San Francisco, CA (December 15, 2022; updated December 22, 2022, updated May 5, 2023)―The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) today unveils its exhibition schedule for Spring 2023, featuring a retrospective of the British Guiana (now Guyana)–born artist Frank Bowling, a new sculptural installation by Anna Sew Hoy, and exhibitions of contemporary photography and sculpture. These four new exhibitions of work by living artists underscore SFMOMA’s commitment to showcasing the art of our time through layered, diverse storytelling.
Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975 (May 20–September 10, 2023) uncovers the explosive development of the abstract painter’s singular vision in the first major survey of his work in four decades. An exhibition curated from SFMOMA’s collection of sculpture, Corporeal (February 18, 2023–July 14, 2024) inspires a thoughtful dialogue between works that reference the human figure through a range of unexpected and dynamic interactions. New Work: Anna Sew Hoy (March 25–July 16, 2023) transforms SFMOMA’s New Work gallery space into an interior landscape of sculptural forms assembled from ceramic, textile and found materials. Featuring captivating works by six contemporary photographers, Kinship: Photography and Connection (May 20–November 5, 2023) considers the ways that humans find a sense of connection or belonging―through friendship, ties to place, to family and beyond.
Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966-1975
May 20–September 10, 2023
Floor 7
Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975 is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work in more than four decades. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, this exhibition captures the significance of the formative decade when Bowling, who was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), moved from London to New York. Featuring over 40 color-soaked paintings, this exhibition uncovers the explosive development of his vision and practice during a period that continues to inflect his deeply experimental works today. The SFMOMA exhibition adds to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s presentation of Frank Bowling’s Americas, with nine additional artworks, including an expanded group of recent paintings produced between 2018 and 2020. The San Francisco presentation also features a wide selection of archival materials that emphasize Bowling’s evolution as an artist as well as a selection of his little-known “map” sketches and a companion gallery that highlights artists from Bowling’s international circle. Work by New York–based artists featured in 5+1, the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition Bowling curated, offers visitors the opportunity to see Bowling’s work alongside his fellow visionary contemporaries, showing his voice as a curator, critic and important figure in debates around process-based abstraction and the role of Black cultural identity in artistic practices.
Major support for Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975 is provided by Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Corporeal
February 18, 2023–July 14, 2024
Floor 5
Corporeal highlights a selection of sculptures from SFMOMA’s collection that invoke the human figure through a variety of forms, whether whole, fragmented or merely implied. Each work engages material in unusual ways, attuning visitors to their sense of body and relationship to their surroundings. Rising from the gallery floor to meet visitors at a human scale, these works invite visitors to consider their place in the world, both collectively and individually.
Rose B. Simpson’s duo of totemic forms, They Rose 1 and They Rose A (both 2019), reflect on the relationship between trauma and resilience and build on Simpson’s multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of Indigenous artists working with clay. Nick Cave’s Soundsuit (2009) offers an ecstatic costume that obscures a wearer’s gender, race and class to subvert biases around identity, while Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud VIII (1999) embodies the invisible energies that radiate from our bodies through a constellation of branching metal. Additional works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Rebecca Belmore, Petah Coyne and others flesh out the presentation.
New Work: Anna Sew Hoy
March 25–July 16, 2023
Floor 4
In the latest installment of SFMOMA’s storied New Work exhibition series, Los Angeles–based artist Anna Sew Hoy enlists a unique approach to material and space in her imaginative sculptural installations. In mesmerizing tangles of hand-built clay arches, found metal cages and detritus ranging from charging cords to denim scraps, Sew Hoy’s work resembles the ruins of a lost city, or places of refuge assembled from the shiny, tech-laden remains of a land destroyed. Taken together, the sculptures embody Sew Hoy’s interest in turning things inside out to explore the relationship between the exterior world (of bodies, buildings and objects) and interior space (of psyches, emotions and souls).
Since 1987, SFMOMA’s New Work series has provided a platform for artists to experiment: to develop and premiere a new body of work, or as an opportunity to revisit or rethink existing work. Initiated with the support of SFMOMA’s Collectors Forum, the series focuses on the innovative ideas and visions of national and international artists and has played a key role in shaping the breadth and character of the museum’s collection and programming. Through New Work, SFMOMA has organized early exhibitions with artists such as Matthew Barney, Marilyn Minter, Kara Walker and Christopher Wool, all of whom received their first solo museum shows through the New Work series.
For more information about the history of the New Work series, view an essay from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: 75 Years of Looking Forward.
Generous support for New Work: Anna Sew Hoy is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Joachim and Nancy Hellman Bechtle, Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.
Kinship: Photography and Connection
May 20–November 5. 2023
Floor 3
Kinship: Photography and Connection features moving works by six contemporary photographers who share a special affinity with their subjects: Farah Al Qasimi, Mercedes Dorame, Jarod Lew, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Deanna Templeton. Relationships are fundamental to each artist’s practice, whether the connections explored in the photographs are familial, platonic, romantic, cultural or geographic. Four of the six—Dorame, Sanguinetti, Sepuya and Templeton—live in California.
Templeton’s series What She Said pairs diary entries from her teenage years with photographs of young women reminiscent of her at that age. Lew’s Please Take Off Your Shoes includes portraits of young first-generation Asian Americans traversing the world in their homes and the world outside. Sepuya photographs friends and lovers, exploring desire and the construction of queer spaces.
For over 20 years, Sanguinetti has photographed two cousins in rural Argentina, documenting their relationship to each other and their environment. Al Qasimi lives in New York City and photographs regularly in the United Arab Emirates, where she grew up. Her bold, distinctive photographs feature human and animal subjects, often gesturing towards the kinship between them. Dorame’s lyrical pictures forge a dialogue with her Indigenous Tongva ancestors and the spaces where they lived.
Major support for Kinship: Photography and Connection is provided by the Lisa Stone Pritzker Family Fund. Generous support is provided by The Black Dog Private Foundation, Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen, Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman, and Kate and Wes Mitchell. Additional support is provided by James C. Hormel and Michael P. Nguyen Endowment Fund and Christopher and Michele Meany.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States and a thriving cultural center for the Bay Area. Our remarkable collection of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design and media arts is housed in a LEED Gold-certified building designed by the global architects Snøhetta and Mario Botta. In addition to our seven gallery floors, SFMOMA offers 45,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space open to all.
Visit sfmoma.org or call 415.357.4000 for more information.
Follow us on Twitter for updates and announcements: @SFMOMA_Press
Image Credits:
Alessandra Sanguinetti, The Necklace, 1999; courtesy the artist; © Alessandra Sanguinetti
Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1969–70; lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Maddy and Larry Mohr, 2011 (2011.590.2); © Frank Bowling; all rights reserved, DACS/Artimage, London & ARS, New York 2022; courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2009; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2010; © Nick Cave; photo: Katherine Du Tiel; courtesy SFMOMA
Anna Sew Hoy, Digital Ocean, spawn, 2022; courtesy the artist; photo: Edgar Cruz
Jarod Lew, Alex and Ryan, 2022; courtesy the artist; © Jarod Lew