Advance Exhibition Schedule
Last updated: Wednesday, February 8, 2012
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- Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams
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August 27, 2011
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February 20, 2012
[ D ]Dieter Rams is widely regarded as one of the most influential industrial designers of our times. Many of his works have achieved iconic status while his ideas (and in particular his advocacy for "less but better" design) have proved formative for a contemporary culture concerned with design ethics and sustainability. For more than 40 years, Rams served as lead designer for Braun and also led the design team for the furniture and shelving company Vitsoe. The exhibition, originally organized and produced by Suntory Museum Osaka in collaboration with Fuchu Art Museum in Japan, surveys the designer's work while pointing to some key influences in contemporary design (Apple, among them). Some 200-plus sketches, prototypes, and original products will be organized into sections, elucidating the designer's modernist philosophy.
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- Jim Campbell: Exploded Views
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November 05, 2011
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September 25, 2012
[ I / M / S ]This new installation in SFMOMA's Haas Atrium will feature hundreds of flickering LED lights creating the illusion of figurative images that explore and reflect the human experience. As visitors move through the space, the vantage point alters and the shadowlike figures begin to take shape, blurring the boundaries between image and object. At once abstract and representational, sculptural and image-based, Campbell's suspended installation will illuminate the Atrium like a chandelier as well as function as a cinematic screen when seen from the museum's second-, third-, and fourth-floor landings. This exhibition marks a significant new step in the San Francisco–based artist's career as Campbell continues to explore image resolution and reduction while exploding the image into a three-dimensional form.
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- Francesca Woodman
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November 05, 2011
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February 20, 2012
[ PH ]This is the first major American exhibition of Woodman's work in more than two decades and the first comprehensive survey of her brief but extraordinary career to be seen in the United States. Now, nearly 30 years after her death, the moment is ripe for a historical reconsideration of her work and its reception. Woodman's oeuvre represents a remarkably rich and singular exploration of the human body in space and of the genre of self-portraiture, in particular. The intersections of her work with feminist theory, conceptualist practice, and photography's relationship to both literature and performance are also the hallmarks of the heady moment in American photography during which she came of age. This retrospective offers an occasion to examine more closely the maturation and expression of a highly subjective and coherent artistic vision. It also presents an important and timely opportunity to reassess this critical juncture in American photographic history. The exhibition will feature approximately 140 vintage photographs—including many that have never been on view before—drawn primarily from the Woodman family's private collection, as well as video work by the artist. Following its national debut at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in spring 2012. Catalogue.
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- The Air We Breathe
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November 05, 2011
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February 20, 2012
[ WP ]"Equality is in the air we breathe," wrote Langston Hughes in Let America be America Again, a poem from 1938 that resonates even still. Over the last decade, equal rights for same-sex couples—including the right to legally wed—has proven one of the country's most pressing civil rights issues. Conceived by SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Apsara DiQunizio as a catalyst for public dialogue about this inequality, The Air We Breathe will debut commissioned works by some 30 artists and eight poets that address the many issues surrounding the cause to legalize same-sex marriage. Many of the artists—including Nicole Eisenman, Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Raymond Pettibon, and Amy Sillman—employ drawing as a primary means of expression. Poems by Will Alexander, John Ashbery, and Anne Waldman, among others, will be interspersed among the works on paper, lending a dynamic voice and rhythm to the presentation. The exhibition springs out of DiQuinzio's related large-format book project, which will be published by SFMOMA in November 2011. Catalogue.
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- New Work: Richard Aldrich
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November 18, 2011
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March 25, 2012
[ P ]Continuing SFMOMA's ongoing New Work series, this solo exhibition brings together an array of new paintings by the New York-based artist Richard Aldrich. Aldrich revels in the possibilities of painting, using its fundamental elements—canvas, stretcher bars, paint—to interrogate and celebrate the intellectual and sensual conundrums of painting. Deeply aware of the historical precedents of abstract painting, Aldrich continues to reinvent painting as a vital medium for contemporary art.
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- 2010 SECA Art Award: Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, Kamau Amu Patton
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December 09, 2011
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April 03, 2012
[ WP / V / S / PH / P / M / D ]SFMOMA's biennial SECA Art Award exhibition showcases recent works by Bay Area artists Mauricio Ancalmo, Colter Jacobsen, Ruth Laskey, and Kamau Amu Patton. Administered by SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), one of the museum's auxiliaries, the signature award honors San Francisco–based artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantial recognition. Ancalmo's process-based film installations incorporate and alter a variety of found mechanical instruments, recombining media to form a structural dialogue that is both poetically and philosophically inspired. Jacobsen's ongoing series of "memory drawings" study the process of recollection and reversal by pairing intricately rendered copies of found photographs with imperfect, mirrored doubles drawn entirely from memory. Laskey's small linen textiles, made with a traditional floor loom, utilize a restricted palette and simple geometric shapes that form both the subject and underlying structure of each composition. Patton's interdisciplinary practice synthesizes diverse media—steel sculpture, drawings, paintings, video, sound, and performance—to investigate the conditions leading to a perceptual experience of a given site. Catalogue.
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- Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards
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December 09, 2011
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April 03, 2012
[ D / F / G / I / M / P / PH / S / V / WP ]Distinguished as one of the few and longest-standing award programs dedicated to local artists at a modern art museum in the United States, the SECA Art Award has honored more than 70 winning artists and given hundreds of finalists a platform to speak about their practice. Since its founding in 1961, the museum auxiliary SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) has been bridging the traditional divide between artists, museum curators, art enthusiasts, and arts professionals. To mark the anniversary in 2011, SFMOMA Assistant Curators Alison Gass and Tanya Zimbardo will organize an exhibition of works in a range of media by a selection of past SECA award winners and a related SECA film award program. Additionally, the curators will edit a comprehensive book covering the full scope of the awards SECA has sponsored across five decades. This publication will weave together artists' voices and recollections to reveal the full story of SECA's impact on the museum and the larger history of its importance to Bay Area art. Featured artists include Tauba Auerbach, John Bankston, Nayland Blake, Kota Ezawa, Chris Johanson, Hung Liu, and Barry McGee, among many others. Catalogue.
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- Paul Klee: Portraits
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January 14
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June 03, 2012
This exhibition brings together a selection of works that illuminate Paul Klee's reimaginings of the traditional genre of portraiture. Over the course of his career, Klee (1879-1940) utilized the fundamentals of the portrait to explore artistic, social, and personal ideas, creating images of himself, friends, and imagined others that invoke myriad psychological states.
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- ArtGameLab
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January 15
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August 12, 2012
This exhibition in the museum's Koret Visitor Education Center highlights a selection of crowdsourced games designed by SFMOMA's community, for SFMOMA's community. Last summer the museum put out an open call for inventive, low-cost game ideas. Visitors can now view the results; pick up instructions for playing prototype experimental games in the museum's galleries and other public spaces; and build their own games through a hands-on game design station.
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- Descriptive Acts
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February 18
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June 17, 2012
[ I / M / V ]This group exhibition features contemporary video and installation works that specifically address acts of recording, speaking, and writing, underscoring the performative quality of much contemporary art practice. Works by Anthony Discenza, Shilpa Gupta, Lynn Marie Kirby and Li Xiaofei, and John Smith will be included, as well as three recent acquisitions by artists Dora García, Aurélien Froment, and Tris Vonna-Michell, which receive their U.S. museum debut with this presentation. In García's Instant Narrative (2006–8), visitors enter a seemingly empty gallery with a video projection of gradually appearing text, only to discover the running description of the space and visitors is typed in real time by a performer seated nearby. Froment's video Pulmo Marina (2010) consists of a single long shot of a jellyfish in an aquarium, the voice-over drawing attention to the conditions of display as experienced in natural history museums, educational films, or commercials. Vonna-Michell's room installation GTO: hahn / huhn, variation 1 (2010) evokes an archive of personal narratives by the artists with an arrangement of slide, photographic, and audio materials to explore, including his rapidly delivered monologue of impressions, emotions, and urban histories of Berlin and Detroit.
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- Mark Bradford
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February 18
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June 17, 2012
[ P ]Organized by Wexner Center for the Arts, this major traveling exhibition is the first museum survey of the work of Mark Bradford, a Los Angeles–based artist and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award recipient who is a leading figure in American contemporary art. The presentation features works in a variety of media but concentrates on Bradford's often monumentally scaled collages on canvas, which are akin to abstract paintings. The artist's early works incorporate permanent-wave end papers, an influence from his family's beauty parlor in South Central Los Angeles. Later works employ various collaged materials—billboard paper, newsprint, carbon paper, wrapping paper—often salvaged from the street and dramatically manipulated with nylon string, caulking, and sanding. While striking in its formal beauty and subtle craft, Bradford's art also evokes allusions to urban landscape and probes the structures of urban society, often defined by race, gender, and class. Sound and media pieces also will be included. Copresented in San Francisco by SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this comprehensive account of Bradford's career to date will be on view at both venues, offering more than 50 works spanning 2000 to 2010, including those produced in response to Hurricane Katrina for Prospect.1, the first New Orleans Biennial. Catalogue.
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- Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective
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February 18
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May 28, 2012
[ PH ]Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, coorganized by SFMOMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, presents the artist's first midcareer retrospective in the United States. Over the past 20 years Dijkstra has revived and reexamined portraiture in contemporary art. Most often, she photographs people in transition, such as adolescents, new mothers and army recruits, during formative periods in their lives when change is perceivable. The extraordinary complexity and presence of her work is evident from her earliest sustained series, in which she photographed adolescents on the beach in front of a nearly abstracted space of sea and sky, to her most recent videos of young people dancing in front of a minimal backdrop at European clubs. This intense scrutiny permitted her not only to record the outward appearance of her subjects, the kinds of clothes they wear, and the way they present themselves to the photographer but also to suggest their internal selves. This exhibition features nearly 70 photographs alongside five video works. Catalogue.
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- Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser
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March 10
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July 08, 2012
[ PH ]This exhibition explores the diverse tradition of photography in Mexico, from the medium's first flowering in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the explosion of the illustrated press at midcentury to the intense documentary investigations of the 1970s and '80s and more recent considerations of the U.S./Mexico border region. Drawn from SFMOMA's world-class photography holdings and highlighting recent major gifts and loans from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the selection underscores particular strengths in the collections, with photographs by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Paul Strand, who, along with many other American and European photographers, found Mexico to be a place of great artistic inspiration. The exhibition also showcases the wide-ranging approaches of important Mexican photographers, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Hector Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, and Mariana Yampolsky.
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- Parra
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March 31
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July 29, 2012
[ WP / D ]This exhibition combines a 60-foot-long mural and a selection of print works by Dutch graphic artist Parra in his first U.S. museum presentation. Parra began his illustration and design career drawing party flyers and posters in Amsterdam several years ago. The artist's playful, witty, and often raunchy works engage viewers with a bold but minimal color palette, and his esoteric compositions of bird-beaked humanistic characters, pedestrian objects, and freeform typography have attracted a near cult-icon status.
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- The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area
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March 31
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July 29, 2012
[ D ]The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and though he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas spawned many local experiments in the realms of technology, engineering, and sustainability—some more successful than others. The first to consider Fuller's Bay Area design legacy, this exhibition features some of his most iconic projects, primarily drawn from the recently acquired print portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One. The 13 works in the portfolio date from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s and include Fuller's 4D House, Geodesic Dome, World Game, and Dymaxion car, among other important inventions. The other half of the exhibition presents Bay Area endeavors inspired by Fuller's commingling of technology, ecology, and social responsibility, specifically projects concerned with improved living systems such as dwellings (temporary inflatable structures by Ant Farm and tents by The North Face and Sierra Designs); transportation (the Plastiki sailboat); and better access to information (Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and smart phones by Apple and Google). Fuller's radical idealism kept him from realizing most of his projects, and he never achieved the success he would have liked. Paradoxically, the view of Fuller as a nonconformist is exactly what links him to the many successful Bay Area innovators who aspire to the kind of visionary thinking the designer has come to embody.
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- Cindy Sherman
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July 14
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October 07, 2012
[ PH ]Cindy Sherman is recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists of the last 40 years and arguably the most influential artist working exclusively with photography. This retrospective traces the groundbreaking artist's career from the mid-1970s to the present. Bringing together more than 170 key photographs from a variety of Sherman's acclaimed bodies of work, the presentation constitutes the first overview of her career since 1997 in the United States. Sherman has served as her own model for more than 30 years, generating a range of guises and personas that are by turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. The exhibition showcases the artist's greatest achievements to date, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the 1970s to her recent large-scale photographic murals.
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- Field Conditions: Explorations on Boundary and Frame
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September, 2012
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January, 2013
(Dates subject to change)
[ D ]This focused ensemble of works, culled primarily from SFMOMA's collection and supplemented by other key installation pieces, aims to address relationships between conceptual art and theoretical architecture, specifically concerning the subject of fields. In this context, the term 'field' refers to an array of objects or marks, accumulating and building to the point of becoming a kind of system. Works gathered here seem to deny the idea of boundary and act as windows into a potentially larger expanse. Exploring concepts such as infinity, networks, and confluence while simultaneously providing grounds for a dialogue on the representation of both "place" and "non-place," Field Conditions provokes one to imagine beyond the frame. Some 20 projects featured in the exhibition— including works from established architects to emerging contemporary artists —could be considered spatial experiments that both call attention to and abstract typical notions of representation, reality, and imaginary landscapes.
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- Jay DeFeo
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November 03, 2012
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February 03, 2013
[ P / S / WP / PH ]Premiering at SFMOMA, this major traveling retrospective considers the entire career of Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), bringing together paintings, small-scale sculptures, photographs, and works on paper, including a number that have not been seen in decades or been on view before. The exhibition will place DeFeo's best-known painting, The Rose (1958–66), in the context of her larger body of work and trace leitmotifs across more than four decades of output. It will also include ephemeral materials such as notebooks, exhibition announcements, and documentary photographs, as well as Bruce Conner's stunning 1967 film The White Rose, which captures the removal of the then-incomplete painting from DeFeo's studio in 1965. Jay DeFeo is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in close collaboration with the Jay DeFeo Trust. The debut presentation in San Francisco will be overseen by Corey Keller, associate curator of photography, SFMOMA. Catalogue.
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- Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye
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November 03, 2012
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February 24, 2013
[ P / S / WP ]A remarkably strong relationship has developed over the past forty years between artist Jasper Johns and various museums and private collectors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Johns's painting Land's End (1963), given to SFMOMA in 1972 by Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, remains a cornerstone post-war work in the museum's collection. In 1978, SFMOMA presented a major survey of Johns's career, and in 2000 organized Jasper Johns: New Paintings and Works on Paper, which traveled nationally. Continuing SFMOMA's significant involvement with the artist, this exhibition brings together for the first time works from Bay Area collections both public and private, and will be supplemented with key works in the Johns's own collection. Organized by Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, in close cooperation with the artist, the presentation features approximately 85 major paintings, works on paper, lead reliefs, and sculptures representing all periods of the artist's work from the 1950s to the present. Catalogue.
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- South Africa in Apartheid and After
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November 17, 2012
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February 10, 2013
[ PH ]Continuing SFMOMA's renowned scholarship in the field of documentary photography, this exhibition examines the work of three photographers—David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, and Billy Monk—who have depicted what they have seen during a vital and difficult period in the recent history of South Africa. Goldblatt's book project In Boksburg (1982) portrays a typical suburban white community not far from Johannesburg shaped by what the artist calls "white dreams and white properties." The late Cole, a self-taught black South African photojournalist, documented the other side of the racial divide until he was forced to leave his country in 1966. Recently Goldblatt recovered a group of Cole's original prints, organized a retrospective tour of the work, and championed an accompanying book project, Ernest Cole, photographer. Selected works from the book—deeply human without a trace of sensationalism—add an important dimension to Goldblatt's work included here. Monk was a gregarious self-taught photographer who worked as a bouncer in a rowdy Cape Town nightclub in the 1960s. His work, also recovered and reprinted after his death with assistance from Goldblatt, made a raw and beautiful record of the port city's racially mixed population. These three groups of pictures will be complemented by a selection of Goldblatt's post-apartheid photographs. Organized by SFMOMA's Sandra S. Phillips, the exhibition will include approximately 130 works.
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- Rooftop Garden
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Ongoing
[ S ]SFMOMA's long-awaited space for large-scale sculpture features a combination of well-known, rarely seen, and recently acquired works from the museum's collection. Sculptures spanning the last five decades by artists such as Robert Arneson, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Tony Cragg, and Ellsworth Kelly are featured in the Rooftop Garden, in both open-air and enclosed spaces. In addition, a site-specific installation by former SECA Art Award recipient Rosana Castrillo Díaz animates the glass-walled bridge that leads visitors from the interior fifth-floor galleries out onto the rooftop.
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- Selected Histories: 20th-Century Art from the SFMOMA Collection
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Ongoing
This installation of works from SFMOMA's collection is conceived as a series of chapters that illuminate key moments and themes in 20th-century art. Each gallery examines a particular subject, such as still lifes and interiors; movement, such as Surrealism; or geographic region, such as Latin America. By presenting a range of conversations among varied works, the exhibition explores the many narratives the museum's collection can suggest about the history of modern art.
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- Picturing Modernity
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Ongoing
[ PH ]This changing selection of pictures from SFMOMA's world-renowned photography collection includes photographs from the mid-1800s to the present that capture key moments in the development of the medium.
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- Garry Winogrand [title TBD]
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Opens
June, 2013
(Dates subject to change)
[ PH ]This retrospective, organized by SFMOMA under the direction of photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien, is the first major touring exhibition and catalogue in 25 years dedicated to the work of Garry Winogrand (1928–1984). Despite being widely recognized as one of the preeminent American photographers of the 20th century, Winogrand has to date been inadequately published and thinly explored by critics and art historians. Postponing the editing of his prodigious body of work and coming abruptly to the end of his life, he completed only five modest books, which contain just a fraction of his total work and merely suggest to the public his great importance to the history of photography. The curatorial research undertaken for this project has made possible the first exhibition and catalogue that reveal to the public the full breadth of Winogrand's oeuvre—a jubilant, epic portrait of America that is Whitmanesque in its ambition to encompass the whole of the nation's life. One of the principal artists in any medium of the eruptive 1960s, Winogrand combines a sense of the hope and buoyancy of American life after World War II with a powerful anxiety, presenting America shining with possibility while also threatening to spin out of control. The exhibition will premier at SFMOMA before traveling to the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Catalogue.
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