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Gabriele Basilico: From San Francisco to Silicon Valley
[ PH ]
Saturday, January 26, 2008
– Sunday, June 15, 2008
This exhibition inaugurates an anticipated three-part series exploring the current state of Silicon Valley—and the effects of the technology boom on the region—through the perspective of photographers commissioned by SFMOMA. A native Italian, Gabriele Basilico studied architecture in Milan before launching his photographic career. His architectural studies continue to inform his work, as Basilico most often takes as his subject cities—notably cities in states of construction or decay, such as the ruins of war-devastated Beirut. This exhibition will present new work produced during Basilico’s month-long residency in Silicon Valley.
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Cut: Revealing the Section
[ A / D ]
Friday, February 08, 2008
– Sunday, June 08, 2008
Featuring a wide range of works draw primarily from SFMOMA’s architecture and design collection, this exhibition examines the architectural concept of the section. A drawing convention as essential as it is little understood, the section is among the primary means by which architects and designers visualize, develop, and represent their work. The exhibition includes approximately 12 section drawings, ranging from Timothy Pflueger’s elaborately detailed depictions of the Castro Theater to more contemporary and abstract works by Joel Sanders and Lewis Tsurumaki Lewis. The exhibition showcases Gordon Matta-Clark’s film Splitting (1974), perhaps the ultimate realization of the section cut as an act of anti-architecture. A new work by Peter Wegner will be highlighted: a paper wall made of hundreds of thousands of sheets of paper that will itself perform a section cut through the galleries. Also included is Wegner’s photographic suite Buildings Made of Sky, which reveals the section cut by showing midtown Manhattan streetscapes upside down, transforming the canyons between skyscrapers into buildings, each a slightly different shade of sky blue.
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Friedlander
[ PH ]
Saturday, February 23, 2008
– Sunday, May 18, 2008
This exhibition presents the most comprehensive survey to date of Lee Friedlander’s career, tracking the artist’s prolific output from the 1960s to the present. Friedlander came to prominence in 1962 as one of a group of photographers who defined a new vision of the American social landscape. His pictures of everyday life—shop fronts, advertisements, televisions, cars—appeared alongside works by Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus in the landmark 1967 exhibition New Documents at the museum of Modern Art in New York. Over the years, Friedlander has exhibited an enormous range of photographs, from color portraits of jazz greats—John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, and Miles Davis—to black-and-white pictures documenting working-class life in the factory valleys of Ohio and Pennsylvania to an extended study of the landscape of the American West, his most recent pursuit. Catalogue.
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In Collaboration: Early Works from the Media Arts Collection
[ M ]
Saturday, March 22, 2008
– Sunday, June 08, 2008
This group exhibition features seminal works from the 1970s, drawn primarily from SFMOMA’s collection, including pieces by Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Dennis Oppenheim, and Katharina Sieverding. In Command Performance (1974), Acconci taunts and entreats the viewer to replace the artist and step into the spotlight. By manipulating representation through time delay or spatial separation, Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974/93) and Campus’s dor (1975) emphasize the discontinuities between physical reality and depiction on a monitor or in a projected image. Birnbaum’s first and rarely seen media installation Attack Piece (1975), Jonas’s Songdelay (1973), and Holt and Smithson’s Swamp (1971) are powerful documents of collaborative performances between artists that investigate such characteristics of time-based media as perception, feedback, and delay. These themes are furthered in Oppenheim’s 1971 video documents of his Two Stage Transfer Drawing performances enacted in collaboration with his son. In Transformer (1973/74), Sieverding uses multiple slide projectors to superimpose close-ups of her face with those of her collaborator and partner Klaus Mettig, integrating masculine and feminine.The dialogical concept of these early works, whether explicitly stated or only implied, sets the stage for the more openly interactive and participatory works that were subsequently produced.
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New Work: Paul Sietsema
[ S / WP ]
Friday, March 28, 2008
– Sunday, June 22, 2008
Debuting a new body of work by Los Angeles–based artist Paul Sietsema, this exhibition features sculpture, drawings, and a 16mm film that together shape an evocative, layered environment—one that fluctuates between presence and absence, historical time periods, and different cultures. Sietsema’s sculptural objects, constructed by hand and with an exquisite attention to detail, are derived from preexisting photographic images. After creating the objects, he shoots them on 16mm film. As the subjects migrate from their initial two-dimensional photographic source to a three-dimensional sculptural object and finally to a cinematic, time-based medium, the artist investigates how different forms of representation affect our understanding of a subject. Sietsema’s new project, for which he received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 2005, is undertaken in an open-ended spirit and uses diverse materials, technical processes, and formal properties to explore numerous prehistoric cultures, such as Africa, Indo-Asia, and Oceania. Brochure.
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A Rooftop Garden for SFMOMA
[ A / D / S ]
Thursday, April 03, 2008
– Sunday, October 26, 2008
With construction of the museum’s new 14,400-square-foot rooftop sculpture garden currently under way, this exhibition offers visitors an experiential glimpse of SFMOMA’s expansion. A horizontal projection on the second-floor landing mimics the span of windows that will overlook the completed garden from the fifth-floor galleries, transforming an opaque wall into a virtual portal. The projection, conceived by rooftop garden architect Mark Jensen, paints an atmospheric portrait of the nascent outdoor space, conjuring specific visual elements related to the design as well as abstract suggestions of the changing seasons, weather, and hourly light that will influence the mood in the garden.
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Modern Masterworks from the Elise S. Haas Collection
[ P / S / WP ]
Thursday, April 24, 2008
– Sunday, July 20, 2008
(dates tentative)
It would be hard to overestimate the significance of the Elise S. Haas collection for SFMOMA. Made up of some 35 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, this group of stunning early modernist works highlights especially the art of Henri Matisse and Henry Moore but also includes pieces by such luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Barbara Hepworth. A student of art herself, Haas not only collected works by these great artists, but she also endeavored to get to know them personally. Though the collection now seems classic, it was one of the most cutting edge of its time, setting a forward-thinking example that continues to inspire the collecting practices of SFMOMA today.
Frida Kahlo
[ P / PH ]
Saturday, June 14, 2008
– Sunday, September 28, 2008
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s birth, this exhibition—organized by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center with renowned Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera—brings together some 45 paintings spanning the artist’s career, from 1926 to 1954. Focusing on Kahlo’s hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits, the presentation will elucidate the progression of her practice, reflecting both her private obsessions and political concerns. In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will present a selection of photographs from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection, including portraits of Kahlo by preeminent photographers of the period, as well as personal snapshots of the artist with family and friends from the artist’s own photo albums. Many of these photographs have never before been published or exhibited. Catalogue.
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The Art of Lee Miller
[ PH ]
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
– Sunday, September 14, 2008
One of the most renowned female icons of the 20th century, Lee Miller was a unique individual admired as much for her free spirit, photographic talent, and intelligence as for her classical beauty. This exhibition—the first complete retrospective of her life and work—will span Miller’s extraordinary career as a photographer and explore her transformation from muse and model to groundbreaking artist in her own right. Born in New York in 1907, Miller modeled for Vogue before meeting Man Ray in Paris in 1929. Shortly after their meeting, she became both his lover and inspiration. Animated by his work, Miller started to make her own images. She became a war photographer for London Vogue and was the only woman in combat photojournalism in Europe at the time. After the war she returned to fashion photography and portraiture, photographing key figures of the day including Man Ray, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.
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Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Logan Collection
[ P / S ]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
– Sunday, October 05, 2008
This exhibition of Chinese contemporary art from the Logan Collection reveals a spectrum of individual responses by Chinese artists to the utopian “dreams of China” that have driven Chinese society from 1949 to the present. Contemporary Chinese art of the 1990s is often thought of in terms of its cynical reaction to the political repression and emerging consumerism of the time, as well as an ironic response to the academic patriotism of the socialist realist style. Bringing together approximately 50 works by contemporary Chinese artists, the exhibition conveys a sense of the shadows, masks, absences, costumes, and monsters that have haunted the Chinese psyche in the wake of a nation’s collective—and often conflicting—dreams of itself. Half-Life of a Dream will speculate on these unresolved psychic traumas that lie behind the parade of utopias that continue to characterize Chinese public life. Catalogue.
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Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer
[ M ]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
– Sunday, October 05, 2008
Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer, both Swiss born, represent two generations of artists who have worked continuously with the computer as an artistic tool. Both artists use digitally created, mesmerizing spaces to articulate a deep engagement with the history of painting, photography, and film. The grainy imagery of reworked footage and photos in Hahn’s interactive video installation is juxtaposed with the brilliant surfaces of Netzhammer’s abstract animations. What looks like a computer aesthetic, approached in a distinct form by each artist, is immediately perceived by the visitor as a deep, personal, and subjective world of objects, transformations, and narratives. Netzhammer designs site-specific installations of his linear projections. Hahn addresses the tempo and desire to navigate in a given work on one’s own terms by allowing the visitor to direct a floating camera to explore virtual spaces. The gaps in Netzhammer’s surreal narratives and the open-ended succession of haunting objects and places in Hahn’s work create a spatial representation that resonates with the construction of dreams.
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246 and Counting: Recent Architecture and Design Acquisitions
[ A / D ]
Thursday, July 10, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
246 and Counting is an exhibition of architecture and design objects acquired by Henry Urbach, Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, during his tenure at SFMOMA, which began in September 2006. The exhibition will showcase more than 246 works, including Eliot Noyes’s model of the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair; Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA’s Tea and Coffee Tower; Jack W. Stauffacher’s graphic portfolio Albert Camus, The Rebel: Twenty-five Typographic Meditations; and Mauro Restiffe’s Empossamento, a photographic series on Brasilia. Conceived as a hybrid of storage and display, the exhibition will be organized by date of accession. 246 and Counting will also illuminate the acquisitions process, revealing how decisions are made about the museum’s collection.
New Work: Zilvinas Kempinas, Alyson Shotz, Mary Temple
[ I / P ]
Friday, August 01, 2008
– Sunday, October 26, 2008
This exhibition presents three installations that embody current trends of light-based work in contemporary art. Kempinas, Shotz, and Temple engage the divergent approaches and effects embedded in the longstanding relationship between light and art. All of these artists eschew advancements in light technology, despite such recent innovations as digitization and LEDs. Although their artwork is fully about light, they do not physically include light within the parameters of their work. Each installation is created through a laborious, handmade process, using both traditional and atypical materials. Temple’s site-responsive installation incorporates trompe l’oeil shadows across the wall and floor of the gallery, reminding us of the way mundane encounters with shadows dramatically inform our perception of space. Shotz’s delicate abstract sculptures act as drawings in space and address the furtive, ephemeral nature of light. Kempinas’s installation investigates light’s ability to confound rather than clarify our visual field. The fundamental property of each work is the ultimate reliance on the presence or absence of ambient light in the gallery space. Via three distinct visual interactions with external light sources, these artists explore the transformative properties of light, highlighting its ability to dramatically alter our perception of materials and our sensation of stability, both visual and physical, within a space. Brochure.
Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas
[ A / D / M ]
Thursday, September 18, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas presents a complex portrait of America’s most spectacular urban environment—and fastest growing city—through the juxtaposition of two recent films: Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_Las Vegas 05 and Stephen Dean’s No More Bets. Barbieri films Las Vegas from a helicopter, using a tilt-focus lens that renders objects out of scale, transforming the city’s iconic landmarks into toy-like simulacra. Beginning in the desert, emphasizing the city’s isolation as well as its antipathy for empty spaces and blank surfaces; Barbieri’s camera travels along the outskirts of the city before arriving at its pulsating nerve center, the Las Vegas Strip. In No More Bets, Dean homes in on the luminous and colorful signs, screens, and surfaces that make up Las Vegas, abstracting the visual excess and revealing beautiful, unexpected patterns within the city’s semiotic jumble. At one point in Dean’s film, when the screen goes dark, 4,000 watts of red light will flash in the gallery, engulfing the viewer in the Las Vegas environment. The two works will be shown on opposing walls, sequentially.
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Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible
[ PH ]
Saturday, October 11, 2008
– Sunday, January 04, 2009
This exhibition will explore the use of photography in 19th-century science, considering in particular the representation of phenomena invisible to the naked eye. Over the course of the 19th century, scientists—both amateur and professional—applied the camera to the microscope and telescope, photographing worlds both infinitesimally small and unimaginably large. The exhibition not only will include examples of these groundbreaking scientific experiments, but will investigate some of photography’s pseudo-scientific uses, including spirit photography, whose practitioners used the X-ray’s ability to picture invisible objects as a means of lending credence to their own claims of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. Consisting of approximately 150 vintage photographs, many of which have never before been exhibited in the United States, the exhibition will include works made between 1839 and 1900 by both noted scientists and amateur experimenters. Catalogue.
Passageworks: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection
[ I / P / S / WP ]
Saturday, October 25, 2008
– Sunday, January 18, 2009
German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin fell in love with the Parisian shopping arcades of the 19th century, calling them “passageworks” for their uncertain status between private and public, interior and exterior, and production and consumption. The exhibition Passageworks is organized around this idea. With contemporary works that evoke a sense of passage or transition, the exhibition considers shifting notions of belonging and mobility, suggesting contemporary experience as fluid and dynamic rather than fixed or stable. Grouped according to themes such as navigation, dislocation, memory, and translation, all the works deal in movement—from past to present, fact to fiction, site to non-site, and back again. Highlights include recently acquired works—some on view for the first time—by Tacita Dean, Luc Tuymans, Pierre Huyghe, Emily Jacir, Julie Mehretu, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Thomas Eggerer.
The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now
[ M ]
Saturday, November 08, 2008
– Sunday, February 08, 2009
This exhibition presents an overview of participation-based art since the 1950s, reflecting on how artists create situations in which the public takes a collaborative role in the art-making process. Early conceptual art and historic works by Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Dan Graham, and Hans Haacke, among others, will be contextualized with projects and installations by contemporary artists such as Jochen Gerz, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Erwin Wurm. The rise of Web 2.0 platforms such as MySpace and Second Life have prompted SFMOMA to commission several artists to create new installations and online works for the exhibition, many of which consider and engage strategies of participation. The Art of Partcipation: 1950 to Now will change form and content as more and more visitors—on-site and online—contribute, and in so doing will explore the role of active engagement between artists, the public, and the museum. Catalogue.
Martin Puryear
[ S ]
Saturday, November 08, 2008
– Sunday, January 25, 2009
Following the development of Martin Puryear’s career over the last 30 years, this retrospective will feature approximately 45 sculptures by the acclaimed American artist. At times deceptively simple, Puryear’s works can be associated with the sentiments of his minimalist contemporaries, but his supremely quiet, poignant forms continually defy further categorization and reflect his own unique style. These often monumental sculptures are distinctly sophisticated, highlighting his master skills. Catalogue.
New Work: Mai-Thu Perret
[ I / S / WP ]
Friday, November 14, 2008
– Sunday, February 22, 2009
For nearly eight years, Geneva-based artist Mai-Thu Perret has been writing The Crystal Frontier, a fictional account of an imaginary feminist commune founded as an attempt to escape from capitalism. Perret studied English literature at Cambridge University. She uses an ongoing, nonlinear narrative consisting of diary entries, essays, poems, and musicals “authored” by the pioneers of the utopian community as a springboard for her related objects. Perret’s new installation, created for SFMOMA, comprises sculpture, neon light, texts, and wallpaper. Like all her work, it draws from diverse sources, such as Russian avant-garde stage design, French illustration, Busby Berkeley musicals, early-20th-century mysticism, the Bauhaus, and various other modern art movements. In its contemporary reframing of feminist and socialist issues associated with the 1960s and 1970s, Perret’s work explores how broader collective possibilities can still suggest social change without a heavy-handed sense of nostalgia. Brochure.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS
Picturing Modernity: The Photography Collection
[ PH ]
Among the first museums in the Untied States to recognize photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA possesses one of the oldest and most distinguished photography collections in the world. The more than 12,000 images in the Museum’s collection date from the advent of photography in the 1830s to the present day. Highlights include photographs by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Alfred Stieglitz. SFMOMA is also known for its rich holdings of photographs by European avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, with an emphasis on Constructivism and Surrealism, as well as a growing selection of “vernacular photography”—anonymous snapshots, documentary evidence, and other photographic images never intended to be viewed as art.
Matisse and Beyond: The Painting and Sculpture Collection
[ P / S / WP ]
Representing movements ranging from Fauvism and Cubism to Pop art and Minimalism, SFMOMA's modern and contemporary art holdings include paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by some of the 20th and 21st centuries' most celebrated artists. The selection currently on view features works by Vija Celmins, Marcel Duchamp, Philip Guston, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, René Magritte, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Kiki Smith, and Sam Taylor-Wood. Through September 10 the presentation includes a performancce installation by Ann Hamilton, titled indigo blue, which encompasses 18,000 pieces of used, blue work clothes and a live "attendant," who erases printed text from a book. The attendant represents the countless anonymous laborers who have served as the engine of U.S. industry through the years; their contributions are humanized through a physical activity that obliterates mechanically produced text.
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