Bill Fontana has been a pioneer of sound art since the 1970s. Using sound as a sculptural medium, he reveals hidden acoustic worlds and transforms the way we perceive the visual and architectural spaces around us. His works have been installed at SFMOMA and across the globe, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Arc de Triomphe to London’s Millennium Bridge and Big Ben. He has also created radio sound art projects for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, NPR, KQED, the BBC, West German Broadcasting Cologne (WDR), Radio Sweden, Radio France, and Austrian State Radio.

Fontana lives and works in San Francisco. SFMOMA has commissioned two major works by the artist: Sound Sculptures through the Golden Gate (1987), which captured a live sonic duet between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Farallon Islands in honor of the bridge’s fiftieth anniversary, and Sonic Shadows (2010), a kinetic, site-specific sound sculpture that explores visible and invisible architectural features of the museum, created for SFMOMA’s seventy-fifth anniversary. In 1997, SFMOMA became the first American museum to acquire one of his installations: Sound Sculpture with a Sequence of Level Crossings (1982/1997), an acoustic portrait of the Amtrak and Southern Pacific rail lines in Berkeley and Emeryville. In 2009, SFMOMA’s Modern Art Council honored Fontana with the Bay Area Treasure Award for lifetime achievement.