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Join us for an evening tracing the far-ranging career of multidisciplinary artist Doug Aitken.
For over thirty years, Aitken has pushed his practice across disciplines and formats spanning film, multichannel video, sound, and performance. The work often stays rooted in an evolving inquiry into how we build landscapes, inhabit environments, and share experiences themselves. He’s best known for expansive, often site-specific works where “site” can mean the physical space a piece inhabits or an excavation of the living history embedded in a place.
In this talk, Aitken traces that restless practice through six projects that draw heavily on film and video and together reveal how his work continually reframes itself. This program offers a rare look at projects never-before shown in San Francisco.
Doug Aitken is an American artist and filmmaker whose genre-defying practice spans film, installation, and architectural intervention. His work has appeared at major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Centre Pompidou.
Aitken is known for immersive large-scale works that transform architecture, including Sleepwalkers (2007) projected onto MoMA’s exterior, SONG 1 (2012) which wrapped the Hirshhorn Museum, and MIRROR (2013) which turned the Seattle Art Museum into a real-time kaleidoscope. Other landmark projects include Sonic Pavilion (2009) in Brazil, the Underwater Pavilions off Catalina Island, and Mirage (2017), a mirrored house installed in the California desert, Detroit, and Switzerland.
He created Station to Station (2013), a cross-country train project later staged at London’s Barbican, and launched New Horizon, a Massachusetts-based art event centered on a reflective hot air balloon. His recent project Lightscape, a film-based installation produced with the LA Philharmonic and LA Master Chorale, debuted at the Marciano Art Foundation in 2025 and was exhibited at The Shed NYC in 2026. Major surveys of his work have appeared at MOCA Los Angeles, The Modern in Fort Worth, and Sydney’s MCA.
Accessibility accommodations such as American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and assisted-listening devices are available upon request ten business days in advance.
Please email publicengagement@sfmoma.org, and we will do our best to fulfill your request.
Support for Public Programs and Artist Talks at SFMOMA is provided by the Phyllis C. Wattis Distinguished Lecture Series.
Presenting Sponsor of Thursday Night Live is Zoox.
Meaningful support is provided by Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Additional support is provided by the Yerba Buena Partnership.