Free with RSVP
Join us for the September meeting of SFMOMA’s Works on Paper Book Club with this month’s moderator, Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator Janet Bishop, who has selected the newly published biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade.
Bishop will open with a short talk on the book and its connections to Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal — currently on view on Floor 4 — before leading the group through a discussion guided by her own questions.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m for informal discussion amongst book club members.
We encourage everyone to read as much of the book as they can, but don’t let an unfinished last chapter stop you from joining us! Come ready to discuss — just know that all plot points are fair game.
Please note that space is limited and advance registration is required. RSVP here.
Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade is available for purchase in the Museum Store or for checkout at your local library.
Read and discuss books chosen by SFMOMA curators, staff, or exhibiting artists at our monthly book club, Works on Paper. Selections are personal: books that inspired work, shaped thinking, or connect to ideas alive in the galleries right now. From fiction and biography to art criticism, poetry, and more, the common thread is that the book opens something up for the reader. At each session, participants sit down and explore the book of the month together with the person who selected it.
Art asks us to slow down — to stand before something and truly look. Works on Paper is a book club built on that same instinct.
This critically acclaimed, “superb” (The Washington Post) biography of one of the most influential and mythologized literary figures of the 20th century examines both Gertrude Stein’s life and her partner’s emergence from the shadows after her death, in the decades-long fight to ensure her legacy.
Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, the Leon Levy Center for Biography, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Granta, and other places.
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.