Free; RSVP required
Join us for the August meeting of SFMOMA’s Works on Paper Book Club with this month’s moderator, Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes, who has selected Swing Time by Zadie Smith. Lopes will open with a short talk on the book and its connections to Feel the Beat: Dance in Photographs — currently on view on Floor 3 — before leading the group through a discussion guided by her own questions.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. for book club attendees who want to discuss the novel informally.
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.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 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.
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty.
Two brown girls dream of being dancers — but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey — the same twists, the same shakes — and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; four collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, Intimations, and Dead and Alive; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and a play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in North West London, where she still lives.
Shana Lopes, PhD, is an assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA. Born and raised in San Francisco, she earned her doctorate in art history from Rutgers University, specializing in the history of photography. Over the past 16 years, she has gained curatorial experience at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has recently curated or co-curated exhibitions, including Around Group f.64, Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue, Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection, Sea Change, A Living for Us All: Artists and the WPA, 2024 SECA Art Award, Zanele Muholi: Eye Me, and Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules. Her writing has appeared in History of Photography, Art Journal, Aperture, and 1000 Words.
Accessible seating is available at this event
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.
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.