Bay Area Walls

SFMOMA presents a series of commissions and other site-responsive wall projects by local artists that actively engage with pressing issues of our time. Many of 2020’s inaugural projects delved into the consequences of a year of social isolation and unrest, polarizing news, racial injustice, economic crises, all against a backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now ongoing, the program is designed to support local artists who are keenly attuned to our community and current moment.

Floor 2

William Scott: Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City
April 6–October 6, 2024
For William Scott, paintings are spaces of freedom to reinvent the past and imagine new futures. Guided by an optimism that something different is possible, the resulting compositions engage in grand acts of time travel that picture Scott and his community reborn. Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City is William Scott’s largest painting to date. Commissioned in conjunction with Creative Growth: The House That Art Built, it merges two of his abiding interests: maplike renderings of San Francisco and portraits of the people who populate his life and dreams. He and his mother, for example, appear as youthful versions of themselves, smiling alongside members of their church and the musician Diana Ross. In the background is the Alice Griffith public housing development near the city’s Bayview–Hunters Point neighborhood, where Scott was raised. Scott’s realism expresses hopefulness and fantasy, culminating in a monumental celebration of “Praise Frisco,” his name for the new San Francisco he envisions for the future.

Gene Luen Yang: Bay Area Hoops
Upcoming: Opens August 31, 2024
Comics artist and writer Gene Luen Yang will create a mural inspired by three basketball legends with a tie to the Bay Area: Fran Belibi, Stephen Curry, and Jeremy Lin.

Floor 3

Reggie Burrows Hodges: Incline
Closing September 15, 2024
Reggie Burrows Hodges: Incline features the debut of Labor: Keepers Orchard, the Bay Area artist’s newest and largest painting to date. Made with paint and pastel on deep black grounds, Burrows Hodges’ softly beautiful narrative works feature people as they steer, serve, soar and shine. Keepers Orchard is the most recent entry in Hodges’ series, Labor, which highlights the people who tend the land, from the artist’s hometown of Compton to his current home in the Bay Area. In this monumental, 25-foot work, Hodges depicts a single worker in a sweeping California landscape with the majesty of Impressionist painting, shadowed by a contemporary awareness of the beauty, bitterness, and fragility of our world. The artist’s work suggests questions around our relationship to the environment at a crucial turning point: in which direction are we inclined to turn?

Jenifer K Wofford: VMD
Upcoming: Opens October 12, 2024
Jenifer K Wofford’s painted mural pictures Victoria “Vicki” Manalo Draves, the first Asian American Olympic gold medalist, suspended in a pike in a vast gradient of color. Born and raised in San Francisco’s South of Market district, the Filipina American diver was also the first woman awarded gold medals for both the ten-meter platform and the three-meter springboard competitions at the London 1948 Olympic Games. For VMD, Wofford was compelled by imagining a “soft inward focus combined with the mannered tension in her body’s position, both completely on display and totally inside herself.”

Floor 5

David Huffman
Upcoming: Opens October 12, 2024
Painter David Huffman will create his first wall-sized work for the Bay Area Walls series. Huffman has long used basketballs to reference his community and personal history, weaving the imagery into complex and gorgeous abstract paintings.