SAN FRANCISCO, CA (October 23, 2024)–The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) today announced that it has acquired more than 100 works of art over the past six months, deepening its collection with a rich array of objects across mediums. The acquisitions continue the museum’s commitment to enhancing its holdings with works by a broad range of artists from across the globe, representing both recognized voices and those deserving of greater scholarly study and public awareness. SFMOMA’s collecting strategy emphasizes both immediate impacts on in-gallery presentation opportunities and the long-term diversification and enrichment of the collection.
The group includes paintings by Emma Amos, Jacqueline de Jong, Tracey Emin, Louis Fratino, Jenna Gribbon, Chase Hall, Virginia Jaramillo, Kurt Kauper, Jiab Prachakul and Dana Schutz; sculpture and mixed media works by Magdalena Suarez Frimkiss, Kimiyo Mishima, Tavares Strachan and Haegue Yang; video works by Dyani White Hawk and Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz; and photography by Nona Faustine, South Ho Siu Nam, Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, Zig Jackson, Billy H.C. Kwok, Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong, Yasumasa Morimura and Senga Nengudi, among others.
SFMOMA continues its focus on collecting works by artists from or with ties to the Bay Area as part of its dedication to local artists and commitment to amplifying their importance to the community’s cultural fabric as well as a broader art history. The most recent group includes a selection of video and photographic works by Kota Ezawa; sculptural works by Kay Sekimachi, Darrin Martin and Carl Cheng; nearly 20 photographs by Jeannie O’Connor; and paintings by Suzanne Jackson, Pacita Abad, Spencer Keeton Cunningham, Justin Caguiat and Rupy C. Tut.
SFMOMA has also acquired a selection of works from Souls Grown Deep, a foundation dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists from the American South, including important quilts by Mary Lee Bendolph, Lucy Mingo and Annie Mae Young as well as a major sculpture and two paintings by Thornton Dial. The works by Dial are from the most significant period of his practice and exemplify the artist’s unwavering vision to transform discarded materials into symbolic commentaries on American life. The acquisition marks the first works by Dial to enter SFMOMA’s collection, adding critical depth to the museum’s holdings. The acquisition from Souls Grown Deep reflects ongoing efforts to recognize and celebrate essential craft traditions and the work of self-taught artists.
“I am thrilled with the range and diversity of works entering SFMOMA’s collection and am grateful for the thoughtful work of our curatorial team in bringing forward both acclaimed and under-studied artists,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA’s Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “As an institution, we are committed to enhancing the breadth of artists represented in our collection and, perhaps more importantly, in our galleries. I look forward to sharing these exceptional works with our audiences and to the opportunities for compelling storytelling that they enable.”
ACQUISITION HIGHLIGHTS
- Kota Ezawa, 11 works (produced between 2005-2024). Ezawa is recognized for his lightboxes, works on paper and animations, which leverage found images, video and film to examine contemporary culture, historical events and ideas of appropriation. His highly graphic and stylized imagery distills familiar scenes into the most essential components, drawing attention to specific elements of significance. The 11 works in the acquisition embrace the range of his creative output from across the past two decades and include National Anthem (2018/2024), a single-channel video with sound that responds to the protests staged by NFL players against police brutality. The work is featured on SFMOMA’s second floor in Count Me In, one of the museum’s many sports-related exhibitions currently on view. Among the other works are the videos Grand Princess (2024), City of Nature (2011) and Ursonate (2022) and lightboxes from the multi-year series The History of Photography Remix, adding meaningfully to SFMOMA’s existing holdings of the Bay Area artist.
- Virginia Jaramillo, Genesis (1969). Jaramillo is a significant figure in the history of postwar American abstraction whose groundbreaking practice emerged alongside other acclaimed artists such as Mark di Suvero, Barnett Newman, and Donald Judd. Genesis is an exceptional, early example from the artist’s Curvilinear paintings made from 1969 to 1974 that feature deep fields of color with delicately arcing lines and are considered among her most iconic bodies of work. The acquisition is an important addition to SFMOMA’s distinguished holdings of abstraction and marks the first work by Jaramillo to enter the collection, enhancing representation of women from the postwar period.
- Dyani White Hawk, LISTEN (2020) and Wisdom (2023). White Hawk’s (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) renowned interdisciplinary practice emphasizes the preservation of Indigenous knowledge and asserts the significance of Indigenous aesthetics and formal innovations within broader art historical dialogues. Her multi-dimensional work includes painting, beadwork, sculpture, photography, video and performance. This chapter of LISTEN features eight scenes of Native women speaking their languages—Seneca, Ojibwe, Hocąk, Dakota, Kwatsáan, Cocopah, Diné and Tiwa—and brings critical attention to the diverse languages of the native peoples of North America. Wisdom is a beaded wallwork made from thousands of shimmering beads arranged in a zigzag composition. The work captures White Hawk’s incredible technical prowess and longstanding engagement with abstraction. The works represent the first by White Hawk to enter SFMOMA’s collection.
- Suzanne Jackson, Hers and His (2018). Hers and His, one of Jackson’s most significant hanging acrylic paintings, includes profoundly personal details that reflect upon her family and upbringing in the Bay Area. Dedicated to her parents, the composition includes poignant remnants of her family’s possessions including sections of colorful quilts and vintage embroidered “His” and “Hers” pillowcases that are suspended in acrylic paint. The composition brings together Jackson’s career-long focus on ancestral history, environmental concerns, structure and light. Hers and His joins Jackson’s El Paradiso (1981–84) in SFMOMA’s collection, building depth in the museum’s holdings of the artist’s work.
- Kimiyo Mishima, Work 12-C2 (2012). Mishima’s sculptures engage with the fears produced by the vast consumer culture of modern-day society. While trained in painting, Mishima came to her sculptural practice as a self-taught artist, developing a singular technique of silk-screening directly onto ceramics with an ink-like glaze. Work 12-C2 captures Sapporo beer, Coca-Cola and Mello Yello cans spilling out of an iron wastebasket and is the earliest clay sculpture in the artist’s 90-can series. The series was inspired by a banal incident in which Mishima witnessed construction workers tossing empty coffee drink cans into the trash outside of her studio in Toki City, Gifu Prefecture. Although it is the first work by the artist to enter the collection, Work 12-C2 finds easy dialogue with objects in the collection that probe capitalism and consumerism.
- Dana Schutz, The Gathering (2023). Schutz is renowned for paintings that skillfully combine abstraction and figuration and pose provocative and often unsettling visions of the social conditions and psychological tensions of contemporary life. The Gathering is a monumental work that embraces the ambitious scale and narrative quality of history painting, with more than a dozen figures brought together in a scene that turns a critical eye on social relations, rituals and mores. The Gathering joins Schutz’s equally compelling work Building the Boat While Sailing (2012) in SFMOMA’s collection.
- Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang, The Mother as a Creator (2001–ongoing, printed 2022–24). Working across mediums, Wang explores gender identity and the expressions and experiences of motherhood in Taiwanese culture. Following her pregnancy in 2000, she chose to use photography for an ongoing project, titled The Mother as a Creator, that considers whether she is able to retain her identity as an artist while also being a mother. The project features black-and-white portraits of Wang and her son, taken every few years. Prior photographs are incorporated into each shot, with the older images receding into the background. As her son has grown over the decades, he has also become an active collaborator in the image-making, capturing the evolving relationship between mother and son. SFMOMA has acquired the series in full, with the option for newly created works to also enter the collection in the future. These are the first works by the artist to enter SFMOMA’s collection.
- Spencer Keeton Cunningham, Colville Indian Extinction Ceremony (2018). Cunningham is a member of the Colville Tribe, one of 12 Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation in Northeastern Washington and has lived partially in San Francisco over the past 20 years. His practice explores gentrification, environmental degradation, Indigenous rights, contemporary Native identity and skateboard culture through painting, drawing, sculpture and film. Colville Indian Extinction Ceremony depicts the death and displacement of Native peoples within a broader dystopian future. The painting, which was originally commissioned by ESPN for the X Games in 2019, will be the first by the artist to enter the museum’s collection.
- Nona Faustine, From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth, Wall St, NYC (2013). Faustine creates photographs that illuminate underrecognized histories and challenge idealized views of the U.S. From Her Body Came Their Greatest Wealth, Wall St, NYC is drawn from the artist’s best-known series, White Shoes, in which Faustine photographs herself—in the nude, wearing white shoes—at locations across New York critical to Black histories. In this image, she is pictured at the intersection of Wall Street and Pearl Street, the site of an 18th-century Dutch colonial market that profited from the sale of slaves and the exploitation of Black labor.
- Jacqueline de Jong, Les pazzes de la piazza (1965). Over the course of her six-decade career, de Jong pursued painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and writing, becoming an important artist within the 1960s European avant-garde movement, the Situationist International. Les pazzes de la piazza captures de Jong’s vigorous painting style and engagement with satirical and absurdist depictions of the bourgeois. The work was created in a single day in a plaza in Ascona, Switzerland, as part of a competition that de Jong won. The painting reflects the chaotic scene around her, with her signature flair for the comedic and grotesque. It is the first work by the artist to enter SFMOMA’s collection, filling a gap in political work by women artists from this period.
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Image Credits:
Kota Ezawa, National Anthem, 2018/2024 (installation view, SFMOMA); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Kota Ezawa; photo: Don Ross
Dana Schutz, The Gathering, 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase by exchange, through a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab; © Dana Schutz. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner