SAN FRANCISCO, CA (June 18, 2024)—The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced that it has recently acquired works by more than 65 artists, including, among others, Virgil Abloh, Farah Al Qasimi, Yael Bartana, Merikokeb Berhanu, JB Blunk, Beverly Buchanan, rafa esparza, Vaginal Davis, Rachel Harrison, Tyler Hobbs, Ulysses Jenkins, Rashid Johnson, Isaac Julien, Yayoi Kusama, Doyle Lane, Mire Lee, Glenn Ligon, Christian Marclay, Oscar Murillo, Philippe Parreno, Paul Pfeiffer, Ron Rael and Virginia San Fratello, Isabel Rower, Niki de Saint Phalle, Amy Sherald, soft geometry, Kunié Sugiura, teenage engineering, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Martin Wong and Christopher Wool. The acquisitions represent SFMOMA’s ongoing commitment to collect works by both celebrated artists and those deserving of greater recognition while further enhancing the representation of women, artists of color, and those from California and the Bay Area within its holdings.
“The acquisitions announced today capture an incredible depth of artistic ambition, formal innovation, and social and cultural experience,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA’s Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “The group reflects SFMOMA’s driving vision to enhance our collection with works by a diverse spectrum of artists who engage with an equally diverse range of subject matter, whether focused on aesthetic experimentation or on grappling with central issues of their time. I’m grateful for the thoughtful consideration that our curatorial teams have brought to this selection and to our broader acquisition strategies. I look forward to sharing these extraordinary works, and the narratives they hold, with our community.”
Among the many highlights is Yayoi Kusama’s Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023), the newest of the celebrated artist’s beloved Infinity Mirror Rooms. The work first premiered at David Zwirner in New York in spring 2023 to overwhelming audience enthusiasm and was recently featured in SFMOMA’s popular special exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, which drew over 170,000 visitors to the museum. With the acquisition, this Infinity Mirror Room will remain on long-term view at SFMOMA from June 22, 2024 to January 2025, where visitors will now have the opportunity to experience it as part of general admission to the museum.
Among the other outstanding works acquired by SFMOMA that feature in recent or upcoming exhibitions are Amy Sherald’s For Love, and for Country (2022) and rafa esparza’s Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022). Sherald’s large-scale painting reinterprets the iconic photograph V-J Day in Times Square (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt through the lens of queer Black experience. Created in direct response to the increase in legislation restricting the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals across the U.S., the work offers a space to reflect on the power of love and the subjects’ interior lives. The work will hold a prominent place in the artist’s first mid-career survey, Amy Sherald: American Sublime, premiering at SFMOMA in November 2024. Esparza’s multimedia sculpture Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser (2022) was featured in the acclaimed SFMOMA exhibition Sitting on Chrome (on view from August 2023 to February 2024). To create the work, esparza transformed a 25-cent mechanical pony ride to resemble a lowrider bike. The artist further activated the work with a performance at the museum last fall. Other recently acquired works include objects by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Jacob Jensen, Carlos H. Matos, Verner Panton and teenage engineering on view in the SFMOMA exhibition Art of Noise through August 18, 2024.
SFMOMA also acquired several works by Isaac Julien, who recently designed an immersive dinner experience for the museum’s annual fundraiser Art Bash in support of the museum’s family and education programming. The acquisitions include the major nine-channel video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which addresses the story of 23 Chinese cockle pickers from Fujian Province who drowned off the coast of northwest England. With the work, Julien challenges the colonial gaze and offers a non-Western perspective of storytelling through a kaleidoscopic cinematic experience. In doing so, he furthers his ongoing interest in examining notions of a “better life” within the context of migration and global displacement. The large-scale photograph Freedom / Diasporic Dream-Space No. 1 (2022), also added to the collection, is inspired by the artist’s latest film, Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) (2022), about the relationship between Alain Locke, a leading Harlem Renaissance figure, and Albert E. Barnes, a pioneering art collector and philanthropist.
The wide range of newly acquired works also includes important additions to the museum’s expansive photography collection. Among them are works by Hal Fischer, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jarod Lew, Alessandra Sanguinetti, and Deanna Templeton, as well as Farah Al Qasimi, Iñaki Bonillas, Mercedes Dorame and Kunié Sugiura. Many of these photographs capture the human experience in ways that encourage connection and understanding, from Fox Solomon’s poignant black-and-white portraits from her acclaimed series Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1987-88), which sought to humanize the disease, to Sanguinetti’s images of two cousins living in the Argentinian countryside and Lew’s images of young second-generation Asian Americans navigating the expectations of their immigrant parents and their own American experience. Other works represent innovations in the medium—such as those by Sugiura, an under-recognized artist who has been working since the 1960s. In Yellow Mum (1969) and Deadend Street (1978), Sugiura combined photographic and painted or drawn elements to create powerful hybrid forms.
Additional highlights:
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The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States and a thriving cultural center for the Bay Area. Our remarkable collection of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design and media arts is housed in a LEED Gold-certified building designed by the global architects Snøhetta and Mario Botta. In addition to our seven gallery floors, SFMOMA now offers over 45,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space open to all.
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Media Contacts
Clara Hatcher Baruth, chatcher@sfmoma.org, 415.357.4177
Alina E. Sumajin, alina@paveconsult.com, 646.369.2050
Image Credits:
Isaac Julien, Ten Thousand Waves, 2010 (installation view); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; © Isaac Julien; photo: courtesy of EYE Filmmuseum
Merikokeb Berhanu, Untitled LXXX, 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa, courtesy SFMOMA