SAN FRANCISCO, CA (June 27, 2024, updated November 5, 2024) — The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces its calendar of exhibitions opening in fall and winter of 2024, featuring modern and contemporary art by a remarkable range of artists and designers located in the Bay Area and beyond.
Table Manners, opening September 14, considers design as an expression of the politics and pleasures of food consumption. On view September 28, Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is the first West Coast retrospective exhibition for the artist, who championed both the artistic value of photography and its capacity to document urgent social issues.
Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, opening October 19, is one of seven related exhibitions inspired by sports, looking at how athleticism, competition and play have shaped our world and influenced contemporary art and design. Amy Sherald: American Sublime opens November 16 as the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s iconic works in portraiture.
Opening November 23, Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography considers the legacy of Group f.64, exploring various moments in the history of Bay Area photography. The 2024 SECA Art Award Exhibition features new works by Bay Area artist awardees Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy and Rupy C. Tut beginning December 14. For his New Work exhibition opening December 21, Samson Young traces the relationship between love and memory in a multimedia installation that draws on the memory recall process of generative AI.
“We are immensely proud of the exhibitions that will be unveiled at SFMOMA this fall and winter,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “From the landmark survey exhibition of Amy Sherald to Get in the Game’s massive exploration of the intersection of art and sports, to presentations that honor the artists of our Bay Area community, the ambitious program on offer at the museum is intended to engage, provoke and inspire our audiences.”
For information on all current and ongoing exhibitions, installations and special projects, visit sfmoma.org/exhibitions.
Table Manners
September 14, 2024–May 2026
Floor 3
At the table, eating is transformed from an act of survival to one of desire and performance. Table Manners explores the social and sensual intimacies of food consumption through flatware, dinnerware and drinkware from the mid-20th century to present day. The exhibition features work from SFMOMA’s large collection of tableware, including recent acquisitions by Virgil Abloh, soft-geometry, Jinhyun Jeon and many others, and is accompanied by commissioned illustrations and textiles by Lucy Stark.
Imagined as a dinner party, Table Manners celebrates how design shapes our relationship to food, and how dining can be a profound communal and cultural experience. From 3D-printed teapots using tea and five-foot-tall wine glasses to self-stabilizing spoons, Table Manners highlights how customs have inspired inventive design forms and how tableware expresses who we are.
Support for Table Manners is provided by Gretchen and James Sandler.
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit
September 28, 2024–February 9, 2025
Floor 3
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit presents the first West Coast retrospective on the work of this critical yet overlooked figure in the history of modern photography. A bicoastal artist between San Francisco and New York, Consuelo Kanaga was one of the first women to become a staff photojournalist at a major newspaper—The San Francisco Chronicle—in the 1910s. During the 1930s, she became associated with several collectives of photographers, including Group f.64 in the Bay Area and the Photo League in New York. Over the course of six decades, Kanaga championed the artistic value of photography and documented urgent social issues, from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and inequality. Her work remains as relevant today as it was during her own lifetime. Organized from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this exhibition charts the artist’s vision, which spans pathbreaking photojournalism, modernist still lifes and celebrated portraits of Black Americans.
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is organized by the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is organized by Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art (formerly Phillip and Edith Leonian Curator of Photography, Brooklyn Museum) with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant, photography, fashion and material culture, Brooklyn Museum. The San Francisco presentation is curated by Shana Lopes, SFMOMA assistant curator of photography, with Delphine Sims, assistant curator of photography.
Major support for Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit at SFMOMA is provided by the Pritzker Exhibition Fund in Photography. Significant support is provided by The Black Dog Private Foundation.
Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture
October 19, 2024–February 18, 2025
Floor 7
Sports serve as a major driver for artistic and technological innovation, community building and debates about social and cultural priorities and norms. From October 19, 2024–February 18, 2025, SFMOMA will present Get in the Game, exploring the powerful role of sports in contemporary culture. The forthcoming exhibition will examine how sports permeate culture, bring people together in shared experience, and offer a critical lens through which to consider ongoing conversations about gender, race, money, national identity and the human body, as well as the will and desire to compete and succeed. Get in the Game, together with its six sports-related companion exhibitions, will be SFMOMA’s most expansive presentation dedicated to a subject to date. Unfolding across multiple floors and over 15,000 square feet, the presentation will feature roughly 200 objects in different mediums.
The following six related presentations look at sports from a range of perspectives, including noteworthy commissions from Bay Area artists:
Unity Through Skateboarding
August 17, 2024–April 27, 2025
Floor 2
Unity Through Skateboarding, focusing on the history of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and women skateboarders and allies, is guest curated by Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez, artists and founders of the Oakland-based queer collective UNITY skate, which introduces participants to skateboarding and artmaking.
When the World Is Watching
Count Me In
August 17, 2024–May 4, 2025
Floor 2
When the World Is Watching and Count Me In highlight how international competitions—such as the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games, the America’s Cup, World Cup and the Gay Games—together with wider participation in sports by Indigenous, Black, disabled and women athletes, mirror important societal conversations globally.
Bay Area Walls: Gene Luen Yang
August 31, 2024–June 2025
Floor 2
SFMOMA has commissioned a new installation by comics artist and writer Gene Luen Yang, who will create a mural inspired by three basketball legends with a tie to the Bay Area: Fran Belibi, Stephen Curry, and Jeremy Lin.
Bay Area Walls: David Huffman
October 12, 2024–August 2025
Floor 5
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.
Bay Area Walls: Jenifer K Wofford
October 12, 2024–September 2025
Floor 3
The Floor 3 landing will feature a commissioned painted mural by San Francisco-based artist Jenifer K Wofford inspired by the local historical figure of Filipina American competitive diver Victoria Manalo Draves (1924–2010), the first Asian American Olympic gold medalist.
Lead support for Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture is provided by Bank of America. Presenting support is provided by Dana and Bob Emery. Major support is provided by Charles and Ivette Esserman, Mary Jo and Dick Kovacevich, KHR McNeely Family Fund, and Stephanie and Mark Robinson. Significant support is provided by Mary Jane Elmore, Susan Karp and Paul Haahr, Wes and Kate Mitchell, Jessica Moment, Nancy and Alan Schatzberg, and Anonymous. Meaningful support is provided by Ethan Beard and Wayee Chu and Maryellen and Frank Herringer, and Susan Swig.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime
November 16, 2024–March 9, 2025
Floor 4
The largest and most comprehensive presentation of Sherald’s work to date, American Sublime will bring together approximately 50 paintings made from 2007 to the present—from her poetic early portraits to the incisive, moving figure paintings for which she is best known. Iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor—arguably the most recognizable and impactful paintings made in the U.S. in the last 50 years—will be joined by early works never or rarely seen by the public and new works created specifically for the exhibition, on view for the first time. Another highlight of the exhibition is For Love, and for Country (2022), a landmark painting recently acquired by SFMOMA for its permanent collection.
Lead support for Amy Sherald: American Sublime is provided by the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund and Diana Nelson and John Atwater. Presenting support is provided by the Evelyn D. Haas Exhibition Fund. Major support is provided by Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan, KHR McNeely Family Fund, Katie and Matt Paige, Stephanie and Mark Robinson, and Shelagh Rohlen, in memory of Tom Rohlen. Significant support is provided by Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem, Jessica Moment, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, and Sonja Hoel Perkins and Jonathan Perkins. Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Dolly and George Chammas, Jessica and Matt Farron, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, Alison Pincus, Komal Shah and Gaurav Garg, Gary Steele and Steven Rice, Susan Swig and Barbara and Stephan Vermut. Meaningful support is also provided by Fashion Partner Max Mara.
2024 SECA Art Award Exhibition
December 14, 2024–May 26, 2025
Floor 2
New work by Bay Area artists Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy and Rupy C. Tut will be featured in SFMOMA’s 2024 SECA Art Award Exhibition, and each artist will have a dedicated gallery. Since 1967, the SECA Art Award has honored Bay Area artists with an exhibition at SFMOMA and an accompanying publication.
Rose D’Amato is a pinstriper and painter living and working in San Francisco. As a second-generation sign maker, she is drawn to decorative folk arts, hand-lettering and the iconic imagery tied to her upbringing and direct experience pinstriping and lettering on lowriders. Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and survivor of gun violence. She constructs sculptures and installations with everyday domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing and braiding. Based in Oakland, Rupy C. Tut studied calligraphy and Traditional Indian painting at the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts, London, in 2016. In her intricate work, she preserves and reimagines this tradition through her depictions of women and ancestral figures.
Major support for the 2024 SECA Art Award is provided by Charles and Ivette Esserman. Significant support is provided by Maria Manetti Shrem and Jan Shrem. Meaningful support is provided by Ethan Beard and Wayee Chu, and Roselyne Chroman Swig.
Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography
November 23, 2024–October 2025
Floor 3
This exhibition takes work made in the 1930s by members of Group f.64 as a nexus from which to explore various moments in the history of Bay Area photography. The group, which counted Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham among its founding members, was devoted to emphasizing the aesthetic qualities that set photography apart from other art forms. Although it was short-lived, Group f.64 had a lasting impact on photography in the Bay Area and beyond. Drawn largely from the museum’s collection, the exhibition features photographs by all 11 of the original members of Group f.64, as well as work made before and after by a wide range of different artists. It narrates the group’s legacy and counterhistories, including photographers it inspired as well as those creating their own Bay Area aesthetic. In January 2025, the exhibition will expand to offer examples of historical and contemporary works related to the members of Group f.64 and other strands of regional photographic practice.
New Work: Samson Young
December 21, 2024–June 22, 2025
Floor 4
Samson Young’s New Work exhibition debuts a multimedia installation that poetically traces relationships between love, attention, memory and the fear of forgetting, and of being forgotten. Young draws on the idiosyncratic duration and rhythm of generative AI’s memory recall process as the basis for polychromatic sculptures, videos and a mesmerizing soundscape. Together, these elements form a space in which to wander, contemplate and access shared time and memories.
Formally trained in music composition, the Hong Kong-based artist utilizes performance, video and installation to rigorously examine the cultural, political and historical contexts of sound. His past projects include orchestral performances that trace the synesthetic relationship between color and sound, 3D-printed instruments that imagine sounds that defy the laws of physics, and sculptures and videos based in AI-generated counterfactual news headlines that poetically probe the proliferation of “fake” news. Young represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2020); the SMART Museum of Art, Chicago (2019); and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2016), among others.
Significant support for New Work: Samson Young is provided by Robin Wright and Ian Reeves. Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Lionel F. Conacher and Joan T. Dea, and Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz.
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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 offers 45,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space open to all.
Visit sfmoma.org or call 415.357.4000 for more information.
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Image Credits:
Isabel Rower, Intimate Spoon, 2020; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; photo: Tenari Tuatagaloa
Consuelo Kanaga, Untitled, 1936; Brooklyn Museum, gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga; © Brooklyn Museum; photo: Brooklyn Museum
Hank Willis Thomas, Guernica, 2016; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; © Hank Willis Thomas; photo: courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country, 2022; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Rose D’Amato, Star Market, 2024; photo: Yubo Dong
Edward Weston, Two Shells, 1927; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, bequest of Albert M. Bender to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: Don Ross
Samson Young, Altar Music (liturgy for an indecisive believer), 2022; courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain; photo: Simon Vogel