SAN FRANCISCO, CA (March 7, 2024, updated April 5, 2024) — The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces its calendar of exhibitions opening in spring and summer of 2024, featuring modern and contemporary art by local and international artists and designers.
New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal, opening March 16, unveils new artworks by the well-known Bay Area painter. Creative Growth: The House That Art Built, opening April 6, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first organization in the United States dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities. Also opening April 6 is a Bay Area Walls commission by Creative Growth artist William Scott, entitled Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City.
Following the closing of Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love on May 28, Kusama’s newest Infinity Mirror Room, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, will reopen without surcharge on June 22.
Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) opens on July 1, the first site-specific installation within SFMOMA’s admission-free ground floor Roberts Family Gallery. Art of Noise, opening May 4, examines the ways that design has enhanced our experiences with music and sound over the past century. On view July 13, Table Manners considers design as an expression of the politics and pleasures of food consumption.
“I am heartened by the creative and community-driven spirit of SFMOMA’s upcoming exhibitions, which reflect the extraordinary quality and diversity of experience that we are committed to offering our audiences,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “We aim to present an incredible breadth of art that has both relevance and meaning for our community.”
For information on all current and ongoing exhibitions, installations and special projects, visit sfmoma.org/exhibitions.
New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal
March 16–October 20, 2024
Floor 4
Over her 60-year practice, Mary Lovelace O’Neal has experimented with materials, color and the relationship between abstraction and figuration. Her paintings allude to a vast mythology of personal and shared narratives, from her beloved dachshund Tillie to her involvement in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Her early works from the 1960s utilized lampblack pigment—powdered soot created from burning oil, which she rubbed and pushed into her canvases. Lovelace O’Neal used this technique to address three subjects at the fore of art and culture at that moment, which she describes as “surface flatness, black as a color, and blackness as an existential, racial experience.” The artist would then go into the velvety black expanses with materials including paint, gasoline and glitter, introducing imagination and play. In time, representational elements emerged from her abstractions, offering new narrative possibilities within a constellation of references across music, literature and social movements.
In 1979, she was hired at the University of California, Berkeley, where she became the first African American professor awarded tenure in the Department of Art Practice in 1985, then chair of the department in 1999, and professor emerita in 2006. Lovelace O’Neal now splits her time between Oakland and Mérida, Mexico, where the works in the exhibition were made. Although Lovelace O’Neal’s recent paintings begin with a black ground, color remains foundational to her practice. As she has explained, “Painting with color was always a surprise. [It was] like dancing with the paint.”
Significant support for New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal is provided by Mary Jane Elmore, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, and Robin Wright and Ian Reeves. Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Jessica and Matt Farron, Adriane Iann and Christian Stolz, and Gary Steele and Steven Rice.
Creative Growth: The House That Art Built
April 6–October 6, 2024
Floor 2
Creative Growth: The House That Art Built celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first organization in the United States dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities. Today, more than 140 artists work at the organization, using every medium, from painting and drawing to ceramics, wood, fiber, digital media and printmaking. This exhibition features a selection from the museum’s recent acquisition of work by Creative Growth artists—Josef Alef, Camille Holvoet, Susan Janow, Dwight Mackintosh, John Martin, Dan Miller, Donald Mitchell, Judith Scott, William Scott, Ron Veasey and Alice Wong—along with archival material that highlights the organization’s history. Together, the exhibition and historic acquisition present the vitality of creative production by these artists and demonstrate their impact on cultural dialogues in the Bay Area and beyond.
Lead support for Creative Growth: The House That Art Built is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher and Diana Nelson and John Atwater. Major support is provided by Mary Jo and Dick Kovacevich. Significant support is provided by Mary Jane Elmore. Meaningful support is provided by Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Maryellen and Frank Herringer, and Alison Pincus.
Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City
April 6–October 6, 2024
Floor 2
SFMOMA presents a major commission by Creative Growth artist William Scott this spring for the museum’s Bay Area Walls series, site-responsive wall projects by local artists that actively engage with pressing issues of our time. Scott’s largest painting to date, the large-scale commission merges two of his abiding interests: map-like renderings of San Francisco and portraits of the people who populate his life and dreams. Scott 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 the artist 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.
Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City was commissioned and executed by William Scott as a part of Bay Area Walls, a series of commissions initiated in 2020. Major support is provided by the Roberta and Steve Denning Commissioning Endowed Fund. Significant support is provided by the Diana Nelson and John Atwater Commissioning Fund. Meaningful support is provided by the Patricia W. Fitzpatrick Commissioning Endowed Fund and the Denise Littlefield Sobel Commissioning Endowed Fund.
Art of Noise
May 4–August 18, 2024
Floor 7
Art of Noise celebrates groundbreaking design that has shaped our relationship with music over the last century. From concert posters to record albums, phonographs to digital music players, handheld radios to hi-fis, the exhibition illustrates the evolving aesthetics of design that have given form and color to sound. Drawn largely from SFMOMA’s collection, the exhibition covers the Floor 7 galleries with a staggering 800 artworks: posters, flyers, album covers, design objects and large-scale installations that merge inventive design and audio.
Unforgettable album covers, flamboyant posters and eye-catching flyers demonstrate the ability of successful graphic design to provide a visual accompaniment to our experiences with audio. Art of Noise offers the opportunity to present hundreds of stunning works from SFMOMA’s trove of psychedelic rock posters of the 1960s and ’70s for the first time.
Designed in collaboration with teenage engineering, the exhibition follows milestones in technical design that have radically transformed how, where and when consumers can listen to music, as well as unique and experimental works that challenge ideas of portability and functionality. Visitors are also invited into audio installations designed for communal listening by teenage engineering, outdoor sonic seating by Yuri Suzuki and an ultra-high-fidelity sound system by Devon Turnbull.
Major support for Art of Noise is provided by Mary Jo and Dick Kovacevich, The Bernard Osher Foundation, and the Bernard and Barbro Osher Exhibition Fund. Significant support is provided by Deborah and Kenneth Novack. Meaningful support is provided by Sonya Yu.
Yayoi Kusama: Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love
June 22, 2024–January 2025
Floor 6
After its inclusion in the museum’s presentation Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, closing on May 28, Kusama’s single Infinity Mirror Room Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023) will reopen without surcharge on June 22. The newest of the artist’s acclaimed Infinity Mirror Rooms, it welcomes the viewer into a universe of multicolored light. At first, the exterior of this sculptural work blends into the gallery’s all-white surroundings, punctuated by an array of large transparent acrylic dots, including a quadrant—or quarter-dot—door at one corner for visitors to enter. In the interior, bright ambient light filters through the colored windows to create a luminous, kaleidoscopic pattern of overlapping circles. As visitors turn around in the space, the mirrored surfaces create an environment that is constantly in flux.
Major support for Yayoi Kusama: Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love is provided by Stephanie and Mark Robinson. Generous support is provided by Jonathan Heiliger and Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger and W.L.S. Spencer Foundation. Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Dolly and George Chammas, Marielle Ednalino and Ken Lamb, Frances Hellman and Warren Breslau, the Pincus Family, and the Sanger Family Foundation.
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker
July 1, 2024–May 2026
Floor 1
With an imagination fueled by rage, sorrow and compassion, Walker has extended her practice beyond her signature cut-paper silhouettes and drawings to include monumental installations that challenge the narratives that are commemorated and memorialized institutionally by the state, museum and church. For her SFMOMA commission—the first site-specific installation for its admission-free ground floor Roberts Family Gallery—Walker will create a large-scale installation that responds to the glass-enclosed gallery space and plays with strategies of engagement and preservation inspired by historical museum displays.
Major support for Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is provided by Roberta and Steve Denning Commissioning Endowed Fund and Sir Deryck and Lady Va Maughan. Significant support is provided by Mary Jane Elmore, Agnes Gund, Diana Nelson and John Atwater Commissioning Fund, Deborah and Kenneth Novack, and Sonja Hoel Perkins and Jonathan Perkins. Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Jessica and Matt Farron, Patricia W. Fitzpatrick Commissioning Endowed Fund, Sheri and Paul Siegel Exhibition Fund, and Denise Littlefield Sobel Commissioning Endowed Fund. Exhibition production meaningfully supported by Kvadrat.
Table Manners
July 13, 2024–May 2025
Floor 3
At the table, eating is transformed from an act of survival to one of desire and performance. By design, tableware embodies the social and cultural dimensions of dining while enhancing our sensual experience of food. Table Manners considers design as an expression of the culture and intimacy of food consumption, as seen in flatware, dinnerware and drinkware from the mid-20th century to present day.
Rooted in ritual, the act of eating and drinking is innate to our humanity. From the ceremonial to the mundane, Table Manners highlights our embodied experiences of food and diverse eating habits and traditions. Centered around expressions of the body and the self, works in the exhibition explore how designers have studied and engineered for the body, how customs and use have informed and inspired inventive design forms and how tableware can act as a marker or expression of identity.
Table Manners features work from SFMOMA’s large collection of tableware, including works by Don Wallance, Takenobu Igarashi, Isabel Rower and many others.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
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:
Mary Lovelace O’Neal, FRANCES, 2021-23; © Mary Lovelace O’Neal, courtesy the artist and Karen Jenkins-Johnson; photo: Michael Covián
Joseph Alef, Untitled, 2021; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Mr. And Mrs. Louis Honig
William Scott, 2024; photo: Julie Plasencia, courtesy of Creative Growth
Achille and Piergiacomo Castiglioni, RR126 Stereo System, manufactured by Brionvega, 1965, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; photo: Don Ross
Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023, installed in the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2023 © YAYOI KUSAMA; photo: Matthew Millman, courtesy SFMOMA
Kara Walker; photo: Ari Marcopoulos, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
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