Current & Advance Exhibition Schedule

July 16, 2022 through January 2, 2023
Floor 4

The most in-depth examination of the artist’s work in more than 20 years, Diego Rivera’s America will provide a new critical and contemporary understanding of one of the most aesthetically, socially and politically ambitious artists of the 20th century. Through a careful selection of some 160 objects, the exhibition will explore central themes of Rivera’s work in Mexico and the United States from the early 1920s through the early 1940s. During these two key decades in a prolific career, Rivera created a new vision for North America, informed by his travels in Mexico and the United States.

Featuring extraordinary easel paintings, drawings, and portable frescoes, as well as filmed projections of murals, the exhibition will highlight the close relationship between Rivera’s mural and studio practices. Diego Rivera’s America will revisit a historical moment when Rivera, more than any other artist of his time, was instrumental not only in forging Mexican national identity, but also in imagining a shared American past and future.

Image: Diego Rivera, Flower Seller, 1926; Honolulu Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip E. Spalding, 1932; © Bancode México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico, D.F./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo: courtesy Honolulu Museum of Art

April 9–September 5, 2022

Floor 7

From analysis of DNA to emotional sentiments, the contemporary artists in Speculative Portraits draw from scientific research and technology to expand on ideas of portraiture, identity and human presence. Spanning digital animation to sculpture, the presentation brings together select loans and works from the media arts collection by Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rhonda Holberton, Mika Tajima and Gail Wight. A key point of departure for the exhibition and a major acquisition, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s installation Room #8 (2006-18) culminated from the artist’s 12-year investigation into the biological nature of identity.

Image: Mika Tajima, Human Synth (Los Angeles), 2019; collection of Mihail Lari and Scott Murray; photo: Flying Studio, Los Angeles, courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin, Los Angeles; © Mika Tajima

Venus Envy I

Madrinas y Hermanas

June 18, 2022–November 6, 2022

Floor 2

Amalia Mesa-Bains presents a two-part exhibition featuring the autobiographical installation Venus Envy, Chapter I: The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End and Madrinas y Hermanas (Godmothers and Sisters), a selection of works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection curated by the artist.

Presented for the first time since it was originally realized in 1993, Venus Envy, Chapter I is the first of a series of autobiographical installations Mesa-Bains created over several decades. Starting from the artist’s childhood experience of her first Holy Communion, the installation displays objects, images, mementos and clothing and examines codes of gender in Catholic rituals and ceremonial rites of passage.

Spanning two adjacent galleries is Madrinas y Hermanas (Godmothers and Sisters), featuring works drawn from the museum’s collections. Accompanied by texts written by Mesa-Bains, the selection includes the works of artists by whom she was inspired, such as Frida Kahlo, as well as by friends and peers Yolanda López, Mildred Howard and Hung Liu, among others.

Image: Amalia Mesa-Bains, Venus Envy I (or The First Holy Communion Moments Before the End) (detail), 1993/2022; courtesy the artist and the Rena Bransten Gallery; photo: Amalia Mesa-Bains; © Amalia Mesa-Bains

August 6, 2022–May 14, 2023

Floor 7

The fascinations of the Arctic and Antarctic have captured our collective imagination for centuries. For the last decade, French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière has traveled to remote and hostile polar regions to explore humankind’s interconnection with these otherworldly environments that have come to represent the precariousness of our future.

The artist’s first solo exhibition on the West Coast, Julian Charrière: Erratic presents works across media that revolve around the artist’s poetic engagement with ice landscapes challenging our constructs of different temporalities, while bringing attention to the traces and longstanding effects of human interferences in nature. The central work of this cinematic and sensory filled exhibition is Towards No Earthly Pole (2019), a panoramic film combining haunting footage of glaciers taken at night during the artist’s expeditions to various glacial regions.

Through immersive encounters with Charrière’s work in this timely exhibition, visitors are invited to approach an environmentally, culturally and politically charged geography with a heightened sense of ecological awareness.

Image: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole, (installation view, MASI Lugano); Julian Charrière/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany; photo: Jens Ziehe

August 6, 2022–May 7, 2023

Floor 3

Sightlines: Photographs from the Collection illuminates some of the myriad ways that SFMOMA’s expanding contemporary holdings intersect with and diverge from earlier photographic traditions. Spanning the history of the medium, this dynamic presentation of over 200 photographs examines various themes, including studio portraiture and the relationship between the body and the landscape.

One gallery is devoted to Louis Carlos Bernal’s vibrant color photographs of the Southwest from the late 1970s. A suite of galleries considers the question of what constitutes a photograph through a selection of works made without a camera, from Man Ray’s humorous and irreverent photograms to a large-scale cyanotype installation by Meghann Riepenhoff.

Image: Seydou Keïta, Untitled, 1952–1955, printed 1996; collection SFMOMA, Foto Forum purchase; © Seydou Keïta / SKPEAC

August 20, 2022–June 25, 2023

Floor 6

Conversation Pieces brings together more than 40 works of contemporary furniture that delve into contemporary cultural issues such as environmental sustainability, social identity and historical narrative. The works on view are sometimes jarring, often bold and always conversation starters, including a rocking chair of 3-D recycled plastic; a hanging light of knitted electrical wire; and a chair celebrating Black identity.

Sparking dialogue throughout the gallery, Conversation Pieces presents chairs and lamps that surprise and garner attention unapologetically. Drawn entirely from SFMOMA’s collection, the exhibition features work by a diverse spectrum of designers, artists and architects. Moving beyond functionality or style, the works on view prioritize meaning and material choice, bringing furniture from the background to the foreground.

Conversation Pieces grew out of a series of discussions on contemporary design, and the exhibition includes interviews with six designers whose work is on view. Visitors will learn from designers Stephen Burks, Dozie Kanu, Fernando Laposse, Jay Sae Jung Oh, Liliana Ovalle and Bethan Laura Woods about their practices, processes and concerns.

Image: Germane Barnes, Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown (4), 2020; collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Germane Barnes

Bay Area Walls

April 16, 2022 – June 18, 2023

Floor 1

Michael Jang has spent a lifetime documenting the world around him. In early 2021, he wheat-pasted a series of his photographic images taken in the 1970s over a boarded-up storefront on Clement Street, the heart of San Francisco’s unofficial Chinatown. Unsanctioned public installations have since become his primary form, fueling his artistic practice with new resonance. Jang’s SFMOMA commission departs from his Clement Street project, adorned with new images and designs, and anticipating further intervention by the artist during its installation.

Image: Michael Jang, Aunts and uncles, from the series The Jangs, 1973, printed 2008; collection San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Foto Forum purchase; © Michael Jang

June 28, 2021 – 2023

Floor 1 Roberts Family Gallery

Free to See

In a groundbreaking partnership with City College of San Francisco, SFMOMA hosts Diego Rivera’s monumental mural The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent, more commonly known as Pan American Unity, in the museum’s Roberts Family Gallery free space. The mural, originally painted in front of a live audience at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, is comprised of 10 fresco panels and measures 22 feet high and 74 feet wide (over 1,600 square feet).

It was Rivera’s last project outside of Mexico and is not only a treasured part of San Francisco history, but also one of the most important works of public art in the United States. Pan American Unity is installed in SFMOMA’s free-to-visit Roberts Family Gallery on the ground floor in conjunction with Diego Rivera’s America.

Image: Diego Rivera, The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent (Pan American Unity), 1940; © Banco de México Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F. / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; image: courtesy City College of San Francisco

Ongoing

Floor 7 Terrace

This sound installation offers a contemplative listening experience for visitors as they enjoy panoramic views of downtown San Francisco and the full reopening of SFMOMA’s outdoor terrace since its temporary closure in March 2020. A single speaker will feature the U.S. debut of Songs Sung in the First Person on Themes of Longing, Sympathy and Release (2003) by the Berlin-based, Scottish artist Susan Philipsz. In this 13-minute presentation, the artist is heard singing acapella versions of songs by Teenage Fanclub, Soft Cell, The Smiths, and Gram Parsons. She often uses popular music in her work because of its capacity to evoke emotional responses and collective memories.

Image: 7th Floor Sculpture Terrace at SFMOMA; photo: Beth LaBerge, courtesy SFMOMA

September 3, 2022–January 22, 2023

Floor 4

Toyin Ojih Odutola’s New Work exhibition is set in the year 2050 in Eko, the Yoruba name for today’s Lagos. Inspired by the speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler and the poetry of Dionne Brand, this new body of work contemplates how bodies, psyches and architectures might respond to an overpopulated, mutated world. Conceived during the pandemic lockdown and following Ojih Odutola’s A Countervailing Theory exhibition at the Barbican Centre, London (2020); Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark (2021); and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2021–2022), New Work: Toyin Ojih Odutola melds storytelling forms to consider African and other global futures.

Born in 1985 in Ile-Ife, Nigeria and based in New York, Ojih Odutola is known for her drawings of figures, interior architectures and landscapes that call on references ranging from art history to the artist’s own upbringing. Often produced in narrative series, her drawings describe scenes or chapters of overarching universes. The artist’s distinctively layered method of mark-making highlights topographies of skin and surface.

Image: Toyin Ojih Odutola, Local News, 2021; © Toyin Ojih Odutola; courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

November 19, 2022–March 12, 2023

Floor 7

This exhibition, featuring approximately 80 of Joan Brown’s paintings and sculptures, will be a major retrospective and the most expansive presentation of the artist’s work in more than 20 years. Joan Brown charts the turns and devotions of a visionary who was once dismissed by critics as unserious but who was rooted firmly in research and impassioned curiosity that remains uniquely compelling today. Deeply embedded in the Bay Area art scene, Brown drew inspiration from many sources to create a charmingly offbeat body of work that merges autobiography, fantasy and whimsy, with weightier metaphysical and spiritual imagery and themes.

Image: Joan Brown, The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim, 1975; GUC Collection, Highland Park, Illinois; ©Estate of Joan Brown; photo: Michael Tropea

October 15, 2022–ongoing
Floor 5

Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections examines how the cultural currents and consciousness-shifting artistic movements of the 1960s continue to be relevant today. Marked equally by hope and loss, the decade ushered in a transformative period of rapid social, political and technological change. Artists associated with Pop art dissolved the division between “high” and “low” culture by incorporating media imagery and new modes of commercial production into their work. In the same period, artists engaged conceptual and minimal strategies to transform industrial materials and serially repeated forms to question social structures and methods of artistic production. This intergenerational exhibition reflects on how these pioneering artistic developments have remained active, driving forces in contemporary art and culture. Organized as a series of thematic galleries, this presentation features works by Felix González-Torres, Kerry James Marshall, Anne Truitt and Andy Warhol and highlights new acquisitions by artists such as Theaster Gates, Tadaaki Kuwayama, Jac Leirner, Helen Mirra and Rakuko Naito. Together, these artists demonstrate the continual resonance of the past.

Image: Kerry James Marshall, Souvenir III, 1998; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Kerry James Marshall; photo: Ben Blackwell

October 15, 2022–June 2023

Floor 5

Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette uncovers and reanimates personal and shared stories of resistance and resilience from her family archive. Installed in dialogue with Afterimages: Echoes of the 1960s from the Fisher and SFMOMA Collections, her Bay Area Walls commission brings together family photographs, images of otherworldly everyday objects and text-based drawings to reflect on Black legacies and collective possibilities across space and time.

This site-specific installation includes an intervention on the window that overlooks the Floor 5 sculpture terrace that glows with Barnette’s signature pink and is inscribed with the title SPACE/TIME. Nearby, an immersive photo mural with framed graphite drawings and oversized rhinestones reveals new dimensions of her family history with references to the materials and objects that recur in Barnette’s work: glitter, spray paint, musical equipment and Hello Kitty. Just as personal and political events collide and coexist in life, here Barnette juxtaposes snapshots of birthday parties and weddings with images of her father in his army uniform before he left for Vietnam and as a Black Panther after he returned. By adding cosmic imagery and a recent in-camera collage of her father in a swirling pink void, Barnette brings these photographs to the present, addressing the expansive arc of time that connects generations.

Situating her work against the backdrop of American politics from the 1960s to now, Barnette explains, “When I think about the systems my father has lived under, and that we continue to struggle against, there’s a point at which you want to imagine something so different that we haven’t seen yet … if you can fathom and imagine outer space, you’re at once acknowledging how impossible it all is, and how much potential there is in that uncontainable unknowable-ness.”

Image: Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Pointing in Pink), 2017, detail from SPACE/TIME, 2022; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Sadie Barnette

November 5, 2022–January 2, 2024

Floor 6

Acclaimed Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s atmospheric video work The Visitors (2012) returns to SFMOMA for its second presentation at the museum. When first presented as part of the SFMOMA exhibition Soundtracks in 2017, this immersive installation quickly became an audience favorite, creating a community of fans. Nine video screens feature projections of Kjartansson and eight musician friends’ intimate performances for the camera in a single durational take. Each performer, including the artist on guitar in a bathtub, is filmed warming up, playing an instrument and singing heartfelt lyrics taken from an intensely personal poem, Feminine Ways, by the artist’s ex-wife, artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir.

“Once again I fall into / My feminine ways” is one of the repeated refrains sung within the romantic setting of the historic Rokeby Farm. This large mansion in upstate New York, full of bohemian décor and seductive atmospheres, is now a living museum and multitrack recording studio. Through a flow of cinematic and harmonic compositions, The Visitors reflects a place where reality merges with fiction, contradictory feelings of sorrow blend with happiness, and moments of humor turn to emotional catharsis. The hour-long loop of lingering melody builds dense layers of past feeling and deeper emotions, creating moments of melancholic contemplations and leaving viewers with a sense of longing unfulfilled.

Image: Ragnar Kjartansson The Visitors (installation view), 2012; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; acquired through the generosity of Mimi Haas and Helen and Charles Schwab; © Ragnar Kjartansson; photo: Katherine Du Tiel

December 17, 2022–April 2, 2023

Floor 3

The renowned German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher (1931–2007; 1934–2015) changed the course of late 20th-century photography. Working as a rare artist couple, they focused on a single subject: the disappearing industrial architecture of Western Europe and North America that fueled the modern era. Their seemingly objective style recalled 19th- and early 20th-century precedents but also resonated with the serial approach of contemporary Minimalism and Conceptual art. Equally significant, it challenged the perceived gap between documentary and fine art photography.

Using a large-format view camera, the Bechers methodically recorded blast furnaces, winding towers, grain silos, cooling towers and gas tanks with precision, elegance and passion. Their rigorous, standardized practice allowed for comparative analyses of structures that they exhibited in grids of between four and 30 photographs. They described these formal arrangements as “typologies” and the buildings themselves as “anonymous sculpture.”

Featuring 200 works of art, this posthumous retrospective celebrates the Bechers’ remarkable achievement and is the first exhibition ever organized with full access to the artists’ personal collection of working materials and their comprehensive archive. The exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur.

Image: Bernd and Hilla Becher, Fördertürme, Belgien, Frankreich (Winding Towers, Belgium, France), 1967-88; The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Estate of Bernd and Hilla Becher; photo: Don Ross

December 17, 2022–May 29, 2023

Floor 2

Since 1967, SECA (the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) has honored recipients of the SECA Art Award with an exhibition at SFMOMA and an accompanying publication. The award distinguishes Bay Area artists whose work has not, at the time of nomination, been accorded substantial recognition from a major institution. Recipients are chosen by SFMOMA curators after a series of studio visits attended by SECA members. The 2022 SECA Art Award exhibition will highlight new work from this year’s award winners: Binta Ayofemi, Maria Guzmán Capron, Cathy Lu, Marcel Pardo Ariza and Gregory Rick.

Binta Ayofemi’s primary medium is the cities of Oakland and San Francisco, with works that focus on Black and Indigenous presence, land and spatial practices and modes of Black abstraction. Through a juxtaposition of bright fabrics, bold prints and a variety of textures, Maria Guzmán Capron creates commanding icons in positions of tenderness, power, vulnerability and movement with a dynamic patchwork of hand-sewn textiles and applied paint.

In installations that push the limits of ceramics, Cathy Lu manipulates Chinese art imagery and cultural references to deconstruct assumptions about Asian American identity and claims of authenticity. Marcel Pardo Ariza explores the relationship between kinship and queerness through constructed photographs, color sets and site-specific installations. Gregory Rick creates vibrant, large-scale paintings that depict scenes of conflict and struggle in high-contrast, cartoon-like imagery.

Image: Gregory Rick, No shit, there I was, 2021; © Gregory Rick