Current & Advance Exhibition Schedule

Opening September 16, 2023

Free to See

Floor 2

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Strips of Stripes is a dynamic site-specific commission that transforms SFMOMA’s Schwab Hall—the museum’s free, public Floor 2 space—with playful designs from the nonagenarian San Francisco-born artist, designer, writer and architect. Stretching from floor to ceiling, Stauffacher Solomon’s commission welcomes visitors to the museum with her “supergraphics,” large-scale, cascading designs that blend typography and wayfinding with the building’s architecture.

Widely known for her pioneering “supergraphics” at Northern California’s coastal development The Sea Ranch, Stauffacher Solomon made design history in the 1960s by creating a new form of environmental graphics that integrate with their surroundings and respond directly to the architecture in which they are located. Stauffacher Solomon has developed her supergraphics for years, generating a unique visual language: bright, graphic shapes and large-scale letters in her own typography that span walls, corners and ceilings, creating immersive environments.

In this new commission for SFMOMA, Stauffacher Solomon creates connections between the striped motif in the museum’s 1996 Mario Botta-designed building and the open volumes of the gathering spaces in the 2016 expansion designed by Snøhetta. Bright red diagonal lines, black-and-white angled patterns, and the letters “OK” playfully take over the walls and ceilings. As Stauffacher Solomon explains, “I’m saying it’s okay to come here. You’re here. It’s okay. Come in. Art welcomes you.”

Image: Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Strips of Stripes, 2023; courtesy the artist

September 21, 2023–January 28, 2024

Floor 4

Fernando Palma Rodríguez brings SFMOMA’s New Work gallery to life this fall with an installation that recalls a Mesoamerican creation story enacted by a series of newly made mechatronic sculptures that blend mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science. In the story, four gods representing the cardinal directions preserve order and give structure to our understanding of reality, and the sculptures enact this narrative as characters in a play. Using materials such as ladders, chairs, electronic sensors, soil, and other domestic and natural objects, the exhibition is intended to instill in the public a heightened sense of urgency driven by climate change and a desire for sustainability.

Palma Rodríguez’s installation, Chicuace ilhuitl (6-sky), aims to connect the ongoing struggle around land and water rights in his home community of Milpa Alta, an agricultural region of Nahua origin that supplies much of Mexico City with its clean water, to a broader conversation around environmental crises. Each robotic character is activated by electronic hardware that taps into distant meteorological phenomena, reflecting the artist’s desire to give nature a “voice,” and to engage the viewer in a conversation with issues of environmental concern.

Image: Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Xi mo matlazacan ce cehce, 2006 (installation view, Gaga, Los Angeles, 2018); courtesy the artist and Gaga, Mexico City and Los Angeles

Opening October 2023

Floor 3

Reggie Burrows Hodges: Incline features the debut of Keepers Orchard, the Bay Area artist’s newest—and largest—painting to date. Made with paint and pastel on deep black grounds, Burrows Hodges’ softly beautiful narrative works feature people as they steer, serve, soar and shine. Keepers Orchard is the most recent piece in Hodges’ ongoing series, Labor, which highlights people who tend the land, from the artist’s hometown of Compton to his current home in the Bay Area. In this monumental, 25-foot work, Hodges depicts a single worker in a sweeping California landscape with the majesty of Impressionist painting, shadowed by an awareness of the bitterness and fragility of our contemporary world. The work questions our relationship to the environment at a crucial turning point.

Image: Reggie Burrows Hodges, Labor: Keepers Orchard, 2023 (detail)

October 14, 2023 – September 7, 2024

Floor 6

Experience the kaleidoscopic world of Yayoi Kusama, one of the most iconic and globally celebrated artists working today. Infinite Love, Kusama’s first solo presentation in Northern California, features two of the artist’s latest Infinity Mirror Rooms: room-sized, experiential artworks that transport viewers into dreamlike, boundless spaces.

Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love (2023) is Kusama’s newest Infinity Mirror Room. It welcomes viewers into a cosmos of dancing color and light. Colored windows produce a luminous, kaleidoscopic pattern of overlapping circles. As visitors turn in the space, mirrored surfaces create an environment in constant flux.

LOVE IS CALLING (2013), the second room in the presentation, is one of the largest and most immersive of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms. This darkened, mirrored environment is illuminated by vividly colored tentacle-like forms accompanied by the sound of the artist reciting her poem “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears.” The introspective piece reflects on encountering the end of life and Kusama’s wish to convey a “message of love.”

Image: Yayoi Kusama, Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I Would Offer My Love, 2023, installed in the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, May 11—July 21, 2023 © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

Opening Mid–September 2023

Floor 5

As a complement to Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love on Floor 6, SFMOMA will exhibit the artist’s monumental sculpture Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart (2023) on Floor 5. Extending over 18 feet in length and more than 11 feet in height, the bronze sculpture’s undulating form winds through the space, enveloping visitors in its curving walls. Painted yellow, Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love is covered in Kusama’s signature polka dots repeated in a pattern that exaggerates the convex and concave gourd-like shapes. Kusama has said, “Pumpkins have been a great comfort to me since my childhood; they speak to me of the joy of living. They are humble and amusing at the same time, and I have and always will celebrate them in my art.” Images of pumpkins can be found in Kusama’s work since the 1940s, but began appearing more broadly beginning in the 1980s, as in important works like her outdoor sculpture Pumpkin, installed on Naoshima Island, Japan, in 1994.

Image: Yayoi Kusama, Aspiring to Pumpkin’s Love, the Love in My Heart, 2023, installed in the exhibition Yayoi Kusama: I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers, David Zwirner, New York, May 11—July 21, 2023; Fisher Art Foundation; © YAYOI KUSAMA. Courtesy the artist, Ota Fine Arts, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

January 18–June 2, 2024

Floor 3

A self-described visual activist, Zanele Muholi uses the camera to explore issues of gender identity, representation and race. Often photographing their own body or members of their LGBTQ+ community in South Africa, Muholi calls attention to the trauma and violence enacted on queer people while celebrating their beauty and resilience. Activism is central to Muholi’s artistic practice, from their early work contending with the dangers of being queer in South Africa to their more recent work embracing their own Blackness and gender expression. This exhibition brings together photographs from 2003 to the present, alongside the artist’s latest explorations in painting and sculpture. The first major exhibition of Muholi’s work on the West Coast, it provides the opportunity for Bay Area audiences to experience the full range of the artist’s expansive project.

Image: Zanele Muholi, Thathu I, The Sails, Durban, 2019; collection of Pamela and David Hornik

October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024

Floor 4

The first retrospective of Pacita Abad brings together the most significant presentation of her exuberant and multifaceted work ever shown in the U.S. The exhibition includes more than 40 works, showcasing her experiments in different mediums, including painting, sculpture, textiles and works on paper. The exhibition is anchored by Abad’s large-scale “trapuntos”—grandly scaled, painted canvases that she stitched and stuffed in a process akin to quilting. Throughout her 32-year career, the artist centered the triumphs and adversities of people on the periphery of power, as seen in her series Social Realist, Immigrant Experience and Masks and Spirits. Abad’s bold, colorful works are deeply personal expressions of her lived experience, and the exhibition celebrates the multifaceted work of an artist whose vibrant visual, material and conceptual concerns are as urgent today as they were three decades ago.

Though she became a U.S. citizen in 1994, Abad lived for several years in a number of countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, the Dominican Republic, Kenya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Sudan and Yemen. Through her travels, she interacted with myriad artistic communities, incorporating a diversity of cultural traditions—from Korean ink brush painting to Indonesian batik—into her expansive practice. Abad’s global, peripatetic existence is reflected in the portability of her works and in her use of textiles, a medium often associated with female labor and historically marginalized as craft.

Pacita Abad is organized by the Walker Art Center, and curated by Victoria Sung, Phyllis C. Wattis Senior Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and former Associate Curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, with Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts.

Image: Pacita Abad, If My Friends Could See Me Now, 1991. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim. Courtesy Pacita Abad Art Estate and Tina Kim Gallery. Photo: Charles Roussel.

November 11, 2023–March 3, 2024

Floor 7

The most comprehensive museum survey to date of the celebrated work of Wolfgang Tillmans comes to SFMOMA this November. With unique groupings of the artist’s iconic photographs, video work and multimedia installations displayed according to a loose chronology, this exhibition highlights Tillmans’s inventive and sensitive approach to artmaking. Organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, SFMOMA’s presentation of this survey is the artist’s solo debut in San Francisco.

Charting the development of Tillmans’s production beginning in the 1980s, To look without fear offers viewers an in-depth look at the artist’s career through the present. From early experiments with a photocopier to acclaimed works in portraiture, ecstatic images of New York City and Berlin nightlife, and abstractions done without the use of a camera, the broad range of the artist’s subject matter reveals his steadfast commitment to engage unflinchingly with the world through his art.

To look without fear highlights Tillmans’s unusual approach to photographic presentation, which he developed early in his career. Affixing his work to gallery walls at various levels with tape, binder clips, steel pins and only the occasional picture frame, Tillmans’s site-specific installations collect his work in dynamic constellations of imagery that eschew the conventions of art display.

Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, and Phil Taylor, former Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Image: Wolfgang Tillmans, Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees, 1992; courtesy the artist, David Zwirner, New York / Hong Kong, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne, Maureen Paley, London

September 2, 2023–March 17, 2024

Floor 3

Sea Change: Photographs from the Collection explores how photography registers change, bearing witness to cultural, political and environmental shifts across time. Presented as a suite of eight transhistorical thematic and monographic galleries, the exhibition approaches the topic of change from various angles. Placing historical and contemporary works in conversation, this permanent collection exhibition will offer a survey of the history of photography that spotlights recent museum acquisitions and works by underrecognized artists.

Sea Change features works by more than 50 artists, including Takashi Arai, Jonathan Calm, Tina Barney, Guanyu Xu and Zoe Strauss, as well as single galleries devoted to the works of Ilse Bing and Bay Area photographer Reagan Louie. Reflecting SFMOMA’s mission to connect its audience to the art of our time, the exhibition reveals how artists have used photography to examine moments of change both past and present.

Image: Richard Misrach, Desert Fire #1, 1983, printed 2016; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of the artist; ©️ Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

August 12, 2023–May 27, 2024

Floor 3

Marshall Brown Projects: Dequindre Civic Academy reimagines the future of a Detroit city block in an installation of architectural drawings, models and collages. Approaching urban design through a conceptual, multidisciplinary lens, Marshall Brown considers the possibilities of architecture to revitalize areas that have had historically limited access to resources, due to systemic inequality, depopulation and infrastructural decline. Dequindre Civic Academy highlights Brown’s innovative approach to solution-oriented urban design, where architecture facilitates and stimulates a progressive vision for civic life. The city-within-a-city is a proposal for a self-contained system that caters to all the needs of its multicultural, multigenerational inhabitants, spanning housing, education, commerce and leisure.

Dequindre Civic Academy was originally commissioned for The Architectural Imagination, an exhibition of speculative architectural projects at the U.S. Pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Image: Marshall Brown, Towards a Coordinate Unit from the Dequindre Civic Academy, 2016; San Francisco Museum of Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Marshall Brown

August 3, 2023–February 19, 2024

Floor 2

From their pinstriped, stylized exteriors to their lush, upholstered interiors, lowrider cars express individual and collective identities and can transform public spaces into sites of celebration. Artists rafa esparza, Guadalupe Rosales and Mario Ayala have each engaged different aspects of lowrider aesthetics and practices in their work, reflecting on their own early experiences cruising in Los Angeles. The customized cars are achieved over time and through the collaboration of drivers, their families and communities for the sake of joy and visual pleasure. For Sitting on Chrome, the three artists are working together for the first time to conceive an exhibition that explores the embodied experience and social dimensions of lowrider cruising. Following a newly commissioned mural by all three artists, four galleries feature paintings, sculptures, photographs, archival materials and a sound installation—some which have never been publicly displayed. Each of these immersive spaces engages the senses to evoke the experience of cruising while examining themes including memory and self-authored histories, queer experiences, issues of policing and the relationship between humans and machines. esparza, Rosales and Ayala celebrate and unsettle the lowrider while highlighting the communities that have established this cultural practice to create spaces for creativity, resistance and community visibility.

Image: rafa esparza, Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser, 2022; courtesy the artist; photo: Fabian Guerrero

Opening July 22, 2023

Floor 4

What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms features thought-provoking contemporary works from the museum’s collection that offer individual artistic responses to questions about life and art. Presented as a series of episodes with rotating artworks, the first episode includes works by Matthew Barney, Rosa Barba, João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Walter Hood, Byron Kim, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yoko Ono, Ebony G. Patterson, Lorna Simpson and Naama Tsabar.

These works propose an engagement with both the physical and the ephemeral, considering the tangible matter of artistic media as well as symbolic actions and urgent subject matters. Presented across eight rooms, What Matters addresses materials, conditions of space and architecture and, most importantly, human relationships. The first episode’s spiritual center is Yoko Ono’s MEND PIECE, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art version (1966/2021), where visitors will be invited to sit together at a table and discover their own means of repairing broken ceramic cups and saucers. In this participatory work, the communal act of mending furthers efforts to, in Ono’s words, “mend the earth.”

In the second episode of What Matters, opening in 2024, works by contemporary artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Sky Hopinka, Deana Lawson and Guadalupe Maravilla will continue the exploration of collective healing, impermanence and intentionality.

Image: Yoko Ono, Mend Piece (Galerie Lelong, New York City version), 1966/2015 (installation view from Yoko Ono: THE RIVERBED at Galerie Lelong, New York 2015-2016); Artwork © Yoko Ono; photo: Kris Graves

May 20–November 26, 2023

Floor 3

Kinship: Photography and Connection features moving works by six contemporary photographers who share a special affinity with their subjects: Farah Al Qasimi, Mercedes Dorame, Jarod Lew, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Alessandra Sanguinetti and Deanna Templeton. Relationships are fundamental to each artist’s practice, whether the connections explored in the photographs are familial, platonic, romantic, cultural or geographic. Four of the six—Dorame, Sanguinetti, Sepuya and Templeton—live in California.

Templeton’s series What She Said pairs diary entries from her teenage years with photographs of young women reminiscent of her at that age. Lew’s Please Take Off Your Shoes includes portraits of young first-generation Asian Americans traversing the world in their homes and the world outside. Sepuya photographs friends and lovers, exploring desire and the construction of queer spaces.

For over 20 years, Sanguinetti has photographed two cousins in rural Argentina, documenting their relationship to each other and their environment. Al Qasimi lives in New York City and photographs regularly in the United Arab Emirates, where she grew up. Her bold, distinctive photographs feature human and animal subjects, often gesturing towards the kinship between them. Dorame’s lyrical pictures forge a dialogue with her Indigenous Tongva ancestors and the spaces where they lived.

Image: Jarod Lew, Alex and Ryan, 2022; courtesy the artist; © Jarod Lew

May 20–September 10, 2023

Floor 7

Frank Bowling: The New York Years 1966–1975 is the first major U.S. survey of the artist’s work in more than four decades. Co-organized with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, this exhibition captures the significance of the formative decade when Bowling, who was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), moved from London to New York. Featuring over 40 color-soaked paintings, this exhibition uncovers the explosive development of his vision and practice during a period that continues to inflect his deeply experimental works today. The SFMOMA exhibition adds to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s presentation of Frank Bowling’s Americas, with nine additional artworks, including an expanded group of recent paintings produced between 2018 and 2020. The San Francisco presentation also features a wide selection of archival materials that emphasize Bowling’s evolution as an artist as well as a selection of his little-known “map” sketches and a companion gallery that highlights artists from Bowling’s international circle. Work by New York–based artists featured in 5+1, the groundbreaking 1969 exhibition Bowling curated, offers visitors the opportunity to see Bowling’s work alongside his fellow visionary contemporaries, showing his voice as a curator, critic and important figure in debates around process-based abstraction and the role of Black cultural identity in artistic practices.

Image: Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1969–70; lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Maddy and Larry Mohr, 2011 (2011.590.2); © Frank Bowling; all rights reserved, DACS/Artimage, London & ARS, New York 2022; courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

November 5, 2022–October 13, 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. “Once again I fall into my feminine ways” is the haunting refrain of the original composition by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson that they perform repeatedly and in unison, voicing a collage of sentences written by artist Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir. Each performer, including the artist on guitar in a bathtub, is filmed warming up, playing an instrument and singing together within the romantic setting of Rokeby, a historic mansion in upstate New York. 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, 2012 (installation view); 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

October 15, 2022–June 2, 2024

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

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

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 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: Katherine Du Tiel, courtesy SFMOMA

Ongoing

Floor 1

This winter, SFMOMA unveils artist Wu Tsang’s immersive video and sound installation Of Whales (2022) in the museum’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium, a space that is free for the public to visit. Acquired by the museum this fall and included in the most recent Venice Biennale, the installation is part of Tsang’s multidisciplinary project inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Imagined from the perspective of the whale and incorporating psychedelic extended reality (XR-generated) oceanscapes, Of Whales interweaves a surreal exploration of Melville’s world with a postcolonial and environmental reading of the novel.

Image: Wu Tsang, Of Whales, 2022 (installation view, SFMOMA); collection SFMOMA, Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Michael D. Abrams; © Wu Tsang; photo: Katherine Du Tiel