Current & Advance Exhibition Schedule

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

Opening February 18, 2023

Floor 5

Corporeal highlights a selection of sculptures from SFMOMA’s collection that invoke the human figure through a variety of forms, whether whole, fragmented or merely implied. Each work engages material in unusual ways, attuning visitors to their sense of body and relationship to their surroundings. Rising from the gallery floor to meet visitors at a human scale, these works invite visitors to consider their place in the world, both collectively and individually.

Rose B. Simpson’s duo of totemic forms, They Rose 1 and They Rose A (both 2019), reflect on the relationship between trauma and resilience and build on Simpson’s multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of Indigenous artists working with clay. Nick Cave’s Soundsuit (2009) offers an ecstatic costume that obscures a wearer’s gender, race and class to subvert biases around identity, while Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud VIII (1999) embodies the invisible energies that radiate from our bodies through a constellation of branching metal. Additional works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Rebecca Belmore, Petah Coyne and others flesh out the presentation.

Image: Nick Cave, Soundsuit, 2009; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2010; © Nick Cave; photo: Katherine Du Tiel; courtesy SFMOMA

March 25–July 16, 2023

Floor 4

In the latest installment of SFMOMA’s storied New Work exhibition series, Los Angeles–based artist Anna Sew Hoy enlists a unique approach to material and space in her imaginative sculptural installations. In mesmerizing tangles of hand-built clay arches, found metal cages and detritus ranging from charging cords to denim scraps, Sew Hoy’s work resembles the ruins of a lost city, or places of refuge assembled from the shiny, tech-laden remains of a land destroyed. Taken together, the sculptures embody Sew Hoy’s interest in turning things inside out to explore the relationship between the exterior world (of bodies, buildings and objects) and interior space (of psyches, emotions and souls).

Since 1987, SFMOMA’s New Work series has provided a platform for artists to experiment: to develop and premiere a new body of work, or as an opportunity to revisit or rethink existing work. Initiated with the support of SFMOMA’s Collectors Forum, the series focuses on the innovative ideas and visions of national and international artists and has played a key role in shaping the breadth and character of the museum’s collection and programming. Through New Work, SFMOMA has organized early exhibitions with artists such as Matthew Barney, Marilyn Minter, Kara Walker and Christopher Wool, all of whom received their first solo museum shows through the New Work series.

Image: Anna Sew Hoy, Digital Ocean, spawn, 2022; courtesy the artist; photo: Edgar Cruz

May 20–November 12, 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

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, SFMOMA); © Julian Charrière/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; Photo: Katherine Du Tiel

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

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

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–June 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

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

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

Free to See

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, Trap, 2022; courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; © Gregory Rick; photo: Glen Cheriton, Impart Photography

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