SFMOMA’S NOW PLAYING SERIES RETURNS THIS SPRING WITH THREE THURSDAY-EVENING ARTIST TAKEOVERS

SFMOMA’s popular Now Playing series is back in 2011 with interactive music, video, and performance works by artists Anna Parkina and robbinschilds with Kinski; San Francisco’s Pop-Up Magazine; and Jerzy Grotowski’s landmark theater-based Workcenter, each of which will take over SFMOMA for a Thursday evening in February, March, and April. The events are free with museum admission and feature live performances in the museum’s Haas Atrium, gallery talks, film screenings, complimentary bites courtesy of San Francisco magazine, cash bars, and provocative tasting menus by local chefs for sale in the Rooftop Garden from Meatpaper magazine and Blue Bottle Coffee Co. Remaking the museum as platform, stage, and promenade, Now Playing invites artists to animate SFMOMA in unexpected ways, allowing guests to experience the museum as projection chamber, food as education and art, and artists playing the architecture.

Now Playing: Anna Parkina and robbinschilds with Kinski

Thursday, February 24, 6–9:45 p.m.

7 p.m. Performance by Anna Parkina

9 p.m. Performance by robbinschilds with Kinski

Moscow-based artist and performer Anna Parkina explores avant-garde legacies in her world-premiere performance “Fallow Land,” which coincides with the opening of her New Work exhibition at SFMOMA.

Then, as part of the Noise Pop Festival, dance artists robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) and Seattle noise band Kinski present C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience), a collaborative piece created with visual artist A.L. Steiner and set designer AJ Blandford. C.L.U.E. is a video and performance work that features a monochromatic pair moving through an array of environments, from salt flats and high deserts to redwood forests and rocky beaches, through dry river basins and vast parking lots. A work permanently in progress, the piece also shifts and adapts uniquely to each presentation site.

Now Playing: How Wine Became Modern featuring Pop-Up Magazine

Thursday, March 17, 6–9:45 p.m.

7 p.m. Screening: Dionysis in 69 (Brian De Palma, 1970)

9 p.m. Pop-Up Magazine presents Sidebar: Wine!

Pop-Up Magazine is unlike any other magazine. It won’t arrive in your mailbox, and you can’t buy it from a newsstand or read it online. Why? Because each issue is a live performance, created for the stage and presented to a live audience. Pop-Up showcases writers, documentary filmmakers, photographers and radio producers—contributors to The New Yorker, This American Life, The New York Times Magazine, NPR’s All Things Considered, and Wired—plus Oscar-winning filmmakers, best-selling authors, and acclaimed artists whose stories and ideas unfold like a magazine, without the paper. Tonight, Pop-Up debuts a new between-issues format: Sidebar. With SFMOMA’s exhibition How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now in mind, Pop-Up’s first Sidebar tackles the culture, science, history, politics, and humor surrounding our favorite drink. This Now Playing program also nods to the Wine exhibition with a rare screening of Dionysus in 69, Brian De Palma’s first film, a split-screen record of Richard Schechner’s landmark restaging of The Bacchae with the experimental Performance Group.

Now Playing: The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Performance

Thursday, April 21, 6–9:45 p.m.

7 p.m. Screening: Allen Ginsberg’s “home movies”

9 p.m. Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards

Drawn from their investigation of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry, 11 actors animate SFMOMA with a cycle of song, gesture, and movement that challenges the conventions of theater-based performance. Ginsberg’s words flow through blues, rock, pop, opera, and even punk idioms as the performers themselves flow through the audience. Coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Workcenter, this West Coast debut of Electric Party Songs creates a social space for new encounters with Ginsberg, American music, and the space of the museum. Before the performance, we screen Ginsberg portraits spanning three decades: Costanzo Allione’s 1978 documentary about the Naropa Institute, Fried Shoes Cooked Diamonds; behind-the-scenes sections from Jerry Aronson’s 1993 chronicle The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg; and Ginsberg’s self-shot Household Affairs.

SFMOMA: Now Playing is free with museum admission. Half-price Thursday-night tickets are available only on-site at the museum starting at 6 p.m. Visit sfmoma.org/nowplaying for more information.

Media support for SFMOMA: Now Playing is provided by San Francisco magazine and SF Weekly. Support for Thursday Nights at SFMOMA is provided by yp.com. W San Francisco is the official hotel of Thursday Nights at SFMOMA.