An Architecture of Belonging: Sarah Sze Transforms the Atrium

Sarah Sze moves fluidly between physical and digital media, layering technology into traditional art forms like sculpture, painting, and drawing. For her new site-specific commission at SFMOMA, she applies this sensibility on a monumental scale throughout the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium, from the entrance to the museum’s iconic oculus five floors up. Sze’s installation fully transforms the space, imparting a sense of wonder and awe throughout the visitor’s path.

Entitled Forever is Composed of Nows after the poem of the same name by Emily Dickinson, this multisensory project is Sze’s most ambitious to date. Two twenty-seven-foot-tall panels that merge painting, photography, and video flank the atrium’s central staircase and anchor the installation. Interwoven throughout the space is a profusion of moving images and sounds.

The most important element may be the visitors who come through the museum’s entrance. The work responds to their presence and movements, activating video projections and sounds invoking local landscapes and the cycles of nature to create a constantly shifting environment. The density of audio-visual content increases with the size of the crowd. Additionally, Sze and SFMOMA staff considered accessibility from the installation’s initial conception, collaborating with global inclusive design firm Prime Access Consulting to incorporate affordances for blind, low vision, and Deaf visitors into the installation. Learn more about SFMOMA’s work in this area in the article “Expanding Access Through Inclusive Design.”

Time is another key element in this ever-changing work, inspiring the choice of title. Sze describes Dickinson’s poem as “a meditation on time as a continuum of present moments, each one adding to the memory of forever.” Excerpts of the poem’s text are installed in braille along stairway and elevator railings, dispersing this concept in tactile form. Snippets of the poem in American Sign Language (ASL) will be interwoven throughout the streams of video projections activating the walls.

Throughout Sze’s conception process, she carefully considered the architectural setting of SFMOMA’s building. Having observed that the museum’s vertical design naturally leads visitors upward to the building’s oculus, Sze reimagined this feature as a planetarium-like environment, illuminated by projections on the circular walls that mimic the rhythm of a symphony, each contributing to a verse or a chorus. Forever is Composed of Nows turns the atrium into “a living field,” says Sze, “expanding and contracting in rhythm with human presence.”

Sarah Sze: Forever is Composed of Nows is on view beginning November 21, 2026, on Floor 1.