Artist Interviews

SFMOMA is committed to partnering with the most forward-thinking artists of our time and bringing their visions to life. Here, in their own words, many of these artists share their creative process and their stories.

Rodney McMillian on home and history

The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism

Vija Celmins: Saying the unsayable

Vija Celmins on her life in (and out of) the studio

Hung Liu on guns, art, history, forced labor, and taboos

Etel Adnan on art and urgency

Etel Adnan on lightning-strike paintings and words as gestures

Kerry Tribe on empathy in health care

O Grivo’s sculptural orchestra

Bea Nettles’s photographic tarot deck

Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules

Isamu Noguchi: There’s no such thing as time

Judy Chicago: The Female aesthetic

Sean McFarland: Landscape photography as failed record

Sean McFarland’s metaphysical way of looking

How ORFN’s graffiti inspires Alicia McCarthy

Alicia McCarthy: Visually listening to bands of colors

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s biometric portraiture

Lindsey White: How humor threatens us

Liam Everett: The art of obstruction

Christina Kubisch: Discovering new sounds

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: The slipperiness of sound

Richard T. Walker on landscape and desire

Larry Sultan discovers his family through photography

Journey through the soundscape of a boiler room with Bill Fontana

Bill Fontana: The makings of a sound sculptor

Anselm Kiefer: “My paintings change”

Park McArthur: Places of commemoration

Robert Frank as a young artist

Will Rogan's Mediums channel artists lost to time

Lieko Shiga on Kitakama village and the 2011 tsunami

Tomás Saraceno: Building “future flying cities” with spiders

Anselm Kiefer: History is a clay

William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time

Marco Breuer: Pushing the boundaries of photography

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Janded: Between two cultures

Ursula von Rydingsvard on sculpture and ancestry

Sohei Nishino’s maps trace more than the city

Bruce Conner: It’s All True

Nobuyoshi Araki: Journey through life and death

Akiyoshi Taniguchi’s meditations on photography

Rinko Kawauchi contemplates the small mysteries of life

Tomoko Sawada’s self-portraits create familiar characters

Eikoh Hosoe: Does photography reflect truth?

Nobuyoshi Araki’s “more is more” approach to photography

Daido Moriyama on the essence of photography

Kikuji Kawada on the Atomic Bomb Dome and postwar Japan

Ishiuchi Miyako’s early life near Yokosuka’s U.S. military base

Keizo Kitajima in the former USSR

Asako Narahashi’s photos from the sea

Hiromi Tsuchida: Documenting Japan’s past and present

Issei Suda on the drama of photography

Daido Moriyama on social rebellion in 1960s Japan

Jürg Lehni’s extraordinary drawing machine

Thomas Schütte: Playing with materials

Robert Frank on photographing The Americans

Dana Schutz on the personalities of paintings

Anthony Hernandez: Peeling away the layers of the Mojave Desert

Robert Adams: Photographing a “landscape of mistakes”

Ron Nagle: The sculptural language of hair loss

Ron Nagle on the ceramic “revolution”

Ken Hakuta: My uncle Nam June Paik

Jananne Al-Ani on the Middle Eastern landscape

Leonor Antunes on the architecture of inspiration

Julia Scher: Predictive Engineering

Claudy Jongstra on art and sustainability

Jason Lazarus: “At sea” with found photographs

Robert Adams's sobering photographs of clearcutting in the Pacific Northwest

How Mike Mandel created new meaning from old photographs

Mike Mandel’s Baseball-Photographer Trading Cards

Michael Jang’s family snapshots

Catherine Opie’s groundbreaking queer portraiture

Janet Delaney on South of Market

Janet Delaney on hand-painted signs

Judith Joy Ross: Protest the War

Leo Rubinfien: How do you photograph a psychological wound?

An-My Lê: Landscapes of war

Rabih Mroué on “the war against the image”

Michael Jang: The night the Sex Pistols broke up

How Michael Jang photographed the most glamorous celebrities of 1970s Beverly Hills

John Divola: “Time is a verb”

John Divola: Photographing abandoned houses

Fred Wilson’s museum interventions

Jon Rubin’s Pictures Collected From Museum Visitors’ Wallets

Reinhard Mucha: Showing the show

Katharina Fritsch’s giant animal sculptures

Richard Deacon on being a “fabricator”

Antony Gormley answers: What is art?

Richard Diebenkorn: “The sky took the place of the ocean”

Hilla and Bernd Becher invented a new genre of photography

Petah Coyne: “Materials are a language”

Ellsworth Kelly explains abstraction

Paul Kos in the Sierras

Tony Cragg, radical materialist

Tony Cragg’s utilitarian materials

When “everything was perfect”: An introduction to Richard Tuttle

Stephen Shore ditched school for Warhol’s Factory

Fred Wilson on “degradaria”

Njideka Akunyili Crosby on painting cultural collision

Mildred Howard’s houses hold memories

Richard Learoyd takes us inside his giant homemade camera

Stephen Shore: Taking photographs that “feel like seeing”

The message is for the media: Ant Farm and Media Burn

Doug Hall on his utopian generation

Doug Hall’s giant Tesla coil

Brice Marden: Abstract painting can take you to paradise

Ant Farm on becoming “underground architects”

Brice Marden: What painting is all about

Peter Campus on his most famous work and why he hates it

Tony Oursler’s “electronic effigies”: Between two spaces

Vito Acconci wants revolution

Hans Haacke: Fighting the establishment

Peter Campus says, “You can’t see yourself”

Abelardo Morell and the magic of the camera obscura

Liz Deschenes on her camera-less photography

Alison Rossiter gives new life to old photographic paper

Barbara Bosworth looks slowly and observes the landscape

Susan Meiselas on “the ethics of seeing”

Markus Schinwald’s strange prostheses and erotic table legs

John Baldessari on fighting the “photography” label

John Baldessari explains his “strange mind”

Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic portraits of hotel rooms

Mel Bochner transforms a wall with chalk

Sophie Calle on becoming an artist

Ewan Gibbs on his San Francisco drawings

Kateřina Šedá holds the Los Altos World Records

Charles R. Garoian: The teacher who was called to the principal’s office

Jessica Stockholder creates an intersection with the intersection

Spencer Finch takes viewers from technicolor to black and white

Jeremy Blake: A waking dream

Christian Jankowski needs subtitles for Silicon Valley Talksa

Jonn Herschend on finding beauty behind the scenes

Larger than life! David Wilson and his sixteen-foot-high ink drawing Frog Woman Rock

Alec Soth photographs loneliness in Silicon Valley

Soul food for the brain: Chris Johanson and public sculpture

Mike Mills finds the past in the present, interviewing the “futurists” of Los Altos

Where did all the art go? Jonn Herschend and stories of the SFMOMA evacuation

Zarouhie Abdalian makes social sound in downtown Oakland

Fake snacks and jack-o’-lanterns: Josh Faught takes us to the Neptune Society Columbarium

Open your eyes! Rediscover San Francisco with David Wilson’s Arrivals

Gu Wenda on the artist as peacemaker

How Gu Wenda turns hair and glue into works of art

Gates of steel: Mark di Suvero and his path to welding

Bow and arrow to the heart: Mark di Suvero’s love for the Golden Gate

Mark di Suvero likes to work with his hands

From Revlon to Robert Smithson: Mary Heilmann finds inspiration everywhere

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s seductive chat bot

Mapping nine centuries of a Romanian city with Tiffany Chung

AA Bronson and his fictional museum Cornucopia

Let’s talk about sex: AA Bronson pushes critics to consider queer culture

The story of Ernest Cole, a black photographer in South Africa during apartheid

Photographer David Goldblatt exposes humanity in former criminals

The photographs of South African nightclub bouncer Billy Monk

In Boksburg, David Goldblatt photographs the reality of apartheid

Jim Campbell: Transmitted in light

Naoya Hatakeyama on what’s awe-some

Tiffany Chung: Maps are about people

Akram Zaatari describes Hashem el Madani’s “photography of the working class”

The Futurefarmers stand on one leg, together

Yto Barrada on how the Strait of Gibraltar shapes life in Tangier

Lamia Joreige maps Beirut’s tumultuous past and future

The Futurefarmers on picnics and Powers of Ten

Lamia Joreige on disappearance and memories of war

Adrian Ghenie: Painting a dictator in the moment before his execution

Adrian Ghenie: Attending art school in Communist Romania

Yto Barrada on laziness as resistance

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Straddling two cultures and building a platform for art

Óscar Muñoz explores memory through ephemeral materials

Óscar Muñoz created an art space that thrives on uncertainty

Akram Zaatari: Collecting images from the Arab world

Adrian Ghenie started a gallery because he was a “failure”

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Using graffiti and breakdancing to rebrand a country

Trevor Paglen on the secret history of early Yosemite photography

Parra on getting “weirded out”

Trevor Paglen photographs classified “black sites”

Pablo López Luz on shooting the landscape of Mexico City

Alejandro Cartagena on photographing while walking through dry riverbeds

How Daniela Rossell’s photographs came to be viewed as images of Mexico’s “poster girls of corruption”

Daniela Rossell questions “female territories”

Stephanie Syjuco creates knockoffs of works of art

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More: Piggybacking assignments

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More: Before web 2.0

Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher’s Learning to Love You More: Instant acceptance

Richard Serra answers: Why make art?

Advice from Richard Serra: Clear away the clutter and do your own thing

How do you take notes? Richard Serra draws his thoughts

Have you seen my bird? Rigo 23’s “found lost bird” posters

From cross-stitch to cake with Gay Outlaw

Hung Liu: There’s dignity in a woman handling a machine

David Best is a burning man

William Allan brings books back to life

Jordan Kantor on the act of looking and looking again

Graffiti is a sport, and Barry McGee a sportsman

Will Rogan: “We are on this planet that’s spinning around the sun and it’s totally insane”

The legendary Wayne E & Wayne R show

Kamau Amu Patton and the machine that’s always learning

A large and flickering grid of light by Jim Campbell

Klara Kristalova on the darker side of childhood

Talking trash, over Skype, with Tiago Carneiro da Cunha

Daniel Schwartz: “My university is the road”

Traveling “through the eye of history” with photographer Daniel Schwartz

Jim Goldberg: Why do we keep making the same mistakes?

Jim Goldberg’s compassionate lens

Richard Misrach: Graffiti in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

Rosana Castrillo Diaz on finding meaning in the everyday

Stephanie Syjuco on the economy of art

Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More: Web-based assignments designed to get people to leave their computers

Helène Aylon “midwifes” an image

Robert Rauschenberg pays tribute to John Cage

Form, growth, behavior: The making of Andrew Kudless’s “bulbous” sculpture

Teresita Fernández harnesses the behavior of fire

Premature mortality: William Kentridge reflects on the AIDS epidemic in South Africa

Beach life: William Kentridge and Tide Table

William Kentridge: transformation with animation

William Kentridge and his animated alter egos

Kerry James Marshall: Requiem for a decade

Kerry James Marshall: Art is a series of visual problems that need to be solved

Completely out of whack: Kerry James Marshall on his murals for SFMOMA

Kerry James Marshall wants to see black people in art, all the time

Kerry James Marshall goes grisaille

Olafur Eliasson: Everyone sees a different rainbow

Ann Hamilton evokes the working class with the color blue

Ann Hamilton gives voice to Charleston’s invisible history

“Un-reading”: Ann Hamilton erases texts to make room for other stories

In the studio with Olafur Eliasson

Experimenting in the lab with Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson’s machine: A phenomenon maker

Olafur Eliasson wants you to slow down and take your time

What does a solid-gray painting have to do with Bob Dylan? Brice Marden explains

Brice Marden on finding inspiration in olive groves

Brice Marden: How to look at paintings

Painting versus photography: Jeff Wall compares and contrasts

Jeff Wall advocates for staged photography

Jeff Wall: “I begin by not photographing”

Henry Wessel: Photographing while “half asleep”

Henry Wessel: The view from the driver’s seat

Henry Wessel: Why it’s better to see without recognizing

Anselm Kiefer: An artist is “outside of the world”

Anselm Kiefer: We use mythology to give life meaning

Deborah Luster: Helping prisoners show themselves to the world

Why Deborah Luster decided to photograph prisoners

“The people who stole the prisoners”: Deborah Luster’s accidental performance work

“Hold these people in your hand”: Deborah Luster’s photographs of prisoners

How Richard Serra influenced Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney and ancient Japanese whaling traditions

Matthew Barney puts his body into his work

Football and perception: Matthew Barney on the field emblem

Matthew Barney on ambergris, a.k.a. whale waste

Matthew Barney on using plastics and petroleum jelly

Amy Franceschini reimagines World War II–era community gardens for San Francisco

Richard Tuttle: Pushing the limits of art

Richard Tuttle: Art is an adventure

It’s alive! Richard Tuttle creates a wire piece at SFMOMA

Richard Tuttle treats words as art

Why was Richard Tuttle’s 1975 exhibition so controversial?

Gary Hill: Your actions reflect yourself

Gary Hill gets down to the neurons

Gary Hill doesn’t miss a beat

Robert Bechtle: The camera is a sketchbook

Robert Bechtle: Paintings are not as ephemeral as photographs

Robert Bechtle gets (photo)real

Romance novels and slave narratives: Kara Walker imagines herself in a book

Kara Walker on the dark side of imagination

Kara Walker explains her interest in “demoted” art forms

Kara Walker depicts violence and sadness that can't be seen

Doris Salcedo: Memory as the essence of work

Doris Salcedo: "Extreme experiences as a point of departure"

Ed Ruscha on combining painting and photography

Ed Ruscha: Drawing with gunpowder

Ed Ruscha: Painting words

Ed Ruscha’s big-city visions

Why Pipilotti Rist works with video

Pipilotti Rist: Our hearts are “rinsed” every second

Pipilotti Rist’s fairy tale about a destructive goddess

Pipilotti Rist’s “instant diamonds”

Judy Chicago prepares for a dinner party with female heroes

Lindy Roy’s liquid inspiration for Poolhouse

On target: Jasper Johns on creating his target paintings

How Zen poems influenced Brice Marden’s paintings

Because he says so: Jasper Johns is not a Dadaist

Frank Stella: Rebuilding painting

Frank Stella and the art of the protractor

Frank Stella describes “art worth making”

David Smith and the search for “accidental beauty”

Richard Serra throws molten lead inside SFMOMA

Glenn Ligon on “the idea of a black man”

Jay DeFeo’s The Rose: The enormous painting that was “almost alive”

Subscribe to the SFMOMA Newsletter

Our monthly dose of videos, essays, art stories and more. Straight to your inbox.