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.

The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism

Vija Celmins: Saying the Unsayable

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

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’s metaphysical way of looking

How ORFN’s graffiti inspires Alicia McCarthy

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s biometric portraiture

Alicia McCarthy: Visually listening to bands of colors

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

Sean McFarland: Landscape photography as failed record

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”

Robert Frank as a young artist

Will Rogan's Mediums channel artists lost to time

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

Kikuji Kawada on the Atomic Bomb Dome and postwar Japan

Keizo Kitajima in the former USSR

Asako Narahashi’s photos from the sea

Jürg Lehni’s extraordinary drawing machine

Robert Frank on photographing The Americans

Robert Adams: Photographing a “landscape of mistakes”

Jananne Al-Ani on the Middle Eastern landscape

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

An-My Lê: Landscapes of war

Rabih Mroué on “the war against the image”

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

Rosana Castrillo Diaz on finding meaning in the everyday

Football and perception: Matthew Barney on the field emblem

Pipilotti Rist’s fairy tale about a destructive goddess

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

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

Richard Deacon on being a “fabricator”

On target: Jasper Johns on creating his target paintings

Because he says so: Jasper Johns is not a Dadaist

Richard Tuttle treats words as art

Why was Richard Tuttle’s 1975 exhibition so controversial?

Pipilotti Rist’s “instant diamonds”

Frank Stella describes “art worth making”

How Zen poems influenced Brice Marden’s paintings

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

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

Anselm Kiefer: We use mythology to give life meaning

Henry Wessel: The view from the driver’s seat

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

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

Robert Rauschenberg pays tribute to John Cage

William Kentridge: transformation with animation

William Kentridge and his animated alter egos

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

Olafur Eliasson wants you to slow down and take your time

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

Matthew Barney on using plastics and petroleum jelly

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

Richard Misrach: Graffiti in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

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

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

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

Richard Serra throws molten lead inside SFMOMA

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”

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: Using graffiti and breakdancing to rebrand a country

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

Trevor Paglen on the secret history of early Yosemite photography

Pablo López Luz on shooting the landscape of Mexico City

Alejandro Cartagena on photographing while walking through dry riverbeds

Akram Zaatari: Collecting images from the Arab world

Stephanie Syjuco creates knockoffs of works of art

The legendary Wayne E & Wayne R show

Jim Campbell: Transmitted in light

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

Kamau Amu Patton and the machine that’s always learning

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

Daniela Rossell questions “female territories”

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

Trevor Paglen photographs classified “black sites”

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

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

Naoya Hatakeyama on what’s awe-some

From Revlon to Robert Smithson: Mary Heilmann finds inspiration everywhere

Gu Wenda on the artist as peacemaker

Mark di Suvero likes to work with his hands

How Gu Wenda turns hair and glue into works of art

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

Tiffany Chung: Maps are about people

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

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

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s seductive chat bot

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

Glenn Ligon on “the idea of a black man”

Kerry James Marshall goes grisaille

Judy Chicago prepares for a dinner party with female heroes

Lindy Roy’s liquid inspiration for Poolhouse

Gary Hill: Your actions reflect yourself

Doris Salcedo: Memory as the essence of work

Why Pipilotti Rist works with video

Ed Ruscha on combining painting and photography

Ed Ruscha: Drawing with gunpowder

Ed Ruscha: Painting words

Pipilotti Rist: Our hearts are “rinsed” every second

Ed Ruscha’s big-city visions

Gary Hill doesn’t miss a beat

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

Painting versus photography: Jeff Wall compares and contrasts

Richard Tuttle: Pushing the limits of art

Richard Tuttle: Art is an adventure

Gary Hill gets down to the neurons

Robert Bechtle: The camera is a sketchbook

Robert Bechtle: Paintings are not as ephemeral as photographs

Jeff Wall advocates for staged photography

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

Robert Bechtle gets (photo)real

Kara Walker on the dark side of imagination

Kara Walker explains her interest in “demoted” art forms

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

Jeff Wall: “I begin by not photographing”

How Richard Serra influenced Matthew Barney

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

Olafur Eliasson: Everyone sees a different rainbow

Brice Marden on finding inspiration in olive groves

Brice Marden: How to look at paintings

Ann Hamilton evokes the working class with the color blue

Matthew Barney and ancient Japanese whaling traditions

Matthew Barney puts his body into his work

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

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

Henry Wessel: Photographing while “half asleep”

Ann Hamilton gives voice to Charleston’s invisible history

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

Teresita Fernández harnesses the behavior of fire

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

Kerry James Marshall: Requiem for a decade

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

In the studio with Olafur Eliasson

Experimenting in the lab with Olafur Eliasson

Frank Stella: Rebuilding painting

Olafur Eliasson’s machine: A phenomenon maker

Beach life: William Kentridge and Tide Table

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

Frank Stella and the art of the protractor

Daniel Schwartz: “My university is the road”

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

Jim Goldberg’s compassionate lens

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

Klara Kristalova on the darker side of childhood

Talking trash, over Skype, with Tiago Carneiro da Cunha

A large and flickering grid of light by Jim Campbell

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

Mapping nine centuries of a Romanian city with Tiffany Chung

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

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

AA Bronson and his fictional museum Cornucopia

Helène Aylon “midwifes” an image

David Smith and the search for “accidental beauty”

Lamia Joreige on disappearance and memories of war

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

Kateřina Šedá holds the Los Altos World Records

Spencer Finch takes viewers from technicolor to black and white

Jeremy Blake: A waking dream

Jonn Herschend on finding beauty behind the scenes

Alec Soth photographs loneliness in Silicon Valley

Soul food for the brain: Chris Johanson and public sculpture

Zarouhie Abdalian makes social sound in downtown Oakland

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

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

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

Christian Jankowski needs subtitles for Silicon Valley Talksa

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

Jessica Stockholder creates an intersection with the intersection

Mel Bochner transforms a wall with chalk

Sophie Calle on becoming an artist

Ewan Gibbs on his San Francisco drawings

John Baldessari explains his “strange mind”

John Baldessari on fighting the “photography” label

Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic portraits of hotel rooms

Markus Schinwald’s strange prostheses and erotic table legs

Susan Meiselas on “the ethics of seeing”

Abelardo Morell and the magic of the camera obscura

Alison Rossiter gives new life to old photographic paper

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

Barbara Bosworth looks slowly and observes the landscape

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

Liz Deschenes on her camera-less photography

Richard Learoyd takes us inside his giant homemade camera

Brice Marden: What painting is all about

Brice Marden: Abstract painting can take you to paradise

Njideka Akunyili Crosby on painting cultural collision

Doug Hall on his utopian generation

Mildred Howard’s houses hold memories

Doug Hall’s giant Tesla coil

Ant Farm on becoming “underground architects”

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

Stephen Shore ditched school for Warhol’s Factory

Stephen Shore: Taking photographs that “feel like seeing”