Advance Exhibition Schedule

Last updated: Friday, August 21, 2009

• 

  Dispatches from the Archives

  November 07, 2009 - February 27, 2011
  [ D ]

  How does a museum best known for showing the work of others choose to publicly present itself? This presentation showcases museum-produced ephemera, design pieces, and publications, while revealing the museum's long history of innovative programming and exhibitions. The materials are culled from SFMOMA's Library and Archives, which have recently processed and catalogued thousands of items spanning the museum's 75-year history. From exhibition posters and magazines to belt buckles and chocolate bars, the exhibition illustrates the story of an institution that cherishes the spirit of innovation.

  The exhibition will be complemented by two related projects featuring visitors' perspectives, the Oral History Project and Phone Booth. Since 2005, SFMOMA has been collaborating with the Regional Oral History Office at the Bancroft Library to create a record of its own history through video and audio interviews with individuals whose contributions have shaped the institution. Historical interview clips from the museum's Oral History Project will be shown alongside recently collected commentary from SFMOMA visitors and community members. The Phone Booth captures visitors' voices through an interactive phone installation; visitors are invited to pick up the phone and record responses to questions about the museum's collection.

• 

  The Anniversary Show

  December 19, 2009 - January 16, 2011
  [ A / D / F / G / I / M / P / PH / S / V / WP ]

  Throughout SFMOMA's anniversary year, the museum will present a series of exhibitions under the heading 75 Years of Looking Forward illustrating the story of the artists, collectors, cultural mavericks, and San Francisco leaders who founded, built, and have animated the museum.

  In celebration of the museum's 75th anniversary, The Anniversary Show showcases the moments when SFMOMA helped to shape both the history and future of modern and contemporary art through groundbreaking acquisitions, exhibitions, and public programming. From 1935 to the present, the exhibition brings together some 400 permanent collection works, including painting, sculpture, media arts, photography, architecture and design, as well as interpretive and archival materials, and will occupy the museum's entire second floor. Artists whose work has been collected in depth, including Bruce Conner, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Rauschenberg, will be featured.

  Press kit

• 

  Paul Klee: Three Exhibitions from the Djerassi Collection

  March 06 - August 01, 2010
  [ WP ]

  Carl Djerassi's generous promise to give SFMOMA a substantial group of intimate works — mostly drawings, prints, and watercolors — by Paul Klee allowed the museum to begin in 1984 what would become an ongoing series of exhibitions devoted to this beloved artist. The current presentation looks back to three early exhibitions that were held in the museum's first home in the War Memorial Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue. The variety of presentations has continued over the years, each revealing another layer of Klee's work.

• 

  Calder to Warhol: Introducing the Fisher Collection

  June 25 - September 19, 2010
  [ P / S / WP ]

  In February of 2010, SFMOMA announced an unprecedented partnership to house and display the collection of Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher—more than 1,100 works by iconic 20^th century artists—in a new museum expansion. Calder to Warhol provides a glimpse into the future of SFMOMA and how the museum will be transformed by this extraordinary group of artworks. This sweeping exhibition showcases the quality and scope of the Fisher Collection, much of which has never been seen by the public. The Fishers collected the artists they loved in depth, purchasing extensive groupings of seminal works. The entire top two floors of the museum, including the Rooftop Garden, feature more than 160 paintings, sculptures, photographs, and video works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Ellsworth Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and many more. Catalogue.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  New Work: Mika Rottenberg

  July 09 - October 03, 2010
  [ A / D / F / I / M / S / V ]

  Mika Rottenberg's installations trespass the expected boundaries of pure video work and move into the sculptural. She installs the multichannel productions in large, constructed environments meant not only to evoke the world seen in the absurdist narratives that she creates but also to envelop viewers in this created world. For SFMOMA, Rottenberg will focus on globalization and labor, particularly the way laborers' bodies entwine with production and evoke broad cultural standards or understandings. Rottenberg has been filming lettuce farmers in Southern California, rubber-plant workers in India, and weavers at an angora rabbit farm. These three spaces and the people that inhabit them will combine into a new, imagined, systematic world of manufacturing that will come to live in an elaborate built installation at the museum.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape

  July 17 - October 03, 2010
  [ PH ]

  The exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, held in 1975 at George Eastman House, signaled the emergence of a novel approach to landscape photography. The photographers of the New Topographics exhibition sought to show the rapidly increasing imprint that man was imparting on the landscape. A new version of this seminal exhibition reexamines more than 100 works from the 1975 show, as well as some 30 prints and books by other relevant artists to provide additional historical and contemporary context. This reconsideration demonstrates both the historical significance of these pictures and their continued relevance today.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Picturing Modernity

  July 17 - October 03, 2010
  [ PH ]

  Among the first museums in the Untied States to recognize photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA possesses one of the oldest and most distinguished photography collections in the world. The more than 12,000 images in the Museum's collection date from the advent of photography in the 1830s to the present day. Highlights include photographs by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Alfred Stieglitz. SFMOMA is also known for its rich holdings of photographs by European avant-garde artists of the 1920s and 1930s, with an emphasis on Constructivism and Surrealism, as well as a growing selection of "vernacular photography" — anonymous snapshots, documentary evidence, and other photographic images never intended to be viewed as art.

• 

  Prints by Paul Klee (1946)

  August 07, 2010 - January 16, 2011
  [ WP ]

  SFMOMA has had a longstanding commitment to the art of Paul Klee over its 75-year history. This exhibition re-creates a 1946 show of prints by the Swiss-born modernist held at the museum. At that time, Klee's work was little known outside of Europe; the exhibition was perceived as highly original, and the works seem no less fresh or innovative more than six decades later. The prints demonstrate how Klee, like many German Expressionist artists of the early 20th century, experimented with etching, drypoint, and lithography techniques in order to advance his exploration of pictorial symbolism.

  Press release  |  Press images

• New Work: R. H. Quaytman

  October 22, 2010 - January 16, 2011
  [ P ]

  The core of R. H. Quaytman's work consists of small, thought-provoking paintings made on wood panels. She uses a variety of techniques and painterly vocabularies to knowingly explore the complex history of painting. Collectively, her works portray a tantalizing range of patterns and surfaces and are often installed specifically in relation to the architecture in which they are exhibited in order to purposively propel the direction of the viewer's movement. For SFMOMA she will debut a new chapter of her work that will focus on San Francisco poet Robert Duncan. Quaytman's subjects often operate on both personal and broader cultural levels: Duncan was an important figure in the artist's personal life as well as a key figure involved with the San Francisco Renaissance and Black Mountain Poetry. This new body of paintings will represent the 17th chapter in her oeuvre.

• 

  Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870

  October 30, 2010 - April 17, 2011
  [ PH / F / M / V ]

  Co-organized by SFMOMA and Tate Modern, Exposed gathers more than two hundred pictures that together form a timely inquiry into the ways in which artists and everyday people alike have probed the camera's powerful voyeuristic capacity. Moving beyond typical notions of voyeurism and surveillance as strictly predatory or erotic, the exhibition addresses these concepts in their broadest sense—in both historical and contemporary contexts—investigating how new technologies, urban planning, global intelligence, celebrity culture, and an evolving media environment have fueled a growing interest in the subject. Works by major artists, including Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Thomas Ruff, Paul Strand, and Weegee, will be presented alongside photographs made by amateurs, professional journalists, and government agencies. The exhibition will also showcase examples of film, video, and installation work by artists such as Thomas Demand, Bruce Nauman, and Andy Warhol, as well as a selection of cameras designed to be concealed in artful ways.
  Catalogue.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century

  October 30, 2010 - January 30, 2011
  [ PH ]

  This retrospective exhibition, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Henri Cartier-Bresson's entire career with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books. One of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography, Cartier-Bresson's inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with "the decisive moment"—the title of his first major book. He joined Robert Capa and others in founding the Magnum photo agency, which enabled photojournalists to reach a broad audience through magazines such as LIFE while retaining control over their work. Cartier-Bresson produced major bodies of photographic reportage on: India and Indonesia at the time of independence; China during the revolution; the Soviet Union after Stalin's death; the United States during the postwar boom; and Europe as its old cultures confronted modern realities.

  Press release  |  Press images

• Bill Fontana: Sonic Shadows

  November 20, 2010 - October 16, 2011
  [ I / M ]

  Commissioned for SFMOMA’s 75th anniversary, a site-specific installation by San Francisco–based sound art pioneer Bill Fontana explores both visible and invisible architectural features of the museum. Sonic Shadows transforms the dramatic circular skylight and fifth-floor steel truss pedestrian bridge into musical instruments, acoustically translating the physical space. The artist's first truly kinetic sound sculpture utilizes moving hypersonic speakers and vibration sensors that respond to visitors’ footsteps, integrating ambient sounds recorded in real time from inside and outdoors. Reflecting off the turret walls, narrowly focused ultrasound beams from the speakers are audible on the bridge and encircling staircases. While Fontana’s past collaborations with SFMOMA relocated environmental sounds from the regional landscape, this new work creates a live composition generated by the building itself. SFMOMA honored the artist for lifetime achievement with the 2009 Bay Area Treasure award from its Modern Art Council.

• 

  How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now

  November 20, 2010 - April 17, 2011
  [ D / G / A ]

  Organized by Henry Urbach, SFMOMA's Helen Hilton Raiser Curator of Architecture and Design, this exhibition will explore the relationship between design, architecture, and wine in modern culture. How Wine Became Modern looks at the material and visual culture of wine over the past three decades and offers a fresh way of understanding the contemporary culture of wine and the role that architecture and design have played in its transformation. It marks the first time that modern, global wine culture has been considered as an integrated, expansive, and rich set of cultural phenomena. The presentation will combine original artifacts and commissioned artworks with multimedia presentations to engage multiple senses, including taste and smell. The exhibition will include aerial photographs of wine-growing regions as well as winery architecture, wine labels, and glassware.

  Press release  |  Press images

• The More Things Change

  November, 2010 - October, 2011 (Dates subject to change)
  [ A / C / D / F / G / I / M / P / PH / S / V / WP ]

  The More Things Change sketches the collective mood of the last 10 years, creating a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Drawn entirely from SFMOMA's collection, this exhibition examines such themes as fragmentation, fragility, systemic collapse, sudden shifts, entropy, metamorphosis, mutation, materiality, and reconfiguration. Comprised of work from all media made since 2000, The More Things Change is jointly organized by SFMOMA's four curatorial departments—painting and sculpture, media arts, photography, and architecture and design. An artist will be commissioned to design a production studio in the overlook gallery that will examine the transformation of the publishing industry over the last decade—an industry that is rapidly coming to terms with the eminence of the internet. A publication will also be produced in this gallery, which visitors will be able to witness taking shape over the course several months. This last space will emphasize the importance of individual gestures, activism, and perhaps a humanist vision. The exhibition will include some 75 works.

• Helios: Eadweard Muybridge

  February 26 - June 07, 2011
  [ PH ]

  Organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Helios: Eadweard Muybridge is the first retrospective exhibition over 50 years to investigate and survey all aspects of the art of this pioneering 19th-century British American photographer. One of the most influential artists of his time, Muybridge began his artistic career in California in the mid-1860s as a masterful landscape photographer. In the 1870s, he developed new techniques in stop motion in order to photograph running horses. He later projected his images to create the illusion of motion, which foreshadowed the motion picture. While best known for his motion studies, Muybridge's overall aesthetic and social vision in the context of his own time will be showcased in this exhibition. Catalogue.

• New Work: Anna Parkina

  February 26 - May 22, 2011
  [ G / PH / WP / D ]

  Anna Parkina is a Russian artist whose work evokes the forms and imagery of Russian Constructivism, particularly the photo collages of Aleksander Rodchenko and the abstract compositions of Liubov Popova, but her approach to this history is complex. Rather than attempting to generate forms that would serve to propel society forward, she employs the imagery of mass culture to reflect upon the changes that have developed in Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her works effectively render a society in flux, in which careers, fortunes, and worlds are made and destroyed every day. Parkina's visual vocabulary is a mix of images of photography, drawing, and text. What is compelling about Parkina's reuse of these techniques is how prescient these forms of pictorial manipulation seem in our era of digital media. Parkina's work seems to find the meaning behind the message and take it drastically out of context to produce a real world with the qualities of the surreal.

• The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde

  May 21 - September 06, 2011
  [ PH / P ]

  Co-organized by SFMOMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, this major touring exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculptures reunites the collections of author Gertrude Stein, her brothers Leo and Michael Stein, and Michael's wife, Sarah Stein. As American expatriates, the Steins were part of the vibrant cultural life of Paris in the early 20th century, where they hosted prestigious salons and developed close friendships with leading artists of the day, most notably Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, whose works they collected in depth and form the core of this presentation. The exhibition will demonstrate not only the importance of the Steins' patronage but also how they developed a new international standard of taste for modern art, acquiring works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Cézanne, Juan Gris, Marie Laurencin, Matisse, Francis Picabia, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. Sarah and Michael Stein's return to Palo Alto, California, in 1935, the same year SFMOMA was founded, was instrumental in the making of the museum's collection, and SFMOMA's presentation will underscore Bay Area connections to the Steins.

• Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

  May 21 - September 06, 2011
  [ PH ]

  Sharon Lockhart is well known for her complex and careful investigations into the mediums of film and photography that probe the limits and intersections of both and explore social subject matter. As much as her photographs reveal cinematic qualities of staging and casting, so too do her films frequently engage a static camera and angles that recall photographic practices. Her latest body of work, Lunch Break (2008), explores the activities of blue-collar workers during their daily midday break and brings into focus everyday life situations that typically escape our media-saturated attention and collective consciousness. Lockhart spent one year in Bath, Maine, at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private-sector U.S. naval shipbuilding company—observing and engaging with workers during their daily routines to produce a stunning cinematic shot of extended time. Created within the political and economic context of global capitalism in the twenty-first century, in which the industrial working class of the United States is shrinking if not disappearing altogether, Lunch Break captures a moment in time that may soon become a thing of the past.

• Richard Serra: Drawing in Retrospect

  October, 2011 - January, 2012 (Dates subject to change)
  [ WP / S ]

  Richard Serra's drawings are among the most significant of the ongoing transformations in the discipline of modernist drawing that have irrevocably changed the place of the practice and definition of drawing in the traditional hierarchy of media. This exhibition, with work from major European and American public and private collections, will trace Serra's investigation of drawing, as an activity both independent from and linked to his sculptural practice. Organized chronologically, it will address significant shifts in concept, materials, and scale and culminate with new, large-scale works completed for this presentation.

• 2010 SECA Art Award

  November, 2011 - February, 2012 (Dates subject to change)
  [ WP / V / S / PH / P / M / D ]

  On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art), the 2010 SECA Art Award exhibition will showcase recent works by four exciting and innovative artists living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. SFMOMA has honored more than 60 artists of exceptional talent with its prestigious biennial award, which includes an exhibition, an accompanying catalogue, and a modest cash prize, often providing the winners with their first international exposure. Administered by SECA, an SFMOMA auxiliary and art interest group dedicated to contemporary art in the region, the SECA Art Award distinguishes artists working independently at a high level of artistic maturity whose work has not yet been accorded substantial recognition. This year, the art community nominated over 250 artists working in a diverse range of media for consideration for the award. Following an extensive review process, the recipients of the 2010 SECA Art Award will be announced in December of 2010.

• 

  Art in the Atrium: Kerry James Marshall

  Ongoing
  [ I / P / A ]

  The first recipient of SFMOMA's new Atrium Commission project is Kerry James Marshall, whose 30-year career has resulted in a rich and varied body of work, including large-scale paintings and installations that take on issues of racial identity, black history, and the urban experience. Utilizing the two large midair surfaces in the Haas Atrium, the artist's murals will depict Mount Vernon and Monticello, the estates of founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Although these cherished sites have been depicted countless times, Marshall's paintings stand apart by playfully incorporating the slaves who supported plantation life. At first glance a number of optical tricks conceal them from view, but visitors who engage in the artist's visual game will discover the otherwise invisible figures who are so often omitted from representations of American history. Over the course of two weeks (February 9 to 23), Marshall will work with painters from San Francisco's Precita Eyes Mural Arts Center to create this new work for SFMOMA's Haas Atrium.

  Press release  |  Press images