Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love - Retrospective Exhibition @ SFMOMA, San Francisco + Walker Art Center, Minneapolis + Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

September 27, 2025 – March 1, 2026 

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

May 14 – August 23, 2026

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

September 26, 2026 – February 7, 2027

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Wind and Water, 1975

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, 

Alice and Tom Tisch, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, 

Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Michael S. Ovitz, 

Ronnie F. Heyman, and Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Ruben Diaz

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the first major museum retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the work of painter Suzanne Jackson, on view from September 27, 2025, to March 1, 2026. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love celebrates Jackson’s groundbreaking artistic vision through more than 80 lyrical paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that explore her use of color, light and structure to expand the parameters of painting and illuminate the persistence of peace, love and beauty.

Debuting at SFMOMA and co-organized with the Walker Art Center, this comprehensive survey spans six decades, from Jackson’s early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of paint and depict figures intertwined with nature to recent three-dimensional paintings that suspend acrylic paint midair. SFMOMA will also premiere a new large-scale commission by the artist, inspired by her longstanding close observations of the natural world. Looking at influences beyond the artist’s studio, What Is Love examines how Jackson’s paintings have been informed by her experiences as a dancer, poet and theater designer, as well as her collaborations with radical artist communities.

Following its presentation at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Walker Art Center (May 14–August 23, 2026) and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027).

“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love promises to be a groundbreaking exhibition, bringing much-deserved attention to Jackson’s achievements as an influential painter who has created awe-inspiring compositions informed by her deep respect for ancestral traditions and the natural world,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “In the sixth decade of her career, Jackson continues to innovate by extending paint into three dimensions and embedding it with found materials to reflect on personal and cultural histories.”

“Suzanne Jackson’s life has been driven by an insistent search for creative freedom and a bohemian spirit that is indebted to the San Francisco ethos in which she was raised,” said Jenny Gheith, curator of the exhibition and SFMOMA Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture. “What Is Love captures the curiosity, wonder and resilience of Jackson’s life’s work, which is marked by adventurous experimentation, a dedication to supporting other artists and a persistent belief in the connection between all living things.”

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

For decades, my figurative forms and challenged shapes have pushed paint beyond the expected. With intentional reflective layers and floating luminous pigment, my work pursues alternative ways of seeing and interpreting spatial relationships of historical events, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and all global people, existing as “environmental abstractions” of our world.

—Suzanne Jackson, 2025

Suzanne Jackson was born in 1944 in St. Louis and shortly thereafter moved with her family to San Francisco, where she would spend the first eight years of her childhood. Her family relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1952, and the remote natural landscape inspired her to learn to paint. In 1961, Jackson returned to San Francisco and spent her formative college years among the bohemian counterculture, studying art and theater at San Francisco State University and dancing with the Pacific Ballet. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles, where she studied drawing with artist Charles White and became part of a radical artist community.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Cover of Suzanne Jackson’s publication 

What I Love: Paintings, Poetry, and a Drawing, 1972 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

From 1968 to 1970, she ran Gallery 32, a self-funded exhibition space, out of her Los Angeles studio. At Gallery 32, Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi were among the artists featured in The Sapphire Show: You’ve Come A Long Way Baby (1970), credited as the first survey of African American women artists in Los Angeles. What Is Love brings together several artworks originally shown at Gallery 32 by Saar, Nengudi, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Dan Concholar, John Outterbridge and Emory Douglas, among others, and will surface new research on its exhibition history. Jackson has reflected, “Gallery 32 functioned as a meeting space for its members to question history, culture and risky improvisations.”

In 1971, Suzanne Jackson gave birth to her son, a major life event that sparked tremendous creative growth. The following year, she self-published her first book of poems and paintings, titled What I Love. More than 50 years later, the title for Jackson’s retrospective turns “What I Love” to “What Is Love,” a provocation that broadens the understanding of the creativity that Jackson has pursued throughout her career.

Organized chronologically, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love begins with Jackson’s first mature paintings and drawings that she made during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, many of which are the largest she has made to date. In these paintings, Suzanne Jackson treats acrylic paint like watercolor by setting down layers of washy pigment to create an ethereal, translucent quality. Depicting images from her dreams, Jackson’s lyrical symbolism often includes animals, plants, hearts and hands that communicate human connections to nature, universal love and unity. Jackson’s deep respect for ecology, continual study of dance and movement, and belief in her ancestors’ integration with the natural world can be seen in her most ambitious painting on canvas, In A Black Man’s Garden (1973), a large-scale triptych. Suzanne Jackson exhibited these early paintings at Ankrum Gallery, an important Los Angeles space for African American artists, along with Brockman gallery and Heritage Gallery.

Outside of the studio, Suzanne Jackson continued her advocacy for other artists, bringing together nearly 180 artists for the 1972 Black Expo in San Francisco. She also served alongside Ruth Asawa, Noah Purifoy, Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote on the California Arts Council (formed in 1976) and helped secure funding for public artworks through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), including two of her own murals, Wind (1978) and Spirit (1977–79).

In the 1980s, Suzanne Jackson moved between Los Angeles, the small mountain town of Idyllwild, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In Idyllwild, where she taught painting and dance, she created small-scale studies of leaves, trees and the mountains that surrounded her. This section of the exhibition brings together rarely seen paintings, works on paper and handmade books. After the unexpected death of her father in 1981, she began El Paradiso (1981–84)—a quintessential composition from this period—named after the bird of paradise, a symbol of freedom for the artist.

Suzanne Jackson stretched her artistic practice further when she earned an MFA in design at Yale University in 1990 and continued to work full-time designing costumes and sets for the theater. With limited resources and time for her studio practice, she began to experiment with leftover scenic Bogus paper (thick sheets of paper that cover the floor when sets are painted). Jackson’s paintings on this material often feature sculptural textures, a darker palette and rougher edges, with forms that bridge abstraction and figuration, as in Sapphire & Tunis (2010–11).

In 1996, Suzanne Jackson moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she continues to live and work. The charged Southern landscape prompted Jackson to further research her ancestral history and to work again in nature, often bringing her students from the Savannah College of Art and Design to sketch in locations with histories significant to enslavement. During this time, she began creating otherworldly paintings that suspend acrylic paint in midair, embedding the surfaces with personal ephemera and various found and sourced materials. These awe-inspiring, three-dimensional paintings are the most experimental of her career, with a focus on structure, light and the environment that relate to her background in theater and dance. Crossing Ebenezer (2017), which includes red netting from fire log bags that suggests both spilled blood and a distressed flag, memorializes a Civil War–era massacre of emancipated African Americans who were drowned in Ebenezer Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Hers and His, 2018 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by 

exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Timothy Doyon

Jackson’s recent paintings also convey reflections on spirituality and aspects of her autobiography. Hers and His (2018), one of her most personal paintings, is dedicated to her parents and incorporates “his and hers” pillowcases and segments of her mother’s quilt block patterns. Created nearly 10 years after her mother’s passing, this work was inspired by a lecture by artist Faith Ringgold, who said that if your mother left unfinished quilts, it is your responsibility to complete them.

The exhibition concludes with ¿What Feeds Us? (2025), a new commission that reflects on the global environmental crisis. This large-scale installation, integrating organic materials such as moss and tree bark with plastic and trash, is built around a central sculptural component. Additional hanging elements combine acrylic paint with found materials, such as African fabric scraps, Indian sari curtains, Korean and Japanese papers. Addressing themes of migration and improvisation, this new work honors connections that exist across all living things.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - PUBLICATION

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that charts the full arc of Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision. This 272-page monograph published by SFMOMA in association with Princeton University Press is edited by Jenny Gheith and includes essays and contributions by Kellie Jones, Paulina Pobocha, Tiffany E. Barber, Taylor Jasper, Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg, Taylor Renee Aldridge, and Meredith George Van Dyke. Jackson’s voice features prominently in a series of dialogues with fellow artists Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar, Fred Eversley and Richard Mayhew and a conversation about her process and new commission with SFMOMA paintings conservator Jennifer Hickey.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - CURATORS

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The exhibition is curated by Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator, Visual Art at the Walker Art Center. Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, curatorial assistant, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.

SFMOMA 

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

www.sfmoma.org

KAWS: FAMILY @ SFMOMA, San Francisco - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

KAWS: FAMILY

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

November 15, 2025 – Spring 2026

KAWS, FAMILY, 2021

Private collection

© KAWS

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces KAWS: FAMILY, a dazzling exploration of the multidimensional work of American artist KAWS. Beginning his career as a graffiti artist in Jersey City and Manhattan in the 1990s, KAWS has become renowned in the art world and beyond for his work in sculpture, painting, drawing, product design, large-scale public works and augmented reality. KAWS’s multidisciplinary practice is frequently centered around a cast of characters whose features are drawn from icons of American animation and pop culture. Recasting and reimagining his distinctive and relatable artistic lexicon, KAWS produces meticulous and exuberant works that investigate our connection to objects and one another. Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), KAWS: FAMILY will conclude its popular international tour at SFMOMA from November 15, 2025, to Spring 2026.

Featuring more than 100 artworks from the past three decades, the exhibition is organized as a series of encounters, with families of related artworks installed throughout SFMOMA’s Floor 4, including sculptures, bold and vibrant paintings, product collaborations and collectibles.

“KAWS has a distinct appeal to a vast array of audiences with his iconic characters and meticulous work in a stunning range of mediums,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “The playful and contemplative works—a dynamic blend of his street art practice and formal education—will offer something for everyone when the exhibition opens at SFMOMA this fall.”

After spending his teenage years painting graffiti in the streets of Jersey City and Manhattan, KAWS eventually enrolled in the School of Visual Arts (SVA) where he received his BFA in illustration in 1996. Since that time, the artist has carved a unique position for himself in the art world, creating a globally recognized practice rooted in drawing, painting and sculpture, and amplified through collaborations with global fashion and design brands.

Working in bronze, wood, on paper and canvas, with vinyl toys and commercial products, KAWS’s art is populated by a cast of recurring figures inspired by his early practice of altering phone booth and bus shelter advertisements with his unique visual language. Originally painting his trademark skull and crossbones over the faces of models, he applied the same concept to altering iconic mascots and characters within the cultural zeitgeist. These figures are at once playful and serious, and in their various poses, forms and sizes, explore distinctly human emotions ranging from loneliness and anxiety to grief and joy. The exhibition takes its title and thematic jumping-off point from the work FAMILY (2021), a bronze sculpture featuring three recurring characters in KAWS’s work. The grouping includes a figure with crossed out eyes inspired by early American rubber hose animations named COMPANION; a bulbous figure named CHUM; and a fur-covered character named BFF—posed together in the style of a studio portrait.

Alongside sculptures, drawings and paintings, a selection of shoe designs, cereal boxes, album covers and a loveseat composed of plush toys made in collaboration with Brazilian design studio Estúdio Campana help showcase KAWS’s ongoing engagement with design and fashion brands and commitment to his work being widely accessible. These commercial works share the same dedication to bold color and strong lines seen in the artist’s paintings and sculptures and have helped KAWS gain a large and dedicated global following.

ARTIST KAWS

KAWS (Brian Donnelly) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1974. Over the last three decades he has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence and affection for the current cultural moment. His practice possesses a sophisticated humor and thoughtful interplay with consumer products and collaborations with global brands, ranging from General Mills and Nike, to Supreme and Comme de Garçons. He often draws inspiration from and appropriates pop culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary for his work across a variety of media.

KAWS has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at institutions such as Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, New York; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha; Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo; the Yuz Museum, Shanghai; and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. He is represented by Skarstedt Gallery and Galerie Max Hetzler.

CATALOGUE: KAWS: FAMILY is accompanied by a 156-page, fully illustrated hardcover catalogue co-published by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and Delmonico Books. Featuring an essay by Julian Cox, AGO deputy director and chief curator, and an interview with KAWS by Jim Shedden, AGO curator of special projects and director of publishing, the publication is available in person at the SFMOMA Museum Store or at museumstore.sfmoma.org.

KAWS: FAMILY is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and curated by Julian Cox, deputy director & chief curator, AGO. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presentation is curated by William Hernández Luege, curatorial associate, painting and sculpture, SFMOMA; and Daryl McCurdy, curatorial associate, architecture and design, SFMOMA.

SFMOMA - SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 

www.sfmoma.org

Alejandro Cartagena Retrospective Exhibition @ SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: "Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules"

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

November 22, 2025 – April 19, 2026

Alejandro Cartagena

Carpoolers #21, 

from the series Carpoolers, 2011-12 

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

Alejandro Cartagena 

Fragmented Cities, Escobedo, 

from the series Suburbia Mexicana, 2005-10

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

Alejandro Cartagena and Rubén Marcos 

Identidad Nuevo León #41, 

from the series Identidad Nuevo León, 2005-6 

© Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules, the artist’s first retrospective, on view from November 22, 2025, to April 19, 2026. Over two prolific decades, Alejandro Cartagena has produced an incredibly varied body of work that reflects on contemporary life in Mexico and its changing landscapes, which have been his home since the age of 13. From color documentary photography to collage, the appropriation of found photographs to Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated works, Cartagena’s prodigious output is unified by his commitment to addressing Mexico’s most pressing social, economic and environmental issues.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules explores the artist’s practice as a “project photographer,” highlighting work from over 20 series. For each project, Cartagena conducts extensive research, then establishes a set of creative constraints around elements such as format, subject matter or location to guide him, often amassing hundreds of photographs around a topic. No photograph is more important than another; rather, his work allows meaning to emerge through accumulation, juxtaposition and variation. The exhibition traces recurring concerns across his career for the first time, including land use, the U.S.-Mexico border, climate change, increasing wealth disparities and the effects of rapid suburban sprawl, while also examining how Alejandro Cartagena uses archival sources, photobooks, large-scale installations and AI to expand what photography can be. Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules will be accompanied by an illustrated monograph published by Aperture that charts the artist’s full career, featuring newly commissioned texts.

“Photography changed our world two centuries ago; the way we see it, and the way we think about it has never been the same since we started using it,” said Alejandro Cartagena. “I want to be part of that history of how the medium transformed our understanding of social, political and environmental issues through images.”

“While Cartagena’s photographs are rooted in his observations of life in Mexico, part of their great power is their ability to open up broad conversations that transcend geography,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “Cartagena’s work invites reflection and probing questions that serve to complicate our understanding of important social and environmental topics. I believe this exhibition will resonate deeply with our audiences.”

The exhibition opens with Alejandro Cartagena’s early photographic projects, where many of his central concerns, such as urban life, appropriation, and the U.S.-Mexico border, first come into focus. At the beginning of his career, Alejandro Cartagena trained his camera on himself and his fellow residents of Nuevo León, Mexico. His first large-scale project, Identidad Nuevo León (2005), was created in collaboration with fellow photographer Rubén Marcos. The two set up a mobile studio with a white backdrop and spent a year photographing 800 people in 25 municipalities in Nuevo León. Each sitter offers a distinct sense of style and presence. Around the same time, for his 2004-05 series Espacios Habitables (Living Spaces), Alejandro Cartagena returned to his birthplace, the Dominican Republic, and asked passersby to take his portrait as if he were a tourist in front of places from his youth. Blurry and taken from a low camera angle, these images gesture toward reconnecting with the past.

In 2009, Alejandro Cartagena began a trilogy of projects about the U.S.-Mexico border: Between Borders (2009–10), Americanos (2012–14) and Without Walls (2017). While some photographs portray the physical border itself, the series as a whole explores its broader cultural, economic and psychological impact. Cartagena pushes back against simplistic south-to-north migration narratives and questions the promise of the American dream, depicting the border not only as a territorial divide but as an invisible force shaping lives, perceptions and policies on both sides of this artificial barrier.

As the exhibition progresses, the environment and issues around land use emerge as central concerns for the artist. In his critically acclaimed, multiyear project Suburbia Mexicana (2005–10), the artist developed five subseries: Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, The Other Distance, Urban Wastelands and People of the Suburbs, which examine the complex relationship between urban centers and the suburbs haphazardly built around them. From poignant, sun-drenched landscapes of dried-up riverbeds to portraits in front of undulating rows of identical, box-like houses, Cartagena looks at how growth has altered the landscape and deeply impacted the lives of its residents.

For his popular series Carpoolers (2011–12), Alejandro Cartagena asked a deceptively simple question: what happens when suburban expansion outpaces public infrastructure? The answer plays out in his depiction of laborers who, without access to a direct bus line, commute in the flatbeds of pickup trucks from their homes in the suburbs to wealthy Mexican enclaves. Standing on a pedestrian overpass for three mornings a week for a year, Alejandro Cartagena photographed these workers from above. Meanwhile, the series Suburban Bus (2016) addresses similar questions but instead looks at those who do have access to a bus line. Over the course of three days and nights, the artist took the bus nonstop to retrace the route he would take daily between 1993 to 2004 on his way to work at his family’s restaurant in Juárez. Alejandro Cartagena places the viewer amongst the huddled passengers, some trying to rest as others stand and sway with the motion of the bus. At once breathtakingly beautiful and melancholic, the series captures the exhaustion and solitude of long-distance commuting.

In 2016, Alejandro Cartagena began experimenting with collage, starting with his own photographs and then moving to small, black-and-white vernacular photographs he gathered at Mexican flea markets and landfills. For his series Photo Structures (2018–19), he carefully excised figures from found pictures, leaving only the background. The resulting images reveal the formal patterns of photographic composition—the repeated poses, angles and backdrops—while also asking what is lost or gained when the ostensible subject disappears.

Continuing to push the limits of photography, Alejandro Cartagena founded Fellowship in 2021, a platform initially created to share NFT-based photography. The project quickly evolved into a broader space for the distribution, collection and exploration of digital media, including generative art, artificial intelligence and video. The exhibition will include a selection of his NFTs. In his most recent video series, We Are Things (2025), Alejandro Cartagena revisits his interest in archival imagery through a new lens—using an AI image generator trained on a personal archive. This latest work brings his experimentation full circle, blending the digital with the analog and linking his early collages of found photographs with cutting-edge technology.

The final section of the exhibition showcases Cartagena’s photobooks as central components of his practice. A prolific self-publisher, Alejndro Cartagena sees the photobook as the natural progression for a project photographer; the editing and sequencing of the work, for him, fundamentally affix meaning to the imagery.

Photographer Alejandro Cartagena

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic in 1977, Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. Over the last two decades, his projects have employed landscape photography and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. His work has been exhibited at more than 50 group and solo exhibitions, including the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona and the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Coppel collection, the FEMSA Collection, the George Eastman House, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and The West Collection.

Alejandro Cartagena has received several awards including the international Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Street Photography Award in London Photo Festival, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia Award in Rome and the Salon de la Fotografia of Fototeca de Nuevo León in Mexico. He was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2021.

Publication : The exhibition will be accompanied by the first comprehensive, fully bilingual publication that charts the entire career of Alejandro Cartagena to date. Published by Aperture, Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules features 175 illustrations as well as contributions by Tatiana Bilbao, Álvaro Enrigue, Horacio Fernández, Charlotte Kent and Shana Lopes.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, where it will be on view from  June through August 2026.

The exhibition is curated by Shana Lopes, assistant curator of photography, with Alex Landry, curatorial assistant, photography.

SFMOMA - SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 

www.sfmoma.org

Bruce Conner @ SFMOMA, San Francisco - It’s All True

Bruce Conner: It’s All True
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
October 29, 2016 — January 22, 2017

BRUCE CONNER

CROSSROADS, 1976

35mm film, black and white, sound, 37 min.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Accessions Committee Fund purchase)

and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the generous support of the New Art Trust

© The Conner Family Trust.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces its presentation of Bruce Conner: It’s All True, the first comprehensive retrospective of the seminal American artist and influential Bay Area figure, on view from October 29, 2016 through January 22, 2017. Organized by SFMOMA, the exhibition brings together more than 250 objects in mediums including film and video, painting, assemblage, drawing, prints, photography, photograms and performance, representing Conner’s intensely productive and polymathic career.

“The often radical shifts in direction of Conner’s artistic practice, the parallel interest in experimental films and material objects, the playful and often irreverent approach to conventions of institutions and collectors—all of this is a sign of a great artist who made a point of not being categorized as a sculptor or a filmmaker and actively embraced change throughout his life,” said Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts at SFMOMA. “It then seemed appropriate to make the integration of all these components of his practice the guiding principle for our retrospective."

“Conner, from the beginning of his career in the late 1950s until the time of his death in 2008, was one of the leading artistic figures in the Bay Area, admired by other artists for his artistic integrity and invention,” said Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA. “His influence has grown enormously in recent decades, impacting younger artists nationally and internationally including major figures such as Dara Birnbaum and Christian Marclay and emerging artists such as Kevin Beasley and Carol Bove.”

Conner moved to San Francisco from the Midwest in 1957 and, after brief stays in Mexico and other cities throughout the U.S. in the early 1960s, called this city home for the rest of his life. During the course of his extensive career, Conner engaged in close dialogue with SFMOMA curators, conservators and educators, has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions and his work remains an important part of the museum’s permanent collection. An early practitioner of found-object assemblage and a pioneer of found-footage film, he achieved international standing early in his career and was a key member of the underground film community and the flourishing San Francisco art world—from the Beat generation, the 1960s liberation era and the punk generation of the 1970s and 1980s, though defined by none.

Exemplifying the fluidity that is now a hallmark of contemporary art, Conner worked sequentially or often simultaneously in a wide range of mediums. Bruce Conner: It’s All True presents a lifetime of work by Conner, whose transformative practice defies straightforward categorization. In a midcentury cultural landscape marked by extremes of devastation and abundance, Conner emerged as a figure adept at repurposing and recombining the detritus of a consumer-driven and media-dominated culture. The exhibition is loosely organized, both chronologically and thematically, emphasizing Conner’s polymorphic abilities by integrating works across mediums and creating atmospheric shifts and densely-installed presentations.

The initial presentation of Bruce Conner: It’s All True is at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (through October 2, 2016). After SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (February 21–May 22, 2017).

BRUCE CONNER: EARLY WORK

The exhibition begins with a group of early paintings, TICK-TOCK JELLYCLOCK COSMOTRON, a rarely seen assemblage with sound, and A MOVIE, Conner’s first film and a major cornerstone of American experimental cinema. This film exemplifies what would become a signature strategy for Conner—creating new forms by reordering shards and fragments of the 20th century. Defining a dynamic mode of filmmaking through the montage of found footage set to music through precise, rapid-fire editing, A MOVIE has had an enduring influence on generations of artists who have produced new films and videos by appropriating, manipulating and remixing the remnants of mass-media culture.

A second major section is dedicated to Conner’s assemblages from the 1950s and early 1960s. Among many highlights is the artist’s first assemblage, RATBASTARD, completed in 1958, the same year that he created the jokingly titled Rat Bastard Protective Association, a social group of like-minded artist and poet friends with a shared interest in the debris of everyday life. Over the next six years, Conner developed a range of assemblage formats including reliefs, along with hanging and freestanding sculptures. Using discarded objects and building materials found in San Francisco thrift shops and neighborhoods undergoing urban renewal, Conner’s assemblages incorporated elements like clothing, toys, costume jewelry, feathers, photos, newspaper clippings, cigarette butts, nails, tacks and razor blades. With few exceptions these works were wrapped or stuffed with torn nylon stockings, giving his assemblages an untimely, foreboding aura.

BRUCE CONNER: SOCIAL JUSTICE

Themes of violent death—by execution, murder or nuclear annihilation—are common in Conner’s early work and reflect the artist’s engagement with contemporary issues of social justice, such as the nuclear arms race, the war in Vietnam and capital punishment. These concerns are particularly evident in his black wax sculptures, such as the recently restored CHILD, first presented in San Francisco in 1960 and last seen briefly in New York in 1995—a famously disturbing wax work created in response to the high-profile capital punishment of Caryl Chessman. The darkly beautiful, BLACK DAHLIA, an assemblage portrait of an infamous sex murder victim, similarly expresses Conner’s acute and intense engagement with issues of social alienation.

BRUCE CONNER: INFLUENCE OF MEXICO

Deeply concerned about the Cold War, in 1961 Conner and his wife Jean moved to Mexico City. There he produced a body of assemblages and drawings distinctly different from his earlier work. The assemblages became lighter, with richer color, and incorporated a deeper spiritual association. The ink-on-paper drawings Conner produced reflect the artist’s experimentation with psilocybin mushrooms, as well as his friendship with Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary. The mushroom form appears frequently in these works, and in some it is equated with the mushroom-shaped cloud of a nuclear explosion. Work such as the film LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS consists of footage shot directly by Conner while living in Mexico, and some earlier shots from San Francisco. Building on the rapid rhythms of his earlier film work and introducing multiple-exposure sequences, it is a psychedelic, meditative travelogue, consisting mostly of rural Mexico, featuring sumptuously colored images of the natural world, local villages and religious iconography. In 1967 Conner added a soundtrack, the song, “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles, publicly presented in this exhibition for the first time. In 1996 he edited a longer version which he set to music by experimental composer Terry Riley.

BRUCE CONNER: WORKS ON PAPER, PHOTOGRAMS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Conner’s work shifted again in the 1970s, with the creation of numerous drawings. Those with a circular composition he called “Mandalas.” He also developed offset lithographs based on his ink and felt-tip pen drawings, using the same motifs for magazine and book covers, posters, endpapers, cards and other multiples. In 1974, Conner began a series of densely monochromatic pen and ink drawings. In some works black ink covers the entire sheet; in others, the black surface is dappled by tiny points of white—reminiscent of stars dappling a night sky. Just as Conner’s Mandala drawings were created using a tightly organized system of lines clustered around central geometric forms, these STAR and INK drawings are made by filling in around increasingly smaller areas that remain un-inked. Dated by the month and year of their creation, they reflect the detail-oriented aspect of Conner’s personality.

The series of 29 large scale photograms, a selection of which are on view, that Conner called ANGELS, were created in collaboration with the San Francisco photographer Edmund Shea (1942–2004) and illustrate Conner’s fascination with darkness and illumination. Conner himself posed for these ghostly prints, though his body and features have been dematerialized into luminous forms that convey the mystical and spiritual overtones that would continue to permeate his work.

Exploring yet another medium, Conner began employing photography in 1977, after seeing a performance by the band Devo at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. Conner became a regular at this important Bay Area punk venue, and after being invited to contribute to V. Vale’s celebrated punk zine Search & Destroy (1977–79), he embarked on a yearlong photographic project to document bands and audience members at the club. In the 1990s, Conner revisited his Mabuhay photographs, producing from them a series of collages that are both nostalgic for, and critical of, the wildness and violence of the punk generation.

In the later part of his career, Conner also made many small intricate collages from engravings, influenced by Surrealism, that express complex psychological and spiritual themes. Entire galleries are devoted to each of these extensive bodies of work. Conner additionally began experimenting with a technique incorporating inkblots in 1975, continuing it until the end of his life; during his final years, it became his primary technique for working on paper. In 1999, Conner announced his retirement from the art world, though the same year, Conner-like inkblot drawings began appearing under the names Emily Feather, Anonymous and Anonymouse. Claiming that he had trained and paid artists to create and exhibit artwork, Conner praised these anonymous artists' decision to create art under pseudonyms, as it resonated with his career-long interest in playing with issues of artistic authorship and identity.

BRUCE CONNER: FILM

Additional filmic works featured in the exhibition are REPORT, CROSSROADS and THREE SCREEN RAY. Containing footage from recorded live broadcasts and the famous Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, REPORT is one of Conner’s most intense filmic constructions expressing shock and physical aggression, and offers a scathing critique of consumerist spectacles. CROSSROADS epitomizes Conner’s horrified fascination with the nuclear bomb, as well as with the capacity of art and cinema to create a powerful record of death and destruction on an unimaginable scale. To make the film, Conner sourced footage of Operation Crossroads, a nuclear bomb test the American government carried out in 1946 at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific. THREE SCREEN RAY (2006) is Conner’s foray into digital editing and projection, structured around Ray Charles’s hit “What'd I Say” (1959). It followed the film COSMIC RAY (1961) and the multiple-projector film installation EVE-RAY-FOREVER (1965/2006). In THREE SCREEN RAY, three video channels create dynamic juxtapositions between elements including a countdown leader, footage of tribal dancing, military imagery, television commercials and Mickey Mouse, allowing Conner’s trademark themes of vice and violence to reach fever pitch.

At the end of the exhibition is the film EASTER MORNING (2008), a hypnotic meditation on rebirth and renewal, propelled by Terry Riley’s iconic Minimalist composition “In C” (1964). This piece manifests the spirituality that appeared throughout Conner’s career, from his earliest Christian-themed paintings to his trance-inducing works on paper. An elegiac, mournful work, this was the last film he completed before his death at the age of 75.

ORGANIZATION

Bruce Conner: It’s All True is organized by SFMOMA and co-curated by Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts, SFMOMA; Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture, SFMOMA; Stuart Comer, chief curator, media and performance art, MoMA; and Laura Hoptman, curator, department of painting and sculpture, MoMA; with Rachel Federman, former assistant curator, painting and sculpture, SFMOMA. Additional curatorial assistance has been provided by Nancy Lim, assistant curator of painting and sculpture, SFMOMA.

Special thanks to Jean Conner, Robert Conway, Michelle Silva and the Conner Family Trust for their cooperation and support with the exhibition.

PUBLICATION

Bruce Conner: It’s All True is accompanied by a catalogue published by SFMOMA in association with University of California Press, and edited by Frieling and Garrels. Illustrated in full color throughout, this comprehensive volume provides access to a range of material, emphasizing aspects of his work that have never been published, including early paintings from the 1950s and works from the last decade of Conner’s life, along with a trove of ephemeral materials. The publication features original scholarship by a field of authors writing from a variety of art historical perspectives, including essays by Frieling, Garrels, Comer, Hoptman, Diedrich Diederichsen and Rachel Federman, as well as contributions from Michelle Barger, Kevin Beasley, Dara Birnbaum, Carol Bove, Stan Brakhage, David Byrne, Johanna Gosse, Roger Griffith, Kellie Jones, Christian Marclay, Greil Marcus, Michael McClure, Megan Randall, Henry S. Rosenthal, Dean Smith, Kristine Stiles and the art collective Will Brown.

EXHIBITION SPONSORSHIP: Major sponsorship of Bruce Conner: It’s All True is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - SFMOMA
151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103
www.sfmoma.org

Architecture & Museums: SFMOMA 2016 new building unveiled

San Francisco Museum of Modern -SFMOMA- unveils preliminary designs for its expansion which will double exhibition and education space 

Snøhetta, SFMOMA Expansion Aerial Northeast Façade; image courtesy Snøhetta and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Snøhetta, SFMOMA Expansion View from Yerba Buena; image courtesy Snøhetta and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art 

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently (May 25, 2011) unveiled the preliminary design for its expansion that will double the museum's exhibition and education space while enhancing the visitor experience and more deeply weaving the museum into the fabric of the city. The new building will both transform the museum and enliven the city by opening up new routes of public circulation around the neighborhood and into the museum. Completion is projected in 2016.

Developed by architectural firm Snøhetta in collaboration with SFMOMA and EHDD of San Francisco, the over 225,000-square-foot expansion will run contiguously along the back of the current building and extend from Howard to Minna streets, allowing for the seamless integration of the two structures. The new building will provide SFMOMA with a greater public profile and an openness that will welcome visitors and project the museum's role as a catalyst for new ideas, a center for learning, and a place that provides great art experiences for Bay Area residents and visitors.

On its east side, the building will feature a sweeping façade and an entrance in an area that is currently hidden from public view and largely unused. This will be achieved through the creation of a mid-block, open-air, 18-foot-wide pedestrian promenade running from Howard Street through to Natoma Street that will open a new route of public circulation through the neighborhood and bring Natoma Street, currently a dead end, to life. The public promenade will feature a series of stairs and landings terracing up to an entry court that extends from the new east entrance, providing additional public spaces.

The building also introduces a façade on Howard Street that will feature a large, street-level gallery enclosed in glass on three sides, providing views of both the art in the galleries and the new public spaces. At this time, the museum is also exploring the creation of a number of outdoor terraces, including one on top of its current building. The Snøhetta building will rise fifty feet higher than the Botta building, and its roofline will be sculpted to frame the skyline of the buildings beyond it to the east when viewed from Yerba Buena Gardens. The new entrance will be accessible from both Howard and Natoma streets and will align with the new Transbay Transit Center being built two blocks east of the museum. This entry will complement SFMOMA's current Third Street entrance, which will be revitalized to enhance visitor flow and access.

On Howard Street, the glass-enclosed gallery and pedestrian promenade will be located on a site currently occupied by Fire House 1 and its neighbor at 670 Howard Street. SFMOMA is designing, financing, and constructing a new, replacement fire station on nearby Folsom Street, representing a gift to the city of more than $10 million, that will provide the Fire Department with a state-of-the-art facility that will enhance emergency response time. 

The planning of the expansion continues as an intensive collaborative process of museum leadership, trustees, visitors, other stakeholders, and the design team. The design of the interior spaces and integration of the two buildings will be unveiled at the end of this year.

Says SFMOMA Director NEAL BENEZRA, "This is a transformative design for the museum, the neighborhood, and the city. The new resources we are creating for SFMOMA are a response to the incredible growth of our audiences over the past 15 years and increased public demand for the museum's programming. The welcoming and luminous character of Snøhetta's design and its embrace of the surrounding neighborhood further SFMOMA's role as a center for learning, interaction, and inspiration for the people of San Francisco and the region."

"Our design for SFMOMA responds to the unique demands of this site, as well as the physical and urban terrain of San Francisco," says Snøhetta principal architect CRAIG DYKERS. "The scale of the building meets the museum's mission, and our approach to the neighborhood strengthens SFMOMA's engagement with the city. Pedestrian routes will enliven the streets surrounding the museum and create a procession of stairs and platforms leading up to the new building, echoing the network of paths, stairways, and terracing that is a trademark of the city."

SFMOMA has raised more than $250 million toward a projected $480 million campaign goal for the expansion, including $100 million for the museum's endowment. The project also encompasses an expansion of the permanent collection, which forms the foundation of the museum's programming. This past February, SFMOMA launched a multiyear campaign to further strengthen the collection, which has more than doubled in size to 27,000 works since the museum moved to its current home in 1995. In September 2009, the museum also announced that the Fisher family would share its renowned collection of contemporary art with the public at SFMOMA. The museum holds one of the foremost collections of contemporary art in the world and the leading collection of modern and contemporary art on the West Coast.

SFMOMA first announced plans to expand its building in April 2009, spurred by growth since it moved to Third Street in 1995. The move catalyzed incredible growth in the museum's audiences, educational programs, exhibitions, and collections. Over the past 15 years, SFMOMA's annual average attendance has more than tripled to some 700,000, membership has grown to 40,000. SFMOMA has also developed one of the strongest exhibition programs in the world, organizing groundbreaking shows that travel internationally, including recent surveys of the work of Diane Arbus, Olafur Eliasson, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, William Kentridge, Sol LeWitt, Richard Tuttle, and Jeff Wall.

SNOHETTA' DESIGN CONCEPT FOR SFMOMA

In describing the design concept, Craig Dykers stated:

SFMOMA sparked the dramatic transformation of San Francisco's South of Market district when it transformed a run-down neighborhood into a cultural anchor for the city in 1995. After 15 years on Third Street, SFMOMA is now further invigorating the city by opening up a place that has been out of sight and out of mind.

SFMOMA's expansion will enliven the neighborhood through a generous plan that frees connections between well-known surrounding streets and more hidden urban spaces. The building will encourage people to enjoy the intimate small streets as much as the heavily used thoroughfares of the district. The new building does not push tightly against its property lines; instead it creates new public spaces and pedestrian routes through the neighborhood along with open views of the surrounding streetscape. By organizing the complex configuration of the museum's expansion site into a unified whole, the new SFMOMA will promote connections to portions of the city that are already becoming more publicly accessible with the construction of the new Transbay Transit Center. Having been a partner to the creation of the cultural hub around Yerba Buena Gardens, SFMOMA will now further enliven the entire neighborhood as an urban destination. 

Formally, the new SFMOMA is designed to engage with the skyline that surrounds it. Its sculptural identity is found in a formal language that embraces and invites the silhouettes of its neighbors to participate in the dialogue of the new urban identity of South of Market. SFMOMA's new, low slung shape will create a horizon in the skyline that connects rather than segregates the different parts of the city that border it.

ARCHITECTURAL FIRM SNOHETTA

Formed in 1989 and led by principals Craig Dykers and Kjetil Thorsen, Snøhetta is an award-winning international architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design firm based in Oslo, Norway, and New York City. As of 2010, the firm, which is named after one of Norway's highest mountain peaks, has approximately 100 staff members working on projects in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The practice is centered on a transdisciplinary approach where multiple professions work together to explore differing perspectives on the conditions for each project. A respect for diverse backgrounds and cultures is a key feature of the practice. Snøhetta is composed of designers and professionals from around the world.

Joining Snøhetta in the creation of the expansion are local firms EHDD and Webcor.

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART - SFMOMA
www.sfmoma.org

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York + San Francisco Museum of Modern art + The Menil Collection, Houston

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

April 13 – August 28, 2011

The first retrospective of the drawings of American contemporary artist RICHARD SERRA is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective traces the crucial role that drawing has played in Serra's work for more than 40 years. Although Richard Serra is well known for his large-scale and site-specific sculptures, his work has also changed the practice of drawing. This major exhibition shows how Serra's work has expanded the definition of drawing through innovative techniques, unusual media, monumental scale, and carefully conceived relationships to surrounding spaces. Featured are 60 works from the 1970s to the present, including many loans from important European and American collections, as well as large-scale works completed specifically for this presentation.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective follows the artist's investigation of drawing as an activity both independent from and linked to his sculptural practice. The exhibition begins with his drawings from the early 1970s, when he drew primarily on paper with ink, charcoal, lithographic crayon, and black paintstick—a crayon comprised of a mixture of pigment, oil, and wax. These works explore formal and perceptual relationships between his sculpture and the viewer. Over time, his drawings increased in scale and evolved into autonomous works of art that challenged the notion of drawing as preparatory work.

In the mid-1970s, Richard Serra made the first of his monumentally scaled Installation Drawings, some of which hang from floor to ceiling and have a width of 10 to 20 feet. To make works such as Pacific Judson Murphy (1978), the artist attached Belgian linen directly to the wall and covered the entire surface with black paintstick, using repetitive and vigorous physical gestures. The Installation Drawings marked a radical shift, altering conceptions of what a drawing is and how it can interact with architecture. Serra's drawings of this period control the space of entire rooms and disrupt perceptions of spatial relationships.

Richard Serra has written of these drawings, "By the nature of their weight, shape, location, flatness, and delineation along their edges, the black canvases enabled me to define spaces within a given architectural enclosure. The weight of the drawing derives not only from the number of layers of paintstick but mainly from the particular shape of the drawing."

In his drawings since the 1980s, Richard Serra has continued to invent new techniques and to explore a variety of surface effects, primarily on paper. In 1989, Richard Serra made a series of diptychs on large, heavy sheets of paintstick-covered paper. Several of the titles of these drawings—such as No Mandatory Patriotism and The United States Government Destroys Art—express the artist's reaction to the removal and disassembly of his sculpture Titled Arc, which was commissioned as a permanent work for New York City's Federal Plaza. The exhibition also includes works from several of his drawing series, such as Deadweight (1991), Weight and Measure (1994), Rounds (1996-97), and Out-of-Rounds (1999-2000).

In Serra's recent drawings, such as the Solids series (2007-2008), the accumulation of black paintstick on paper is so dense that nearly the entire surface of the paper is covered in a layer of viscous pigment. To make these drawings, Richard Serra often pours melted paintstick onto the floor and then lays the paper on top of the pigment. The paintstick is transferred to the sheet by pressing a hard marking tool onto the back of the paper. The exhibition swith a new drawing series from 2010 titled Elevational Weight.

Complementing the drawings there is a presentation of the artist's sketchbooks and four films made by the artist in 1968: Hand Catching Lead, Hand Lead Fulcrum, Hands Scraping, and Hands Tied.

RICHARD SERRA (b. 1939, San Francisco, California) studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, graduating with a BA in English literature. Serra then received an MFA from Yale University in 1964 and had one of his first New York exhibitions at Leo Castelli's Warehouse gallery, in 1967. His work has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1977), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1986 and 2007), Serpentine Gallery, London (1992), The Drawing Center, New York (1994), Dia: Chelsea, New York (1997), Guggenheim Bilbao (2005), and the Grand Palais, Paris (2008), among other museums.

Richard Serra has received numerous awards and accolades for his artistic achievements. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received honorary doctorates from Yale University and other universities. In 2008 he was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Academy and was decorated with the Order of the Arts and Letters of Spain. He received the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture from the Japan Art Association in 1994 and the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2010.

Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective is organized Bernice Rose, Chief Curator, Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center; Michelle White, Associate Curator, The Menil Collection; and Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The presentation of the exhibition at the Metropolitan is organized by Magdalena Dabrowski, Special Consultant in the Museum's Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art.

The 180-page exhibition catalogue features 160 illustrations and essays by Michelle White, Bernice Rose, Gary Garrels, and Magdalena Dabrowski, as well as contributions by Richard Shiff, the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art at the University of Texas at Austin; and Lizzie Borden, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker and writer. Also included in the catalogue are: an illustrated chronology related to Serra's drawing production; a selected drawing bibliography and exhibition history; and an anthology of selected interviews and writings by the artist, including Serra's notes on drawings. The catalogue is published by The Menil Collection and distributed by Yale University Press.

The exhibition was organized by the Menil Collection, Houston. After its presentation at the Metropolitan, Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective will travel to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (October 15, 2011 – January 17, 2012) and The Menil Collection, Houston (March 2 – June 10, 2012).

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

1000 Fifth Avenue. New York City

www.metmuseum.org

Prints by Paul Klee, 1946, at SFMOMA – Exhibition re-creates 1946 Show of Prints

Prints by Paul Klee (1946)

Exhibition Re-creates 1946 Show of Prints

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

August 7, 2010 - January 16, 2011

Paul Klee, Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück, Engel bringt das Gewünschte (A Spirit Serves a Small Breakfast, Angel Brings the Desired), 1920; lithograph with watercolor; Collection SFMOMA, Extended loan and promised gift of the Djerassi Art Trust.

Photo Courtesy of SFMOMA

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will showcase the exhibition Prints by Paul Klee (1946). Organized by John Zarobell, SFMOMA assistant curator, collections, exhibitions, and commissions, the exhibition features 21 works.

SFMOMA has had a longstanding commitment to the art of Paul Klee over its 75-year history. This exhibition re-creates a show of prints by the Swiss-born modernist held at the museum in 1946. 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.

Short BIOGRAPHY of PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)

Paul Klee born in Münchenbuchsee, just north of Bern, Switzerland's capital, grew up in a musical family and was himself a violinist. Ultimately he opted to study art and in 1900 trained with neoclassicist Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy, where he first met painter Vasily Kandinsky. As was standard academic practice, his training included anatomy lessons and life drawing from the nude; he later spent seven months touring Italy, where he was exposed to early Christian and Byzantine art. In 1906 he married pianist Lili Stumpf and settled in Munich, then an important center for avant-garde art; their only child, Felix, was born there the following year. Klee's friendship with Kandinsky prompted him to join Der Blaue Reiter -The Blue Rider-, an expressionist group pivotal to the development of abstract art. Later, at the invitation of founder Walter Gropius, Klee taught at the esteemed Bauhaus from 1920 to 1931; in 1931 he accepted a position at the Dusseldorf Academy, but was soon dismissed by the Nazis, who included 17 of his works in their infamous exhibition of "degenerate art," Entartete Kunst, in 1937. After a move to Switzerland in 1933, Paul Klee developed the crippling collagen disease scleroderma, marked by a pathological thickening and hardening of the skin; he died from its complications in 1940.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco, California - CA 94103

www.sfmoma.org

New Topographics: Photography Exhibition at SFMOMA

Photography exhibition > United States > California > San Francisco

 

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape

SFMOMA - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

July 17 - October 3, 2010

 

Comprised of close to 150 photographs, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape is a restaging of a historically significant exhibition held in 1975 at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York.

This reprisal brings together the work of all ten photographers included in the original New Topographics: Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel. Widely considered one of the seminal exhibitions in the history of photography, New Topographics signaled the emergence of a radically new approach to landscape and demonstrated the influence of Conceptualism and Minimalism on photography in the 1970s.

New Topographics is significant to the history of photography primarily because it marked a dramatic shift in attitude towards landscape as a photographic subject. Unlike their predecessors, such as Ansel Adams or Minor White, the photographers featured in New Topographics did not use their work to express transcendent personal experiences of untrammeled nature. Rather, they used a more seemingly neutral approach to depict the ordinary landscapes that surround us, including aspects of the built environment that are often overlooked and considered eyesores: cheap motels, gas stations, tract homes, trailer parks, and parking lots. Included in the exhibition are: Buena Vista, Colorado (1973) by Henry Wessel; South Corner, Riccar America Company, 3184 Pullman, Costa Mesa (1974) from the series New Industrial Parks by Lewis Baltz; and Irrigation Canal, Albuquerque, New Mexico (1974) and Untitled View, (Boulder City) (1974) by Joe Deal, which all evince this radical reconceptualization of landscape.

Although they might lack conventional aesthetic hooks of expression, narrative, and beauty, these photographs are powerful aesthetic statements that reflect the complex and ambiguous relationship between humans and the environment—a relationship of particular importance in the West of the USA. As open to the work of conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha as they were to the history of their chosen medium, the photographers in New Topographics represent a crucial bridge between the once-insular photography world and the larger field of contemporary art. This restaging offers an opportunity to consider the photographs both in the context of the newly central role photography was playing in 1970s contemporary art as well as in relation to the period's prevailing cultural concerns, such as land use, national identity, environmentalism, and nostalgia.

The exhibition was coorganized by Dr. Britt Salvesen, department head and curator of photography, prints and drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Dr. Alison Nordström, curator of photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York. The San Francisco presentation is organized by Erin O'Toole, assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, New Topographics, published by Steidl, George Eastman House, and CCP. In the lead essay, Salvesen traces the prevailing cultural and aesthetic ideas that gave rise to the show, as well as the interconnections between the participants. Also featured is an essay by Nordström outlining the significance of New Topographics in Eastman House's history and its influence on photographic history as a whole.

Following the presentation at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to several international locales, including: Landesgalerie in Linz, Austria (November 10, 2010, through January 9, 2011); Die Photographische Sammlung Stiftung Kultur in Cologne, Germany (January 20 through March 28, 2011); The Netherlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands (June 25 through September 11, 2011); and Museum of Fine Arts in Bilbao, Spain (October 17, 2011 through January 8, 2012).

The new presentation and international tour of New Topographics is made possible by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

 

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape
July 17 - October 3, 2010

SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
151 Third Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

 

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August Sander: People of the 20th Century Photographs Exhibition

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

August Sander, Hod carrier, 1928, gelatin silver print

Courtesy of the August Sander Archive, Cologne ;

ARS, New York, 2002

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents August Sander: People of the 20th Century from November 29, 2002 through February 23, 2003. The exhibition comprises more than 200 vintage prints drawn from the photographer’s monumental portrait of German society, made for the most part between the two world wars. SFMOMA’s presentation is the most comprehensive showing in the United States of this seminal project, which has never been publicly displayed in its entirety in this country. The works on view are culled from the archives of the Photographische Sammlung of SK/Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, and supplemented by selected photographs on loan from international institutions and private collectors. The exhibition curator is Susanne Lange, director of the Photographische Sammlung of SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. Overseeing the San Francisco presentation is Douglas R. Nickel, SFMOMA curator of photography. Accompanying the exhibition is a newly revised seven-volume trilingual (German, English and French) monograph containing all 619 works in the portfolio, as well as Sander’s own annotations on the photographs and negatives, many categorized and evaluated for the first time.

August Sander (1876–1964) is widely hailed as an avatar of modern photography. His influence can be seen in the work of subsequent generations of international photographers, including that of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Sander’s exhaustive People of the 20th Century project set conceptual and aesthetic standards that were unprecedented in the history of photography; the achievement is still considered unparalleled today. Through this project, Sander created a compelling record of the world and time in which he lived by making direct, descriptive posed portraits of ordinary people from a broad cross section of German society—the farmer, businessman, bricklayer, painter, secretary, philosopher, dockworker, blacksmith and coal carrier, for instance—where individuals stood for and were grouped according to categorical occupational, social or familial types. He then collected the photographs into some 45 portfolios, which were finally assigned to seven archetypal categories: “The Farmer,” “The Skilled Tradesman,” “The Woman,” “Classes and Professions,” “The Artists,” and “The City.” The final category, “The Last People,” included the elderly as well as those with birth defects, disabilities, and mental disorders. Taken together, these images capture a detailed view of pre–World War II Germany and reflect Sander’s optimistic view of the prevailing social order.

Sander was born in 1876 in Herdorf, Germany, near Cologne, the son of a mining carpenter. Soon after receiving a camera from an uncle in 1892, he built a darkroom and began photographing. After his military service, he worked as a commercial photographer, specializing in architectural and industrial photography. Sander was most active creatively during the period between the two World Wars, when many German artists were stimulated by newfound political freedom. Inspired by the Cologne Progressives, a group of radical painters he met in the early 1920s, he conceived of his ambitious project in sympathy with the Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity,” in art current in this circle. Sander worked on People of the 20th Century until his death in 1964, despite the tumultuous world events generated by the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich: Nazi authorities disapproved of Sander’s undifferentiated, unheroic depiction of the German people and for a time forced him to stop work on the project; thousands of his glass negatives were confiscated and destroyed. Eventually Sander relocated to the village of Kuchhausen—bringing with him and thus saving 10,000 negatives—and sat out the war years by devoting himself to a series of landscapes and nature studies. One of Sander’s sons, Erich, who joined the anti-Nazi Socialist Worker’s Party in 1933, was jailed for treason in 1934 and died in prison 10 years later. Erich’s brother, Gunther Sander, began working toward the publication of People of the 20th Century in 1980.

The first section of the exhibition, “The Farmer,” demonstrates Sander’s familiarity with the rural environment of his youth, as well as his view of the farmer as the basic archetype of society. The first section also includes a portfolio of 12 pictures that Sander created as a prologue to the total project. These images depict a broad cross section of social types as they relate to inner character: the man of the soil, the revolutionary, the philosopher and the sage. A second section, “The Skilled Tradesman,” includes images of members of the trades as they were understood in Sander’s age—the bricklayer, the locksmith, the shoemaker, the tailor, the potter and the pastry cook—as well as images of industrialists, technicians and inventors. In the third section, “The Woman,” women appear largely defined in relationship to other people in pictures with titles such as Wholesale Merchant and Wife, The Innkeeper and His Wife and Middle-Class Couple. In some of the later images, however, women do appear in autonomous social roles in occupations that were open to them, such as nun, dressmaker and secretary.

In the fourth section, “Classes and Professions,” Sander creates a complex image of society: the subsection “The Clergyman” includes both Roman Catholics and Protestants; “The Teacher and Educator” shows teachers from cities and villages; “The Businessman” ranges from match seller to publisher to art dealer. Sander’s comprehensive view of society is most apparent in his inclusion of people whose professional activity might be considered marginal, such as the hypnotist in the portfolio “The Doctor and the Pharmacist.” Also on view are portraits of politicians of multiple political persuasions. However, all Sander’s portraits are made in the same spirit of scientific objectivity and neutrality, including a series of national socialists, Jews, and soldiers of both world wars.

The cultural spectrum of “The Artists” ranges from world-class conductor to café musician, from film actor to touring player. The images in “The City” depict the life of urban dwellers on festive and solemn occasions; people living on the fringes of urban society, such as circus artists, gypsies, transients and city youth. The section also includes images of persecuted Jewish citizens, foreign workers and political prisoners. Sander devotes the final section, “The Last People,” to people on society’s outermost perimeters: the sick, the old and frail, and people born with physical or mental disabilities. On view in this section is an image of the death mask of his son Erich, who died as a political prisoner.

The seven-volume catalogue that accompanies the exhibition is available for purchase in the SFMOMA Museum Store. Published by Harry N. Abrams, the fully illustrated set is priced at $195, $175.50 for SFMOMA members.

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Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, SFMOMA, San Francisco

Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
February 19 - May 30, 2000

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will highlight 40 years of work by Sol LeWitt in the long-awaited exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective. The first comprehensive survey of Sol LeWitt's work since 1978, the retrospective will present over 200 works -- ranging from the well known wall drawings and structures to photographs, books and works on paper -- from each phase of the artist's career. Organized by Gary Garrels, SFMOMA Elise S. Haas Chief Curator and curator of painting and sculpture, in collaboration with Sol LeWitt, the exhibition will open on February 19 and be on view in the Museum's fourth-floor galleries through May 21, 2000, and in the fifth-floor galleries through May 30, 2000.

Sol LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, and received his BFA in 1949 from Syracuse University. In 1953 he moved to New York, where he attended what is now known as the School of Visual Arts, and from 1955 to 1956 worked as a graphic artist for the architect I.M. Pei. In the mid-1960s, he began taking occasional teaching positions at art schools including Cooper Union, the School of Visual Arts and New York University. His work was first publicly exhibited in 1963 at St. Mark's Church, New York.

Since 1965, Sol LeWitt has had hundreds of solo exhibitions. His first retrospective was presented at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1970 and later showcased in a major mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1978. His work has been featured in innumerable group exhibitions. Sol LeWitt's pieces have been collected by some of the most prestigious museums in the world, including SFMOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Paris's Musée National d'Art Moderne, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum and the Tate Gallery, London. 

Development of a Distinct Philosophy 

Beginning in 1962, Sol LeWitt began to make a series of geometric wall reliefs, soon moving to free-standing objects or "structures," the name he uses for all of this sculptural work. At this time his work was closely related to that of other artists, including Carl Andre, Donald Judd and Robert Morris, who were developing the movement that was dubbed Minimalism. By 1964 his structures had been simplified to open, linear forms, in which ideas could be explored in permutations and series.

In the mid-1960s, he pioneered the Conceptual art movement, emphasizing ideas for the generation of art rather than working from physical materials. LeWitt published "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," an influential statement on Conceptualism, in a 1967 issue of Artforum and followed this with "Sentences on Conceptual Art," which appeared in Art Language in 1969.

In "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Sol LeWitt stated the importance of reduction in the artistic process: "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." His work is focused upon the ideas behind it and the proscribed rendering of form to realize a physical manifestation of those ideas. 

Supporting his idea that the thought is more important than the act, Sol LeWitt rejects the notion of art as a unique and precious object. He often uses assistants to execute the works based upon his detailed instructions. Adherence to LeWitt's system does not validate a scientific principle or insure technical perfection. For Sol LeWitt, an idea may be mathematically or scientifically invalid, but as long as the executor follows the system established by the artist, a true expression of the idea is produced. The intent is to merely to make good art. Instructions for executing a work give way to any number of physical manifestations of an idea; some will be beautiful, some will not, but the idea maintains its integrity. His art exists, above all, in the space between the artist's conception and the viewer's reception; it is dependent upon the viewer's sensory responses for its completion. Some instructions are simple and straightforward and some are long and complex.

For example, Sol LeWitt's instructions for the execution of Wall Drawing #340, 1980, mandates: 

Six-part drawing. The wall is divided horizontally and vertically into six equal parts. 1st part: On red, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a circle within which are yellow vertical parallel lines; 2nd part: On yellow, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a square within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 3rd part: On blue, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a triangle within which are red vertical parallel lines; 4th part: On red, yellow horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a rectangle within which are blue vertical parallel lines; 5th part: On yellow, blue horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a trapezoid within which are red vertical parallel lines; 6th part: On blue, red horizontal parallel lines, and in the center, a parallelogram within which are yellow vertical parallel lines. The horizontal lines do not enter the figures.

Sol LeWitt's work strikes a delicate balance between perceptual and conceptual qualities; between dedication to the simplicity and order of geometry and his pursuit of visual beauty and intuitive creation; and between his authorship and anonymity regarding his work. Wall drawings, perhaps more than any other medium Sol LeWitt uses, illustrate this inherent tension between craftsmanship and anonymity. The historical precedent of Renaissance fresco painting, which LeWitt deeply admires, is counterbalanced by the execution of his wall drawings. By using industrial materials that erase any trace of craft and employing assistants to execute his ideas, LeWitt was one of the first artists to renounce the importance of the artist's hand. However, LeWitt's desire to adhere to a system does not negate his wish to create truly beautiful wall drawings. As the artist said in the early 1980s, "I would like to produce something I would not be ashamed to show Giotto." 

Four Decades of Work

In 1968 Sol LeWitt made his first artist's book, developing an array of variations of straight lines, overdrawn in four directions. In a logical extension, LeWitt made the radical break of executing some of these drawings in large scale with pencil directly on the wall, the first of his "wall drawings," which would form the basis for his most sustained, important and richly developed work over the next thirty years. This shift also set the pattern throughout his career of moving readily back and forth between works on paper, wall drawings and structures. It is this way of working through theme and variation among media and materials that will be highlighted in the SFMOMA retrospective. 

Idea, detail and execution merge in the work Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, in which Sol LeWitt explores all possible configurations of an incomplete cube. Each arrangement is expressed in three ways: as a three-dimensional wooden structure composed of eight-inch segments; as a schematic drawing; and a photograph of the sculpture. In its most reduced state, the cube is achieved with three segments. At its most complex, it is fashioned with eleven edges and comes closest to forming a complete cube. Between the boundaries, Sol LeWitt illustrates each possibility of a cube-structures with four segments, five segments and so on. He presents the elements by rank, with both the sculptures and pictures ordered from the least to most complex.

In the 1980s, Sol LeWitt's work shifted significantly. Geometric shapes and their permutations became the dominant subject of his 1980s wall drawings, which are executed in layers of colored ink washes that create an extraordinarily varied palette of luminous tones. His works, until then linear and muted, now included three geometric shapes -- circle, square and cone -- and were created with a richer and warmer palette. For example in 1982, Sol LeWitt executed a series entitled Forms Derived from a Cube, in which he depicted variations of geometric elements found within a cube. The piece signifies the beginning of a more selective and interpretive approach to his work; with an innumerable number of possible permutations of a cube, LeWitt chose to depict only 24 variations. These, in turn, at the end of the decade, inspired a new series of complex geometric, crystal-like forms, executed both as multi-colored wall drawings and as structures of white painted wood that erupt from the floor. 

Over the years, Sol LeWitt repeatedly experimented with the idea of a star in different colors and configurations. His Star series exemplifies the artist's mature exploration of serialism and geometry. LeWitt's 1996 Wall Drawing #808 -- presented at the Bienal Internacional São Paolo where Sol LeWitt represented the United States -- presents an array of three-to nine-pointed stars, each centered within a black-bordered rectangular section of wall space. The artist's strict use of geometry dictates that each star is constructed from the form of a regular polygon, and each point of the star rests on the circumference of a circle. Sol LeWitt achieves the broad range of color in each section through a process of layering, rather than mixing, his traditional four colors. In later works from the 1990s -- such as Wall Drawing #879: Loopy Doopy (Black and White), 1998, which is composed of broad, lively swirls -- Sol LeWitt began to incorporate more fluid shapes and wider brushstrokes. Moving away from the strict systematic forms of his earlier work, the latest pieces have a rhythmic optical playfulness and exuberance, an almost decorative quality, often combining bright, saturated colors with alternately saturated blacks.

Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective will be accompanied by a 368-page catalogue with essays by Martin Friedman, Gary Garrels, Andrea Miller-Keller, Brenda Richardson, Anne Rorimer, John Weber and Adam Weinberg. Featuring a lavish photo section with 140 color and 315 black-and-white photographs, the catalogue also includes a selection of Sol LeWitt's writings, the complete exhibition checklist and a bibliography. The catalogue is co-published by the Yale University Press and will be available in a $39.95 softcover edition and a $75 cloth edition at the SFMOMA MuseumStore. In addition, SFMOMA's Education Department will present a host of public programs, including a studio program for youth, a three-part lecture series and a half-day symposium. 

After its SFMOMA presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (July to October 2000), the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (October 2000 to February 2001) and other international venues. 

Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by Henry S. McNeil Jr.

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