Education Assistant Jessica Whiteside’s made the Flickr report on the last-ever SFMOMA Sessions party here. I’ve always wondered about the provenance of the party title “Sessions”…

And, Fritz Haeg’s call for SFBay Animal Stories has been extended til June 2. You can post story submissions in the comment box, or you can email them to Education (at) SFMOMA (dot) org, subject line: “Fritz Haeg Animal Story.”

Tonight at 6:30 & again Saturday at 1pm in the Wattis Theater—

Les Amants Réguliers (Regular Lovers)
Philippe Garrel, 2005, 178 min., 35mm

“A love letter both to French New Wave cinema and to late 1960s French youth culture, Philippe Garrel’s Regular Lovers stars the director’s son (Louis Garrel, of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) as a Parisian student revolutionary. At a lolling pace, the film explores art, bohemia, revolution, and sex in May 1968 and after. While both director and audience know the historical outcome of these youthful acts, Regular Lovers points to their poignant appeal.”

Irresistible. See you then/there—

Desirée Holman, The Magic Window (still), 2007; © 2008 Desiree Holman; photo courtesy of the artist and the Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

[Last Thursday SFMOMA assistant curators of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio & Alison Gass announced the 2008 SECA Art Award recipients. The SECA Award is an extremely competitive biennial prize... More

I wondered the other day if there would be any crossover between the two big institutional locally focused exhibitions this year: NONE WHATSOEVER.

However, many congratulations days overdue to SFMOMA’s own Joshua Churchill!! who works here in Exhibitions, and is one of the artists included in this summer’s Bay Area Now 5. Right on.

En route to tomorrow: interview w. Alison Gass & Apsara DiQuinzio re: SECA Award process, as promised.

As promised earlier today, the 2008 SECA Art Award recipients are:

Tauba Auerbach, Desirée Holman, Jordan Kantor, & Trevor Paglen.

———————–

And the finalists:

James Buckhouse

Monica Canilao

Dina Danish

Veronica De Jesus

Lucas DeGiulio

Ala Ebtekar

Dustin Fosnot

Aaron Gach

David Huffman

Prajakti Jayavant

Packard Jennings

Ruth Laskey

Christian Maychack

Keegan McHargue

Julio Cesar Morales

Jay Nelson

Kate Pocrass

Emily Prince

Lordy Rodriguez

Zachary Royer Scholz

Paul Schiek

Andrew Schoultz

Jennie Smith

Chris Sollars

Travis Somerville

Paul Wackers

Mary Elizabeth Yarbrough

—————————

You can find the official SFMOMA press release here. And, check back here early next week—SFMOMA assistant curators of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio and Alison Gass, who selected the winners, will talk a little bit with me about this award cycle’s nominati... More

TONIGHT at 6:30pm, SFMOMA assistant curators of painting and sculpture Apsara DiQuinzio & Alison Gass will be announcing the 2008 SECA Award recipients to an assembled group of SECA committee members and their guests. The SECA (called after the auxiliary group which supports the award, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) is a highly competitive, much-desired biennial award with a long local history. Since 1967, SECA has honored sixty-two Bay Area artists with its Art Award, which includes an exhibition here at the museum, an accompanying catalogue, and a cash prize. Hundreds of artists are nominated, there are thirty+ finalists, and out of those finalists, only four are typically selected. (In my memory, there have been as few as two and as many as seven.)

The SECA members, who have been traditionally sworn to silence and secrecy until the morning following the announcement, will have to wait mere hours to spill the beans this time around. Check back here late ... More

This July architect and artist Fritz Haeg is bringing his latest interdisciplinary project ANIMAL ESTATES to San Francisco for a month of workshops and events, and he’s looking for local animal stories to include in an Animal Estates 5.0: San Francisco booklet.

Debuting at the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Animal Estates creates model dwellings for... More

Ugh, hot. And they say it’s not going to stop just yet. And there was a mosquito in my room last night. Which puts me in mind of:

R&Sie
Mosquito Bottleneck Project, Trinidad

R&Sie, Mosquito Bottleneck Project, Trinidad, 2003 Collection SFMOMA

This fourteen-hundred-square-foot home was designed for a media-art collector living on the... More

Due to a problem with the print, Jorge Fons’ Rojo Amanecer will be replaced by additional screenings of D.A. Pennebaker’s One P.M. this evening at 6:30pm, and again on Saturday at, appropriately, 1pm. Apologies from Public Programs for the change–HOWEVER, if you didn’t get a chance to see One P.M. last week, it’s a great opportunity to see it now. Interesting look at what happens when you filter Godard through the Pennebaker lens. More on the Around ’68 series below.

Local blogger Heidi J De Vries has a nice and very personal bit up about Robert Rauschenberg today at Engineer’s Daughter.

Mary Biggs, SFMOMA school docent, and Ellen Arenson, SFMOMA Docent Council President

This Monday past was the Docent Spring Thing—every year the Education department holds a party in the museum to celebrate and thank the two hundred-plus docents who work so hard year round. The party is a chance for the staff to come out and say hello to and thank the touring footsoldiers of the museum.

The docents are a highly committed, all-volunteer team, and their training program is extensive and ongoing. The newly graduated docent class spent over ... More

SFMOMA lost a great friend yesterday with the death of one of the most influential of postwar American artists, Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg’s work is one of the strengths of our collection, and many of our staff have fond memories of working with him. There is a wonderful bit of interview with Rauschenberg here; he talks about knocking on de Kooning’s door with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand, hoping to convince the elder artist to give him a drawing—to erase.

Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953; trace... More

We’ll begin the week with a soothing silent video of the quickly moving (and noisy) Minna Street construction of the soon-to-be rooftop sculpture garden:

This was made by Tim Svenonius, SFMOMA Producer of Interactive Technologies, who says, “On April 30th, a construction crew raised two thirty-two ton girders into position between the museum and the rooftop of the adjacent garage, where a skybridge will lead to the future sculpture garden. I was out on Minna street with nearly two hundred other museum staff people, who were evacuated from our offices, in case a gust of wind sent one of the beams careening into our building to pulverize us all. The vid was shot using a Sony Cybershot, 8.1 Megapixel, and edited (hastily) in iMovie.”
Many pictures of this event here.

It’s all part of turning 40: the reunions with old friends (and they’re so old aren’t they?), the memories of youthful excess and lost opportunities, and a mildly self-pitying feeling that, from now on, things are going to stay pretty much how they are, or get worse.

It’s the 40th anniversary, this month, of May ’68 – the date of the student protests in Paris, but also one that evokes a whole era of revolt and social change around the world. The legacy of the protest era has reached middle age. Various peo... More

This cool thing just in from Harrell Fletcher: A new participatory website called Some People, where you’re invited to “choose and present someone that you think other people should know about by making a documentary about them. Your documentary can take any form that can be presented on the web – video, sound, images, text or any combination of those things.”

I like it! Instructions for making and posting your documentary are here.

Eliasson fans, I’ve just had word that Olafur’s One-way colour tunnel, pictured at top, and installed here on the fifth floor bridge since Take your time: Olafur Eliasson opened last September, is coming down May 27. Come and see it while you can.

Thanks to Tammy Fortin on camera, and to Tim Svenonius for helping me get the footage off the camera and inaugurating me to the joys of iMovie. Thanks again to Kara Davis and Nol Simonse! Kara talks a little bit about the dance itself below.