Like this! All year!

More by Umbo here. A little more here. And here.

See it bigger here. More by Edward Steichen here. More about Edward Steichen here, here, and here.

More by Beth Yarnelle Edwards here. More about Beth Yarnelle Edwards here.

More by William Allan here.

I’m a big fan of the photographer Martin Parr generally, and am the fan of fans of his series British Food, especially at holiday time. I love this picture: for the unnatural tangerine glow of the filling; that the edge of the crust that looks nearly as orange; and especially for that tiny bright triangle of sun in the picture’s lower r... More

For those of you who somehow missed the news, or for those in parts more distant: SFMOMA turns 75 this January 18. Bay Area, if it hasn’t happened already, you are about to become intimately familiar with this pretty starburst, as SFMOMA prepares to spend 2010 celebrating 75 long years of life.

This post is a ‘save the date’ card for our long weekend anniversary extravaganza, happening January 16, 17 and 18 (Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend).

Six special anniversary exhibitions, showcasing hundreds of objects from the permanent collection, will be open that Saturday. There will be installations by Bill Fontana (in the Wattis) and Allison Smith ( on the fifth floor); the Mike Shine Show will be parked out on our Minna pad—in a borrowed SFMOMA artists gallery truck—on Saturday and Sunday; the Schwab room (that ground floor room off of the Atrium, where the cocktail bars normally live at the member openings) will be opened to Caffè Museo as a cafe extension/lounge; Bl... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, guests, or staff]

After the Kuchar Bros. screening last Thursday evening (George and Mike Kuchar, Recent Preservations: Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, Tootsies in Autumn, A Woman Distressed, and Lovers of Eternity) I trapped Mike Kuchar in the back of the catering kitchen, near the walk-in freezer, and conduct... More

from Corey Keller, SFMOMA associate curator of photography:

On Sunday, December 13, photographer Larry Sultan passed away at home, surrounded by his beloved family. For several months he had been fighting a rare and virulent cancer, one that would not respond to treatment. In a series of humorous, thoughtful, and heart-breaking emails, he kept us a... More

December 6th marked the 40-year anniversary of what’s well known only as “Altamont”—the end of the sixties.  Los Angeles-based independent curator Jenée Misraje talks with two artists (named Sam) who’ve dealt with the history of Altamont in distinct ways.

***

JENÉE MISRAJE

1969. It began with Richard Nixon assuming the White Hous... More

for Francis Heinzfeller

Magic is never settled; the one that should have it has it. The only definitive statement that can be made concerning its nature is that it is creative. Eros is the name of its agency.

Throughout my impassioned love for Kenneth Anger and his Magick Lantern Cycle I have heard of several stray films that over time have disa... More

1.

I went to the Bowman/Bloom Gallery in the Lower East Side because someone had left their cell phone on the bed at poet Eileen Myles’ 60th birthday party, and eventually it rang and Eileen learned it belonged to Richard Hell, and so she arranged to run it by the gallery where Richard Hell is one of a trio of Lower East Side artists showing work in the Nincompatibles show, which actually just came down a couple days ago. I promise you that any disappointment you may feel at not being able to see this show is dwarfed by my disappointment i... More

Pity the artist who works in celluloid. If compelled towards story-telling and the budgets typically commensurate with such, one must first bed down with tycoons and their retainers, then run a gauntlet of various ideological hit-squads in order to promulgate the work. Film has a diabolic power which sits uneasily on the collective psyche of this... More

The Diggers

I’ll start the ‘variations survey’ with an off-handed proposal by the Diggers, who popularized the free-store as a radical transformation of space and value.  Their free store (above) was realized in San Francisco, 1968.

“A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street…No owner, no manager, no empl... More

Our monthly feature, Collection Rotation: some wonderful guest organizes a mini-exhibition from our collection works online. This month’s guest-curator is the totally marvelous San Francisco artist and filmmaker ANNE MCGUIRE. You can see some of her work in JIGSAMENTALLAMA, on through 12/19, at David Cunningham Projects. Thanks Anne!

_________... More

1. The Believer had a party for their current Art Issue last week at Electric Works Gallery, where the Paul Madonna show Album 01: In What Era Will You Get Stuck is currently up, and I liked it a lot. The artist has a lot of pieces featuring those nubby rubber monsters you put on top of your pencils in middle school (or now), with the waggling arms, and lots of text in his work (which I love) expressing career and other popular life anxieties. The title piece dooms the viewer to a sort of style/fashion/general relevance anxiety; the question of w... More

For about a year now I’ve been an avid fan of Sketchup, a freeware 3-D modeling program developed by our peninsula neighbor friends Google. It’s billed as an everyman’s version of CAD, and it has saved my artist butt many a time by allowing me to create quick and lovely 3-D sketches of exhibition spaces and installation proposals. I used it extensively on my last project in London, “COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone,” emailing spatial mock-ups of furniture placement and measurements back and forth to the ... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests.]

Name/ Place of Residence/ Occupation/ Hobby?

My name is Christo. I am information desk attendant at SFMOMA. I’m also a painter. A hobby of mine would be photography.

Do you collect anything?

I’ve noticed a collection of cameras in my apartment. And that just kind of happen... More

The rest of the Flickr set is here.

Will Yackulic’s books have always seemed to me a well-deserved respite from his exacting geometric typewriter works. Even before his art involved pulling paper through a wide carriage Remington, the books were a break from painting thousands of white and turquoise cubes. These earlier landscapes resembled the stark terrain of Superman’s planet Krypton.

Titles of Will’s books include A Serious Earth, Solar Doughnuts, Pac Mastery: Observations and Critical Discourse, Stendec, Death Race VSOP, Space Surveillance Variations and of... More

[Stephanie Pau, SFMOMA manager of interpretation, sifted through many hundreds of paper bits and pieces to put together a mini-retrospective of the museum's paper-trail history since 1935, on view now in our visitor education center.]

A few weeks ago, a new exhibition opened at the Koret Visitor Education Center, located on the second floor of the museum. It’s called Dispatches from the Archives, and I’ve organized it as part of the 75th anniversary suite of exhibitions. Dispatches is as much a reflection on as it is a celebration of SFMOMA&... More

The movie about the early days of Nelson Mandela’s unprecedented presidency in post-apartheid South Africa will be released on Friday, December 11th. It’s the first major film about Mandela and post-apartheid South Africa filmed on location in South Africa. The film is based on the novel “Playing the Enemy” by South African writer John Carlin. The story is about the South African rugby team’s quest for the world cup and its affect on race relations in the post-Apartheid society.

I have an ongoing interest in the play of images that p... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests. George Kuchar, legendary San Francisco filmmaker, lives in the Mission district and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.]

Hobby?

I like making pictures, videos, movies. Videos now, etc.

Do you collect anything?

I got a whole bunch of things because I didn’t like painting the ... More

Last summer my friend Tony and I began watching feature-length films that portray artists. Growing up in the US, these films were our first models for what it meant to live and behave like an artist. Watching them again has been an exercise in nostalgia but also a critical investigation into the national image of the artist. A few weeks into our research a friend pointed us to an excellent survey of artists-in-film by Temporary Services called Framing the Artists. It includes Bucket of Blood (1959) and Color Me Blood Red (1965), two B movies we had already watched that cast artists as serial killers. These are just two of dozens of films we found that not only stereotype artists but cast them as sociopaths, idiots, misanthropes etc. This from Temporary Services: It is our contention that by continually watching, cataloging, and analyzing these portrayals, artists can also gain a better understanding of their own responsibilities to their viewers and how the stereotypes hurt their abili... More

While visiting Githinji’s studio at 1018 Pine street in West Oakland we talked about a lot of things, mostly about the notion of ritual and process. Like many Black/African artists the ritual process of creating the material art object is foremost in Githinji’s mind. The ritual of making is the “art” and knowing that makes seeing and experiencing the object that is the residue of his ritual even more rich. He describes the process with an earnest look on his face “…that is what we do. It’s like James Brown, you know, to get under i... More

Man I am so jacked up on the biggest Shirley Temple in a dirty glass from Vesuvio, extra formaldehyde from the maraschino cherry, please. I went there for a mocktail after hearing Kevin Killian read from his latest book, Impossible Princess, at City Lights. Kevin Killian is so freaking funny, and his work is so brazenly vulnerable in that it’s vulnerable to be so weird and risky and also risque, and he just plunges into the hilarious muck of it with pretty much the best vibes I’ve ever felt off a writer giving a reading. Some litera... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA visitors, artists, staff, or guests.]

Name/Place of Residence/Occupation/Hobby?

Fayette Hauser, Los Angeles, California. Occupation is a dilemma. Right now I would say artist, writer—I’m writing a book, and archiving my photography, contributing to other peoples’ books, so it’s really a lot of history at this momen... More

*an ongoing series of individual images presented for speculation and scrutiny, with only tags at the bottom to give context. Because sometimes words are never enough…