Dear everyone, Open Space is going on holiday and will return to posting on January 3. Before I sign us off for a well-deserved winter rest, I want to take a moment to say thank you to the many, many people who contributed to Open Space in 2010. I am honored to be able to continue to work with so many brilliant, passionate, and articulate people.

To the 56 columnists, guest writers, Collection Rotation contributors,  SFMOMA curators, and SFMOMA staff who’ve written, produced, and labored on the front side of the blog:

Darrin Alfred • B... More

Kaja Silverman, art historian and film theorist, on Robert Rauschenberg’s Cy and the Roman Steps (I, II, III, IV, V) (1952).

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three-day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks — 7.5 minutes or less! — on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it “manic splendor” — and it was. You can follow the 75 Reasons to Live talks as we post them by checking in here.

Poet Lisa Robertson, on German artist Eva Hesse’s Sans II (1968). “Identity is the state’s authority.”

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three-day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks — 7.5 minutes or less! — on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it “manic splendor” — and it was. You can follow the 75 Reasons to Live talks as we post them by checking in here.

Rachel Rosen, director of programming for the San Francisco Film Society, on Eadweard Muybridge’s Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill (1877).

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three-day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks — 7.5 minutes or less! — on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it “manic splendor” — and it was. You can follow the 75 Reasons to Live talks as we post them by checking in here.

Because this is my last post for 2010 I wanted to reflect on a few photographs I took when I was living in San Francisco. Having been away from the Bay Area for almost two years now, there are certain moments I recall vividly, in full color and in 3-D, if you know what I mean. One such moment was when I was taking pictures at Southern Exposure in 2... More

The photography exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape was originally presented at the International Museum of Photography of the Eastman House, Rochester, New York, in 1975. It marked the emergence of a different kind of art photography, one that was difficult, cerebral, political, deadpan; it extended the landscape/cityscape tradition into the suburbs, concentrating on the destruction of the land in the name of development. Without this movement, there might not have been a Center for Land Use Interpretation, for o... More

One of my favorite haunts in San Francisco is the San Francisco Antique and Design Mall, tucked away near the end of Bayshore Drive near Industrial, just before it reaches over into Visitacion Valley. It’s one of the few places in the city where, once inside, one can truly feel like they’re on vacation, or at least in another, much sma... More

I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

After a three-week bout of pneumonia, it’s good to be back ... More

Winter Solstice 2010

4.30 AM, BERKELEY—Later today, in the hours between total lunar eclipse and the longest night, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will be discussing an Order (drafted by its chairman and Obama appointee) which spells the end of the Internet as a common carrier, and will allow “paid prioritization” by big capitalist firms. For the arts community and cultural workers, not to mention commoners everywhere, the implications are serious indeed. The lockdown of image banks is already well advanced; the historian of San Francisco, Gray Brechin, admits that the cost of illustrations for his Imperial San Francisco — once freely accessible in the State Library — would now be prohibitive.

We have lived through the opening military-socialist phase of the planetary telecommunications system, whose infrastructure required public subvention and state action far beyond the ability of private capitals — cold war informatics and telemetry, DoD-fun... More

The exhibition The More Things Change samples SFMOMA’s collection to present a range of works made since 2000, offering a selective survey of the art of the last 10 years and a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Some common themes emerge: fragmentation, fragility, entropy, metamorphosis, reconfiguration. The exhibition itself ... More

Penelope Umbrico’s 5,377,183 Suns from Flickr (Partial) 4/28/09 is on view through January 16. This installation comprises 1,440 prints of photos of the sun taken by Flickr users, and the title of the work refers to the number of results returned for the Flickr search “sunsets” the day the artist produced the work. You can read more about the work at the artist’s website. I thought it would be fitting to make our own collection of pictures from Flickr of people in front of Suns from Flickr.

A big THANK YOU to t... More

SFMOMA and assistant curators Apsara DiQuinzio (painting and sculpture) and Tanya Zimbardo (media arts) have just announced the 2010 SECA Art Award winners. For those more far than near, this prestigious biennial award honors Bay Area artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantia... More

It’s often overlooked in the Bay Area, but the music scene and the art scene have always been closely connected. At 65, artist Mildred Howard knows that as good as anyone. She is also a good example of someone who has had numerous opportunities to move or relocate, but for her the music and family has helped keep her here. She is one of the quiet... More

[Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Every month or so I invite a someone to organize a mini-“exhibition” from our collection works online. Please welcome artist and curator Margaret Tedesco.]

BETWEEN TWO

For Remy Charlip, his AIR MAIL DANCES, and for Jill Johnston (1929–2010)

I am a thief and I’m not ashamed. I steal from the best wh... More

Below, curators Sharon Lerner and Xiaoyu Weng provide some thoughts on the “Riot Show” event, organized on December 2, 2010. Find the preview post, by Joanna Szupinska and yours truly, here.

On December 2, Julian Myers and Joanna Szupinska presented, as part of Open Space Thursdays, “Riot Show,” Myers’s archive of recordings of cr... More

This is the 12th of a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Darr, proprietor of the great Bay Area cinephilia blog Hell on Frisco Bay, I’ve been scouting out the San Francisco locations used in Christopher Maclaine’s Masterpiece, THE END. What began as an attempt to identify and document what physically remains of the often mysterious places at which THE END was shot has evolved into a larger project to also analyze the film, and to identify all its many actors and extras, all of whom appear uncredited. To read the full version of these preliminary remarks, including info on how YOU can participate in this project, click here. For further information on Maclaine, check out the intro, which serves a... More

For the past year and a half I’ve been batch contributing listings for one-time events such as lectures, screenings, and workshops to Happenstand.com. These events are compiled at the outset of each season for the Pickpocket Almanack’s master calendar, the jumping off point for the 5 faculty who select events from across the Bay Area to construct courses. In the process I became curious about some of the statistics that might be available through mining the Happenstand database, the best visual arts calendar in the Bay Area.

In conv... More

Thanks to Autumn Peterson for snapping this shot of an ambitious museum visitor and Claes Oldenburg’s Geometric Apple Core.

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA.” You tag, too!

When I moved away from San Francisco two years ago I thought I would go to New York, meet like-minded artists and find my place among the wide-eyed bohemians in the East Village. Among them, I thought, I would finally be able to work uninhibited and purely, immersed in a thriving, electric world of creative and brilliant people. In my fantasy every... More

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome artist John Davis, who also works for the museum part-time as a film projectionist.

MYTHOLOGY IN FACT

I was initially drawn to t... More

This is the eleventh in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian... More

Thanks to Ron, aka Cuzinyung, and his wife, April, for this great series. I love how April interpreted Robert Therrien’s Untitled (Bent Cone)!

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA.” You tag, too!

On Thursday, December 2, at 7 p.m.,  Joanna Szupinska and I will host a screening and discussion of “Riot Show,”  my archive of recordings of crowd violence at rock concerts, in the Koret Visitor Education Center at SFMOMA. Looking forward to that event, Joanna and I talked through the origins and various forms of the project over the years, ... More

Nicholas Nixon, _The Brown Sisters, Allston, MA_, 1983; Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today’s post is more “Two on Several” than “One on One”: Every year since 1974 the photographer Nicholas Nixon has made a portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters. Please welcome Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on The Brown Sisters.

When Suzanne asked us to write something on Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, we began by wondering what we might possibly say. We’ve been working together on writing some things about feminism and how it shows up or not in our small psychosexualsocial poetry scene. So we tend to talk a lot about women’s relations wi... More

This is the tenth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

In my intro to this series, I described my initial encounter with Stan Brakhage in 1986, and the brief interview about Maclaine my collaborators in what would become the Austin Film Society and I w... More

I am interested in how we can use random stimuli to inspire thought and synthesize notions that might otherwise never come together. I’ve always understood the I Ching that way: it merely enables us to gather our thoughts in reaction to its pithy, suggestive text. I used to know some poets who for a time tried writing while having several ra... More

I’m very fond of this picture, and so make it my holiday offering to you. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! (SFMOMA has another autochrome beauty by Emile Bruguière, by the by. It’s of the Lick Observatory, and you can see it here.)

I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

I was in New York last week conducting studio visits with a couple of artists we’ll be exhibiting in 2011 at the SFAC Gallery. On a free night I hooked up with Emily Hall, a truly amazing writer who regularly contributes to Artforum and works as an editor at MoMA... More

“The Gauntlet” is what my partner, Cliff Hengst, and I have long dubbed the block of Capp St. between our apartment and our art studios in the Mission. On any given day you can find — through the obstacle course of trash, rotting food, feces, needles, and other junk — random personal ephemera: scrawled notes, posted messages, discarded f... More

Mark Dion, the environmental and conceptual artist, has a major exhibit in the Bay Area for the first time in more than a decade. His latest project is on view at the Oakland Museum until March 6th next year.

Dion’s trademark gesture is to go “backstage,” as the sociologist Ervin Goffmann would have put it, to the sites of production of official and institutional knowledge. His practice is to make art that reveals the heterogeneous context of discovery. The making and presentation of knowledge turns out, upon investigation, to b... More

The exhibition The More Things Change (“TMTC“) samples SFMOMA’s collection to present a range of works made since 2000, offering a selective survey of the art of the last 10 years and a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Some common themes emerge: fragmentation, fragility, entropy, metamorphosis, reconfiguration. The exhibition itself will continually change, with a varying array of works on view. TMTC is also an unprecedented collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum: over the course of... More

This is the ninth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).... More

The More Things Change, which opens today, offers a selective look at contemporary art made in the last 10 years, drawing on a range of works from the museum’s collection to present a thematic and psychological portrait of the decade. Some common threads emerge: fragmentation, fragility, entropy, metamorphosis, reconfiguration — and the exh... More

It came as no surprise to me that Acey Thompson, who snapped this shot, and model Marcus Gannuscio are both artists. I love the black hoodie and yellow shirt next to this blue and white Ellsworth Kelly. Acey fills us in on their trip to the museum:

“Marcus is my boyfriend, and we live together up in Portland, OR. We’re both from Califor... More

“can I devil worship with the new iphone?? LOL”
—Kanye West

The 1850s were a good time for Satanism in France. Riding the rising tide of the Second Empire, French intellectuals praised the virtues of cynicism and rebellious confrontation. This fluorescence of Satanic devotion was influenced by a nuanced poetics of Satanism in England: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Byron’s poetics of heroism. Already in those authors we can detect a paradoxical understanding of Satan’s significance. Robert Southey, for instance, called Byron’s group ... More

All of us at SFMOMA are delighted to wish Wayne Thiebaud a very happy 90th birthday!

Bay Area Ecstatic, my first programming effort for an SFMOMA film show, plays this Thursday, 7 p.m., in the Phyllis Wattis Theater. Note to followers of The THE END Tour: this week’s post has been preempted by this exploration of later forms of Bay Area ecstatic cinema. Please enjoy, and check back next week for your next Maclaine fix, the co... More

Thanks to Ken Osborn, aka Misterken, for taking this great photo of visitors interacting with George Segal’s Chance Meeting. Ken explains it further:

“I went to SFMOMA with friends to see the Fisher Collection (Calder to Warhol). While it was truly an impressive collection, I was most fascinated by New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. Perhaps that’s my bias as a ‘photographer.’

“While looking at the art on the rooftop garden, I waited for a group in front of this sculpture so I could ta... More

Alameda Naval Air Force Base, Hangar 20, then and now:

OPENrestaurant is all set to transform the former Navy hangar and current home to the St. George Distillery into OPENwater: educational think tank, temporary restaurant, watershed installation, and flotilla!

How does water flow in the Bay Area? OPENwater is SFMOMA’s latest collaboration ... More

I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

In response to conversations after attending SF Opera’s product... More

[Our "One on One" series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding  to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome Cincinnati poet, the marvelous Mr. Dana Ward ... And a happy belated to Art Garfunkel, 69 last Friday.]

When I set out to write about Cory ... More

This is the eighth of a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

Wi... More

Thank you, Ken Yee (aka yuweiquan), for capturing this!

Plus, Ken has quite the story behind his trip to SFMOMA that day:

I wanted to check out and attempt photographing something I had observed on a rooftop garden visit from a couple of weeks earlier. I was sitting to the left of the Ellsworth Kelly (with the Louise Bourgeois behind), admiring jus... More

Several times a year I find myself on the CCA campus in Potrero Hill to attend readings presented by Small Press Traffic in Timkin Hall. Those visits always entail the long and drafty walk down the broad corridor, whose walls are always populated with student’s works. Historically I’ve been too absorbed in bliss, ambivalence, or despair... More

I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… My posts are always collaborations and are presented in two parts. Part 1 is a summary of a shared experience with my collaborator(s). Part 2 is a response often in the form of a project created specifically for this blog.

My first co-conspirator for this grand blog experiment is Scotti... More

Bill Fontana is a composer and sound artist. SFMOMA has commissioned what will be a truly fantastic new site-specific installation by the artist, opening this month.  Bill talks here about his appreciation for the sound qualities of Dan Graham’s 1994 sculpture Double Cylinder (The Kiss).  I remember that after his talk, one listener suggested that the  disorienting visual and acoustic properties inside the sculpture were as dizzying as a fabulous first kiss. We all agreed. More Dan Graham.

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks—7.5 minutes or less!—on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it ‘manic splendor’—and it was. You can follow the 75 Reasons to Live talks as we post them by checking in here.

This is the seventh in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Darr, proprietor of the great Bay Area cinephilia blog Hell on Frisco Bay, I’ve been scouting out the San Francisco locations used in Christopher Maclaine’s Masterpiece, THE END.  What began as an attempt to identify and document what physically remains of the often mysterious places at which THE END was shot has evolved into a larger project to also analyze the film, and to identify all its many actors and extras, all of whom appear uncredited. To read the full version of these preliminary remarks, including ... More

The Flickr universe just got a little smaller.  Back in August I posted a Flickr Pic of the Week by Chris Gruhl, a.k.a Shadowgolem.  I loved Chris’s image and associated text because he took an artwork he didn’t particularly appreciate and he used his creativity to make it more to his liking:

Anne Bast, SFMOMA’s intellectual pro... More

Fillip contemporary art journal in conversation tonight in SFMOMA’s Koret Center (2nd Floor) starting at 7pm.
Kristina Lee Podesva, Editor and Jeff Khonsary, Publisher. Hosted by Joseph del Pesco.

http://fillip.ca

Creativity Explored is a nonprofit visual arts center where artists with developmental disabilities create, exhibit, and sell art. The center provides studio artists with opportunities to visit Bay Area museums, galleries, and local artists’ studios. Creativity Explored studio artists are accompanied by an art instructor to experience and participate in the Bay Area arts community. On October 14th, they went to the SFMOMA, a popular destination amongst the artists.

I accompanied Andrew Bixler, Whitman Donaldson, Vincent Jackson, Melody Lima, ... More

[Our "One on One" series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others from around the country, responding however they wish to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, very pleased to welcome Darrin Alfred, associate curator of architecture, design, and graphics at the Denver Art Museum. ]

Not long after S... More

This is the sixth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my fri... More

When Suzanne Stein invited me to become a blogger for Open Space my first thought, outside of being complimented, was how I would add one more thing to my crazy life. If you don’t know me, here ya go. For 40+ hours a week I’m the Director/Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. We produce 9 exhibitions a year in three locations, s... More

These first four images are from a collaborative curatorial project I did with the German photographer Matthias Geiger a few years ago. I’ve always liked this group. Then I heard Michael Arcega speak on Monday night, and he talked about his interest in pidgin languages. He put the Phillipines National Anthem, which is in Tagalog, through a computer Word file to get it “translated” into proper English, which of course came out as a pidgin English. (He then had an opera singer sing the new version). As a NY Times crossword addict, I thought... More

The event is now over. Thanks for coming! Hopefully the discussion was interesting and thought-provoking enough that you’d like it to continue it here in the Open Space online world. Please post any additional insights, unanswered questions, lingering thoughts, and overall criticism, and I will add my own recap and post-event thoughts in the com... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Carolyn Eames, who has worked at SFMOMA for 25 and 1/2 years, retires today. Carolyn started in admissions in 1984 when SFMOMA was still located on Van Ness Avenue. When the museum moved to its current Third Street location in 1995, she joined the Operations Department as the museum’s receptionist. It would be hard to imagine anyone else knowing as much as she does about SFMOMA. Carolyn, everyone here will miss you tremendously, and we wish you all the best!]

Do you collect anything?

I colle... More

You may have missed the Art Publishing Now summit and fair at Southern Exposure this month, but you can still get an overview of publishing activity in the SF Bay Area. These one- to two-minute videos offer capsule introductions to a handful (15) of the people behind the print (or web) in the SF Bay Area. Two longer conversations recorded before the event, with Stretcher and Art Practical, are included at the end. For more information on the weekend, or to visit the archives, click over to the APN website.

ARTHUR ALLAN was recently commissioned to do a Public Service Announcement for Yerba Buena Gardens. The announcement aired this past weekend at an event held in the gardens and was attended by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

(This Thursday, October 21st, at 7 p.m., I will be hosting an Open Space Thursday event — “Design Is Dead! Long Live Design?” — in the Koret Visitor Education Center at SFMOMA. More details are here.)

This past spring I was part of a search committee charged with finding the next chair of Graphic Design at the California College of the Art... More

[Our regular feature, Collection Rotation. Every month or so I invite a someone to organize a mini-“exhibition” from our collection works online. Please welcome none other than TYLER GREEN to Open Space for this month’s iteration. Welcome, Tyler!]

For years SFMOMA’s paintings and sculpture collection galleries effectively began in 1906, wit... More

This is the fifth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend ... More

Computer reading/animation of an excerpt from the The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975; reissued by Picador, 2008; ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42758-0.

Sometimes during my tenure as blogger, I will go see Hollywood blockbusters with people and document, in impressionistic fashion, our experience.

I went to go see The Social Network (2010, dir. David Fincher) with the poet and SFMOMA Community Producer Suzanne Stein. We saw the film at the Metreon and then talked about the movie. We talked about it on BART, and then over a beer at Doc’s Clock.

We both thought The Social Network was a really good movie, and we both thought it was funny that we thought it was so good. We talked about the narr... More

[Today’s post is from Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music. She’ll be here this Thursday introducing that evening’s screening, Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane.]

Jordan Belson is an enigma and a legend of the experimental film world. He has produced a remarkable body of over 33 abstract films over six decades, richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself. His films have been called “cosmic cinema,” and the imagery is not terrestrial — it is of skies, galaxies, halos, suns, stars, auroras. He works with a vocabulary of film images he’s created since the 1940s, but does not use compu... More

This is the forth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Darr, pr... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Rebecca Solnit is a San Francisco-based writer. Her forthcoming book Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas reimagines traditional map-making to chart not just space and place but people and time in 22 inventive maps. SFMOMA is issuing six broadside copies of seven maps, and collaborating with Soln... More

[For the last couple of years we've been posting “One on One” pieces from SFMOMA curators or staff. Now the column will feature artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding however they wish to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, we are very pleased to welcome Lindsey ... More

This is the third in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA). This Wednesday even... More

In “I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac,” Kathy Acker somewhat wryly describes the art world as “the bohemia of finances.” Still, questions of money and capital in the art world do transpire. Occasionally during my tenure as blogger at OPEN SPACE, I have posted discussions with local artists and curators about the economics of their practice. Tod... More

This past spring during New York Amory Week I found myself locked out of my Brooklyn sublet. Calling on another friend in town from San Francisco, I was happy to discover him and a new acquaintance at a local watering hole across town at three in the morning. He had shared a cab from Chelsea with a stranger who turned out to be Amanda Browder, the ... More

Tonight @ 7 p.m., Paul Clipson presents an extensive show of his work in Super-8 and 16mm in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater:

In previous posts I’ve waxed eloquent thusly:

“Experimental filmmaker Paul Clipson, who modifies the Dionysian-Romantic vision and cinematic practice of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie by a remote, Apollonian, graphic... More

The Berkeley Center for New Media and Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice recently hosted a gallery walk-through with some of the artists featured in Worth Ryder Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Knowledge Hacking, described as a project that “invites artists to use the university research environment as raw material for their work.” While many of the issues raised by this collaboration between BCNM and WRAG’s curator Anuradha Vikram deserve serious exploration, I want to mention here just one exchange that occurred during the panel... More

This is the second in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA). Tonight’s show at th... More

The first comprehensive exhibition of the work of Eadweard Muybridge, protean genius of early photography, is coming to SFMOMA next February. It will arrive by way of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and now Tate Britain, where I caught the show a day or two after it opened earlier this month. Tate Britain in Pimlico is the original Tate Gallery,... More

This is the first of a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and the San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).  This Wednesday evening’s show at the PFA features a semi-rare screening of Christopher Maclaine’s THE END, the exciting appearance of David Meltzer, and a super-rare visit by Wilder Bentley II, who in 1953 played Paul... More

[I’m going to try to commission event reports for each of the Open Space Thursdays discussions — first up is a report on last Thursday’s “Bay Area art writing” conversation, from writer and artist Ariel Goldberg. If you were there — or not — responses much welcome and encouraged.]

Getting Away with Language

Ariel Goldberg

True Story: earlier this month, I was at the ticket inspection stairs of SFMOMA when my pen got the hairy eyeball. I’m sorry, we’re pencil only. A security guard later offered me a pencil when I tried to use the ink.

Then Open Space Thursdays was born as a blog-comes-to-life event. Suzanne Stein introduced the invited conversationalists, and Dominic Willsdon proposed topics of discussion. As we sat with refreshments in stationary orbits of couches and chairs, our purpose was to discuss the interpretive language a museum may produce; art criticism as language of evaluation; and writing that exists alongside, while not about, visual art.

The evening p... More

[from SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Erin O'Toole]

The June 18 death of Joe Deal was a deep blow felt throughout the photography world. A widely respected and much loved artist and educator, Deal will be sorely missed by his former students, fellow photographers, and legion of friends in the community.

Although I never had the opportunity to meet Deal, I have long been an admirer of his work, particularly the photographs he made in Southern California in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Perhaps the fact that I grew up in Los Angeles in ... More

[For almost two years we’ve been running a regular “One on One” series of posts, featuring curators or SFMOMA staff on a single work of art from our collection. Beginning today, the column will feature artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding in any manner they like on a work of their choosing. It’s a distinct pleasure to begin this new iteration of the series with a post from Patricia Maloney, editor in chief of Art Practical.]

On September 11, 2001, I was walking down 6th Avenue and had reache... More

“Somehow it makes the painting feel more relaxed, instead of being pinned upon the wall like it’s being crucified … [The painting can] stand in its own shit and watch the other paintings being crucified on the wall.” — Chris Ofili

“The Triumph of Shit,” a screed against most contemporary art, by Donald Kuspit includes the memorable lines: “To paint is to stick the extra finger of the physical paintbrush up one’s psychic anus, forcing one’s body ego to excrete a painting,” and, “The artist has become an unreflective ... More

[Our host for next week’s Open Space Thursdays conversation event is artist Jessica Tully. She’s invited cephalopod expert Richard Ross and author and environmentalist Adam Werbach to join us in a participatory parlor game, as we consider the possible civic implications of the myths and metaphors surrounding the otherworldly octopus. 7 p.m. on ... More