For quite a few years I was lucky enough to have some friends living in Paris. Most of them were going to École des Beaux-Arts for photography. They would let me come stay with them for a week or two and we would go out to clubs, drink, smoke cigarettes, and spend half the day making and then eating breakfast in our underwear. But on one trip I ex... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Through the miracle of science, the Art in Space Center has built a state-of-the-art rocket containing all the vital technology for a successful liftoff into the outer limits of our galaxy.... More

Happy Holidays from all of us at Open Space — see you in the New Year!

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Today’s proposal, the last in the sequence, takes the form of a conversation between Dieter Roelstraete and Monika Szewczy... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“The Six Gallery was established in September 1954 with the intention that there might exist in the San Francisco area some outlet for the works of local artists who had heretofore been met with varying degrees of indifference, disinterest, or hostility by the larger commercial galleries and museums of art, where the concern seems to lie less with local, contemporary artists, than with o... More

As part of the Here, There, and Elsewhere festival, SFMOMA’s Public Programs team had the opportunity to pair with sister institutions around town. With Carolina Caycedo’s piece We Have All the Ingredients, we took over seminar spaces and the roof gardens of both the California Academy of Sciences and the San Francisco Art Institute. Carolina took us from the microscopic to the telescopic, but the treat of each performance was the cleansing tea that she prepared for us. Get a leg up on the New Year and try this delicious cleanse at... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an expansion project planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. And now and then, the editors will present “proposals” discovered elsewhere. Today: Paulina Ołowska, Yael Bartana, and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Above is an image of Christian Kerez’s projected plan for the Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej (Museum of Modern Art) in Warsaw, Poland. It’s a buildi... More

Over the last few months, my California College of the Arts undergraduates and I have been considering the “formal” questions raised by, about, and within the Occupy movement. In addition to exhibitions (like the one at Yerba Beuna Center for the Arts last summer/fall) devoted to Occupy’s visual culture, we studied the forms of protest, assembly, performance, governance, and communication that have arisen in this and other contemporary activist environments. We also analyzed coverage of Occupy in mainstream and indie media, and... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an expansion project planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k.asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Amongst those proposals the editors will intersperse some related works drawn from history. Today: Ed Ruscha.

Ed Ruscha’s pa... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“This piece was a long time ago, but was at a special time for me, a good time for my work. San Francisco was the breeding ground, the creative space, in which I could dream of Victorian lad... More

Show Me the Money is an earnest attempt to get people to talk about money in the visual arts.

Alternative Exposure is a grant program run by Southern Exposure and funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, with additional support by Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Alternative Exposure was launched in 2007 in order to support the independent, under-the-radar work of artists and small groups that are a defining feature of the San Francisco Bay Area art community. Since developing Alternative Exposure with SoEx, the Andy Warhol Foundation has invested in the creation of a growing national network of regional regranting programs, supporting the Idea Fund in Ho... More

The 2012 SECA Art Award recipients have just been announced: Zarouhie Abdalian, Josh Faught, Jonn Herschend, and David Wilson.

Many Open Space readers will know that the biennial SECA Art Award was established in 1967 to honor individual achievements of Bay Area artists through an exhibition, an accompanying publication, and an honorarium. In a nic... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. This animation by Ian Dolton-Thornton is today’s proposal.

Ian Dolton-Thornton is an artist based in Oakland. Find grup... More

Tomorrow at noon (Pacific) Willa Koerner, our social media genius, and I are hosting SFMOMA’s first-ever crowd-sourced public program: we’ve invited five contributors to our Art Microhubs Tumblr project to join us online to talk about the relationship of smaller arts organizations to their local communities. Why do these places matter?... More

Show Me the Money is an earnest attempt to get people to talk about money in the visual arts.

Daily Serving is an international online arts magazine with 35 different contributors from around the world. In addition to exhibition reviews, they have columns reserved for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format (#Hashtags); an art advice column (Help Desk); a weekly column tying together artistic practices, exhibitions, and popular culture based in Los Angeles (LA Expanded); artist interviews; and fea... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“I began tending honeybees as preparation for a performance/film project called Immersion [1973–76]. At the time the 16mm film was a natural extension of my sculptural site investigations with moths, wild bees, living systems, harvesting and decay cycles, weathering and erosion processes — all the projects in one way or another involving a human intervention, gesture, or residual tra... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Today’s proposal is by Daniel Marcus.

As the political class moves lemming-like toward the fiscal cliff, partisans of the ... More

Who and what are these three figures, proximate yet separate, together yet apart? Each head and pair of arms emerges from a terra-cotta stand-in for the body: an imposing amphora, absent its pointed bottom, perched on its (silent) metal-covered mouth. Like a tiny fleet navigating across the museum’s stone floor, they seem to be caught up in a mom... More

Raised in a Midwestern amusement park, Jonn Herschend is a visual artist and filmmaker whose work explores fiction, reality, and the narrative structures that we employ as a way to explain the chaos and clutter of our everyday lives. He is also co-founder/editor of THE THING Quarterly (along with Will Rogan). More information can be found on ... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Amongst those proposals the editors will intersperse some proposals and projects drawn from history. Today: Russian cosmist philosopher Nikolai Fedorov.

Via Boris Groys, “The Artist as Curator of Bad Art,” in Exposition Imaginaire: The Art of Exhibiting in the Eighties, Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst, ‘s-Gra... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Amongst those proposals the editors will intersperse some historical proposals and projects drawn from the history of art an... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Today let us bow to the Mail Queen, aka Patricia Tavenner,and her long reign as a contributor to and curator within the global network of mail art and artists’ stamps. The Oakland-based artist adopted this nom de plume around the time that she began teaching courses on the “hidden” history of women artists. In 1972 she cofounded the Northern California Women’s Caucu... More

Location & Practice: A Roundtable Discussion

In this brief excerpt from the exhibition catalogue for Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art, Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, in conversation with SFMOMA curators Dominic Willsdon and Apsara DiQuinzio, talks about what it has meant for Futurefarmers to have made a commitm... More

This Saturday, as the centerpiece of the Here, There, and Elsewhere festival, SFMOMA is hosting a daylong symposium, on- and offline, on the subject Creating the Periphery. What and where is a “periphery” in contemporary art? When does a single city contain elements of activity that feel both center AND periphery? Aaron Levy, the execut... More

A bit of sound for you, as we roll into the multi-day, multi-program Here, There, Elsewhere festival. Playlist of tracks from some of the countries included in  Six Lines of Flight, provided by the exceptionally awesome Chris Dixon, proprietor of Explorist International, a record store in San Francisco’s Mission district, specializing in eclectic and esoteric vinyl from around the world. Chris can often be heard DJing around the city, too, under the name Phengren Oswald, spinning ’60s and ’70s soul, international underground ... More

SFMOMA is collaborating with 7 other Bay Area art institutions on 15 events over the next 12 days — beginning tonight (6 p.m., FREE) at Kadist, with an evening of seven live performance proposals. The semifinalists presenting this evening were selected through an open call for actions and gestures that emphasize visual commentary on urgent soci... More

Sunday, October 28, 2012

I had no idea it was going to be a Bay Area art reunion when photographer Mariah Robertson convinced me to help make costumes at MOMA/PS1′s First Annual Artist’s Halloween Carnival and Parade. I also had no idea — until the last minute — that Courtney Love was the official judge for the costume contest.

I ... More

In 2013 SFMOMA will close for an ambitious expansion planned to last nearly three years. Reflecting on the closure, grupa o.k. asked several friends and colleagues to imagine their own proposals for a museum in San Francisco. Today’s proposal is by Zarouhie Abdalian.

The Museum of the Witnessing Object is dedicated to exhibiting objects as a... More

In Summer 2013 SFMOMA will close its doors to the public to accommodate construction for an impressive expansion, currently planned to last nearly three years. And while these months of closure will be filled with off-site programming and exhibitions at other places, it will nevertheless be felt keenly among those who care about art and its institu... More