Juliet Clark

“I will talk to you of art, for there is nothing else to talk about.”
—Maxwell H. Brock (Julian Burton) in A Bucket of Blood

California, 1959: in an apartment on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, Jay DeFeo, a central figure in the city’s artistic bohemia, labors over a mammoth monochromatic painting called Deathrose. Meanwhile... More

Over the four weeks leading up to the presidential election, four separate designers/design firms have tackled the not-so-small problem of rebranding the United States. More detailed posts on this project series can be read here and here. Three weeks ago was Jeremy Mende/MendeDesign. Two weeks ago, MGMT. design. Last week, Playlab, Inc. This we... More

Joseph Becker

Can there be architecture without buildings? What if a wall or a floor went on forever? The works in our current show, Field Conditions, pose these questions and more about the construction, experience, and representation of space. In an attempt to expand our general interpretation of architectural ideas, its focus is on an array of p... More

Our regular feature Collection Rotation. Each month someone special organizes a mini “exhibition” from our collection works online. Today, please welcome SFMOMA’s Anne Bast Davis.

Orphans in the Museum

Once, in my past position as intellectual property associate at SFMOMA, I received a request from a writer who wanted to reproduce a work by Tina Modotti, the Italian-born photographer-turned-communist-revolutionary who worked closely with Edward Weston (and whose photographs of Mexico were featured in a recent SFMOMA exhibition... More

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

“Several intentions were announced in early press releases, but one of the most important functions of the gallery was to serve as a (store)front for my ‘guerilla art’ activities, for which the imprimatur of the gallery structure confers legitimacy and lays down a smokescreen … A basic philosophy of the Samore Gallery has always been subversion, sabotage, and upheaval.”

�... More

The triumph of reality television may be everyone’s loss, but surely scripted drama faces the bitterest defeat. Yet the devil’s advocate in me feels it’s a challenge to be met, and that only the most original and audacious works today are up to the task. Even when overtly sensational, today’s cinema verite generally seems secondhand in comparison to “reality.” All of which brings us to Gallery Girls.

Bravo’s series focusing on young women in the New York art world is “reality” tailored and ... More

“The medium of performance, with its economical nature and inherent element of surprise … has proved most appropriate to the precari­ous, unstable context of life in Cali..” — Michèle Faguet

Zoe Butt, email; Sunday, September 27, 2012
Greetings from the air — somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, I imagine — moving from Bangkok to Fukuoka to Kitakyushu.

I am sitting in the dark and trying to work out where my time is inside my body. I think it’s quite confused. The head is a swirl of visual similarities where geography starts to me... More

Over the four weeks leading up to the presidential election, four separate designers/design firms will tackle the not-so-small problem of rebranding the United States. More detailed posts on this project series can be read here and here. Two weeks ago was Jeremy Mende / MendeDesign. Last week, MGMT. design. This week: Playlab, Inc.

The San ... More

Lisa Sutcliffe

Over the past twenty-five years Naoya Hatakeyama has examined the structures industrialized societies create to claim and process natural resources. Natural Stories, his first solo U.S. exhibition, follows these systems of production from their point of departure — beginning, for instance, at a limestone quarry and tracing the mine... 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 name A.R.E. was open to interpretation, encouraged in fact by a chalkboard at the stairs. This was apt for a space that was interested in the present moment, resistant to being fixed and going on the path toward institutionalization taken by the first wave of alternative spaces in the 1970s. Artists for Revolution in the Eighties is how A.R.E. was best known and listed on the group cal... More

In July of 1976, I was fresh off my Kindergarten graduation from Hadley Elementary, eager to join the older kids who went to school for a whole day. No more of this going home at noon nonsense. In order to enjoy this privilege, though, one last obligation loomed: Marching in the Bicentennial parade. In Revolutionary War-era garb.

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“Bay Area artists’ communities rub up against (and are occasionally funded by) the power centers of wealthy risk-takers, disciples of innovation who possess the will to promote social transformation while remaining largely uncritical of (or actively complicit in) military technology and the erosion of civil guarantees of access to resources... More

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

graphic designed by Lauren Venell

Works Progress is currently run by artists Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson. Based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, it focuses on creating “collaborative projects that inspire, inform, and connect; catalyzing relationships across creative and cultural boundaries; and providing new platforms for public engagement.” Works Progress began in 2009 as a group effort with three major projects: Salon Saloon, a live-action... More

Two more spaces from our Art Microhubs Tumblr resource project, aggregating information about the important smaller-scale art and culture spaces you organize, frequent, or love. We’re highlighting a few on Open Space each week, and thinking about a broadcast conversation among contributors late fall. Participate!

What’s it called and where... More

The presidential debate wasn’t even half way over when the Facebook page for “We have women in binders” reached 80,000 likes. Just as quickly, countless silly images could be seen on Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and on blogs across the political spectrum. In case you missed it, here are a few of them.

Over the next month leading up to the presidential election, four separate designers/design firms will tackle the not-so-small problem of rebranding the United States. A more detailed post on this project series can be read here. Last week was Jeremy Mende / MendeDesign. This week: MGMT. design from Brooklyn, NY.

Is there anything more American tha... More

Porous Boundaries

With SFMOMA’s expansion and renovation scheduled to start in 2013, I have been thinking about Swiss architect Mario Botta. Botta designed the current San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which the Norwegian collective Snøhetta’s sleek new design will eventually gut and grow south and east to create a striated mesa-like mass. Botta’s red brick Third Street façade and black-and-white atrium tower will remain intact, but the current building’s stately formality, symmetric geometry, and byzantine flavor will be softened, ... More

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

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What’s it called and where is it?

Rock Bar

It is a bar and it is located in San Francisco. The bar program is directed by artist and curator Brion Nuda Rosch.

Who goes there?

Neighbors & Intellectuals. Artists and Non-Artists

How does it work?

It’s a bar. It works like a bar. You stop by for a drink. You talk. You play songs from the Aquarius Records curated jukebox. You talk more.

Part 1 of a conversation between Vietnam-based curator and Sàn Art Director Zoe Butt and art historian and writer Moira Roth.

Vandy Rattana, Bomb Ponds, 2009

Moira Roth, email; Saturday, September 21, 2012; Berkeley, California

After the pleasure of spending time with you recently in the Bay Area, while you were visiting here, I love it that we ... More

Over the next month leading up to the presidential election, four separate designers/design firms will tackle the not-so-small problem of rebranding the United States. A more detailed post on this project series can be read here. First up: MendeDesign from San Francisco.

(more…)

A reply to an unusual inquiry received by the SFMOMA Education Department 10/7/12:

Dear Clock Smith,

Thank you for your inquiry as to what sort of chainsaws SFMOMA has in stock. Currently we have two different versions of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting, both of which include the artist at work on his site-specific “building cuts,” in wh... More

Baby is a pop word, an incantation that has launched many a platinum teen idol to stardom. The limitless palace of popular music is overrun with roaming “baby”s in each wing— screaming ones, cooing ones, babies on fire—but I’m not sure any song, even those that make the word’s maternal connections literal, has mined its meditative romanticism, the way it takes you back, quite like Donnie and Joe Emerson‘s “Baby.” Here, aside from random references to moonlight and sandy beaches, the words around the... More

When I was living in San Francisco, it was hard to find really good used records. In New York however, they are all over the place and it seems the more I look, the more I find. So for the benefit of those who thought record collecting was dying out, I am here to say it’s not. In fact, a whole lot of great records can be bought for about $1.0... More

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

Organizations and Art Spaces – Directories and Personal Histories:
Project Space Survival Strategies
A web-based publication that functions as an organizational resource through the presentation of surveys regarding the survival strategies of currently fifty independent alternative project spaces internationally, organized by Elysa Lozano for Autonomous Organization and presented by Invisible Venue.

SITE/PROJECT PROFILES by Temporary Art R... More

Is there a still-thriving tradition of gay (or at least homoerotic) collage, with the Bay Area as its potential capital? That question has lingered in my mind when I’ve glued images from After Dark to Maria Callas box sets (or placed old horror movie hand gestures in new contexts), and when I’ve met other local gay men devoted to simila... More

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

Bay Area ceramicist Richard Shaw and his wife, painter Martha Shaw, have collaborated on music and art for many years; their renowned artistic family includes Alice Shaw and Virgil Shaw. This weekend an estimated 750,00 people will ‘walk in the park’ to attend the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, an annual free music concert in San Francisco.

[Today we have a twist on the usual 5 Questions interview: I asked the cast of Rashaad Newsome's Shade Compositions each the same question. See the performance TONIGHT at 9pm in the museum's Atrium! FREE with museum admission.]

What’s your favorite tool?

Rashaad Newsome: My computer

What’s your favorite tool?

Top row: Sam Zimman – m... More