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Missed connections keep popping up at the museum. It must be springtime!

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Opening Day!

Yesterday was Free Tuesday at SFMOMA:

In response to San Francisco’s beautiful weather I wanted to remind everyone to take in the sun.

“An intoxicating 9 minutes and 22 seconds video art piece.�Martynka Wawrzyniak, who has been known to make these strong visual treatments, lets chocolate be poured on her whilst remaining submissively still for nearly 10 minutes.

The Polish-born, NYC-based artist currently has work at the The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.”    purpleTELEVISION

video source from purpleTELEVISION

from SFMOMA’s digital engagement associate, Willa Koerner:

A couple of weeks ago on SFMOMA’s Facebook page, I put out an invitation for folks to take their relationship with art to a whole new level: by professing their feelings in the form of a love letter. If you’ve ever written a real love letter to somebody, then you know all about th... More

Before making this artwork, which itself was originally a text piece for a wall, John Baldessari had the epiphany that his art was horrible, or that he had not been making what he wanted to be making. So after 13 years living a lie as a painter — he was fed up at not getting anywhere with his work — he did what any self-respecting artist shoul... More

The exhibition Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams is on view at the museum through February 20, 2012.

A LEAF, treeless
for Bertolt Brecht:

What times are these
when a conversation
is almost a crime
because it includes
so much made explicit?

(Paul Celan, quoted in ACTS, A Journal of New Writing, eds. David Levi Strauss & Benjamin Hollander, Issue 5, 1986. Thanks to John Sakkis for sending.)

François Mori/AP

Libyans wave national flags in Tripoli’s Green Square, renamed Martyr’s Square, during morning prayers Wednesday on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Libyans are also celebrating the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi.

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“The children are drawing pictures of the new Libyan flag, something that would have gotten them arrested only two weeks ago.” (National Public Radio, 31 August 2011)

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The first time I ever heard of Tripoli was when, as a child, in a school classroom, our music teacher taug... More

July 22 was the hottest day in New York City since 1977. It was still 100 degrees until 10:00 at night, and if you poked your head out the window nobody was outside. Earlier in the day, looking north, I shot this view from atop of the Empire State Building with the Hudson River to the left and the East River to the right.

Click on the picture for... More

What’s cooking? Click below to find out!

Note to self: Drunk dialing is not a good idea.  Note to self: Whenever it seems like a good idea to send a sexy/funny picture of myself without a shirt – don’t do it. Note to self: When I feel angry don’t post the angry message on Facebook because, duh, people can read it. Note to self: Even if I am at the gym working out and I... More

A group of California College of Arts MBA in Design Strategy students met at the museum for a social outing and activity. They were asked to take three pictures of things that moved them, and as you can see, some took that literally by reenacting Eadweard Muybridge‘s Jumping over boy’s back (leap frog) on the third-floor landing. A new spin on Jumping in Art Museums?

Thanks to Laura Ramos for snapping this great pic and to Jessica Watson for posting it on Flickr!

We choose the Flickr pictures from anything tagged “SFMOMA.̶... More

Thanks to Leonard Davich for catching this shot of a visitor adding one more blue color block to Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Yellow Blue White and Black with White Border (1952–53) from the Fisher Collection.

“I’ve been experimenting for a while with overexposed photos as a way to enhance and isolate subjects, colours, and forms,̶... More

Carter Young took this photograph of two people chillin’ in Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More installation. The work includes 70 assignments completed by strangers and sent in to the artists, selected by SFMOMA Media Arts Curator Rudolf Frieling and artist Stephanie Syjuco. It’s nice to see quiet moment... More

“Palimpsest, i.e., a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.”H.D.

Painter Philip Guston & poet Clark Coolidge are major collaborators in the tradition of poets and painters working together. In case you haven’t seen it, there’s a delicious new book from the University of California Press, Philip Guston... More

Because April 2008 was when Open Space first appeared, I thought it might be nice to mark its third anniversary with an interview with the poet Jack Spicer from June 17th, 1965. It is published by Jacket magazine online. Click HERE to read it.

And to get a sense of the impact he has had on the San Francisco creative community click HERE to read a s... More

On April 12th, 1861, Fort Sumter, a Union fort, was attacked, marking the start of the Civil War. The War would went on to claim over 600,000 lives and pit brother against brother, as they say.

In 1863, after centuries of institutionalized slavery, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation created the legal framework for the freei... More

Please consider donating to any of a number of organizations supporting earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster relief efforts in Japan.

The developmentally disabled artists at Creativity Explored have been drawing their own renditions of SFMOMA artworks for years, and the organization’s current exhibition The Masters features thought provoking interpretations of beloved and well-known works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection. We’re excited about the exhibition and... More

“Palimpsest i.e. a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” H.D.

this is not a poem

only a day to remember

I say the war is over…

the war is over…

H.D., “May 1943,” Collected Poems: 1912-1944

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Window, National Lawyers Guild [photo: NC]

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Daniel G. Marchand caught Robert Arneson’s No Pain (1991) spying on a museum visitor.

“We were visiting the museum and having a coffee in the [rooftop garden] when I noticed this woman reading her newspaper, being watched by the “head”. I just had to get to ground level and capture the moment.”

Thanks Daniel!

We choose... More

Dear Louise Bourgeois,

You probably don’t remember me, but I met you on my very first trip to New York. I was staying with my friend Yael Bartana on St. Mark’s Place, and she was nice enough to let me stay for like two weeks. So anyway, one day I was with another friend who had gone to your house in Chelsea on a class trip. When we were walking... More

If this sculpture, Hail to Reason (2004) by Rachel Harrison, could be said to have a face, then I believe these two are standing nose to nose. Ugo52, aka Hugo Molina, happened upon this scene and documented it for us:

“I was visiting the museum with a friend that day when I saw this person by that sculpture without moving or doing anything but standing in the position for a long time, so I said to myself that has to [be] a powerful piece of art and I just took the picture.”

You can see this work by Rachel Harrison in the 5th-floor g... More

To make their friends jealous in the 19th century people would bring home souvenir photographs from their trips. Long before Kodak’s Brownie camera popularized the concept of the snapshot and before Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, or Google, there was the cheap 8 x 10-inch albumen print. Back then you could pick them up in stores or from str... More

Matthew Felix Sun took this photograph of museum visitors adding their own colors to Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green Black Red, 1996. “This picture was a chance photo of mine,” he writes. “I don’t know the people who posed for this wonderful tableau—”

Thanks, Matthew!

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week fro... More

Masami Kawazato, a.k.a mamichan, made her own personal installation on the 5th floor turret bridge with her gray shoes and dress alongside the steel mesh of the bridge.

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

You may remember a Flickr pic of the week post from last May of Sol Lewitt’s Steel Sculpture. Here’s another take on the same work that I couldn’t pass up. Christie Landrie took 365 pictures of herself in 2010, and we were lucky that she took #273 at SFMOMA.

Thanks, Christie!

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything... More

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

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

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

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!

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!

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.)

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

“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