SFMOMA’s Schwab Room was to the gills with representatives of San Francisco’s culinary pioneers this past Friday, May 31, for The Kitchen Sisters’ The Making of a Charitable Food Movement, coordinated by Mission Chinese Food and Sharetable.org, and featuring presentations and sample bites from La Cocina, Tartine, and Flour + Water, among othe... More

Bringing you stories of Bay Area craftspeople and pioneers, from the makers of violins to jars of jam to the queer car service, Homobile, The Kitchen Sisters are Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, radio producers and collaborators since they first met in 1979. The pair are currently hosting The Making Of… at SFMOMA, part of the museum’s four-day... More

Founded in 2011 by Bay Area arts patron Ann Hatch, The Workshop Residence is based in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood and hosts eight individual artists—four local, four international—per year. The for-profit program pairs its resident artists with local factories or visiting artisans in order to design and make locally manufactured, af... More

The Treatbot Ice Cream Karaoke Truck trades in—yup!—ice cream and karaoke. Based in the San Jose area, they’ll serve you up a scoop of Eastside Horchata or Mango Ice and throw in the opportunity to belt out your tune of choice to whoever’s listening. Today, Thursday, May 30, and tomorrow, Friday, May 31, they’re parked outside SFMOMA on T... More

SFMOMA commissioned the online project Agent Ruby by acclaimed San Francisco artist Lynn Hershman Leeson in 2001–2002. Since that time Agent Ruby—an artificial intelligence internet entity—has conversed with online users, which has shaped her memory, knowledge, and moods. On May 23, 2013, art historian, playwright, and poet Moira Roth met Age... More

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the paintings of Sydney Cohen, the Oakland-based artist who is also an adjunct painting/drawing professor at California College of the Arts. We met there last summer teaching painting in the Pre-College Program on the Oakland campus. She is warm and unpretentious, and we became fast friends commiserating... More

We are presenting daylong screenings of Al Wong’s Twin Peaks (1977) in SFMOMA’s Phyllis Wattis Theater on Free Tuesday, May 7. Over the course of a year the San Francisco native shot this contemplative journey, winding around the distinctive hills in the city. Twin Peaks was featured at SFMOMA in a spotlight screening of his work in 197... More

On Saint Patrick’s Day, at Travis Air Force Base in California, an aircraft nicknamed the Hanoi Taxi lands with twenty POWs aboard.  There are more than four-hundred family members there to greet them, and journalists ready to capture the moment.  Slava Veder snaps the shot (at the bottom of this post) that brings this reunion home in a single image.  In the far left, Lt. Col. Robert Stirm has his back to the camera; his back to the war you could say.  In front of him, his fifteen-year-old daughter, Lorrie, rushes towards h... More

The measuring of time is fine-tuned in accuracy down to the leap-second, on New Year’s Day of this year. The epoch of this scale, however, goes back to midnight, January 1, 1970. The scale also measures time before 1970, but in negative numbers. At 15:30:08 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), on Saturday, December 4, in the year 292,277... More

Watching the mesmerizing coverage of the Mars Rover landing this summer, I was reminded of video artist George Bolling’s 1974 pioneering, real-time broadcast event Jupiter Flyby which attracted over 25,000 visitors to the Exploratorium in San Francisco between November 26 and December 2 of that year. During the event, Bolling was stationed at NAS... More

Join Open Space columnist Chris Cobb on Sunday for an experimental live stream from the New York living room of Margaret Porter Troupe and Quincy Troupe, as the Harlem Arts Salon hosts Nobel Laureate, novelist, and grande dame of American letters Toni Morrison. Joining Ms. Morrison in conversation will be preeminent poet, writer, and MacArthur R... 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

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

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

This is Part 2 of an interview with Archana Horsting of Kala Art Institute. Go here to see Part 1.

graphic developed with Lauren Venell

Do you ever start programs because you find a funding opportunity, or does it work the other way around (you develop the project and then you look for the funding), or do you develop programs in partnership with a funder?

Archana Horsting: Well, all of those happened. While we have a long history of just doing and then finding the funding as we go along. You’re better off convincing people and educating your funders about what you want to do and what you are... More

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

For this installment of Show Me the Money, I will be focusing on the Kala Art Institute. Kala’s mission is to help artists sustain their creative work over time through its artists-in-residence and fellowship programs, and to increase appreciation of this work through exhibitions, custom printing, art sales, public programs, and education. Additionally, Kala offers art education to the general public and public school children through its on-site classes and workshops and its Artists-in-Schools program.

We are at an interesting point in the histories of nonprofits. In the burst of utopian exubera... 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

[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

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Last week Berlin-based artist Christian Jankowski was at the museum. He was on a trip through parts of the U.S., beginning in Chicago for the Expo art fair; followed by his partner Jorinde Voigt's exhibition opening at the Nevada Art Museum; then on to L.A. to his gallery, Regan Projects, and the ... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. I recently caught up with Ed Osborn, who is at SFMOMA to install his work Night-Sea Music (1998) on the museum's third-floor landing. The work will be on view until November and if you can't get to the museum in person, check out this video of the piece in action. Ed is a sound artist living in Pr... More

Today at Modern Art Notes, Tyler Green interviews American photographer Robert Adams. SFMOMA has many pictures by Mr. Adams in the collection, and an interview with the artist is a rare treat. Thanks to Tyler for sharing a clip of the podcast — on Adams in relation to Carleton Watkins — with us! Please welcome him.

The American photographer Robert Adams is the subject of a nine-venue retrospective that has recently arrived at the Yale University Art Gallery, the institution that organized the exhibition. Titled The Place We Live, the exhibi... More

Originally from the musically rich Motor City, Detroit, Michigan, Oluyemi Thomas has been a San Francisco Bay Area resident since 1974. Thomas studied both music and mechanical engineering at Washtenaw College. He creates ordered compositional free music that he acknowledges as part of, but not limited to, what is called jazz. Over a career spannin... More

Originally from the musically rich Motor City, Detroit, Michigan, musician/composer/multi-instrumentalist Oluyemi Thomas has been a Bay Area resident since 1974. He studied both music and mechanical engineering at Washtenaw College. Thomas creates ordered compositional free music that he acknowledges as part of — but not limited to — what is cal... More

My interest in doing this interview with Oakland musician Oluyemi Thomas stems from a desire to get a wide range of answers to some questions that have held my interest for a number of years now. For example, how does the jazz aesthetic show up in the visual field? And, what are the visual markers indicating that we are “seeing” jazz? My goal is to explore the intersection between jazz music, spirituality, and ritual and to explain how these things are made present in the visual field. There are so many unexplored implications in the notion... More

Maybe it has something to do with turning 29, but it seems that all I want to do lately is talk with older generations of queer artists and political organizers about their lives and work. Last week I met with Lenn Keller, a Bay Area filmmaker and photographer whose practice straddles the worlds of artmaking, political activism, and queerness. I first saw Lenn’s work in 2010 when her exhibition Fierce Sistahs: Art, Activism, and Community of Lesbians of Color in the Bay Area, 1975–2000 was on display at the San Francisco Public Library. Fie... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests ... although today I'm posting all seven questions with Tammy Fortin, because I couldn't bring myself to cut a single one. Tammy is a 9-to-5er at SFMOMA as the assistant to the curator of media arts, Rudolf Frieling. She is also a musician and writer. Tomorrow is also her last day at the museum. Miss you already, Tammy!]

Do you collect anything?

I collect a lot of things by accident. I’m a sentimental person. If you gave me a scrap of paper and you wrote a really nice note on it, I woul... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Lynn Marie Kirby is a San Francisco–based artist and teacher. Her collaborative video project with Li Xiaofei, Hello? 你好!, is on view through June 17 as part of the Descriptive Acts exhibition.]

Do you collect anything?

Collaborators.

If you could steal any artwork in the world to have up in your home, what would it be?

Must be Vermeer, judging from the picture that Alexis Petty just took of me for this blog. Alexis and I meet frequently in this café as we are collaborating on a projec... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Anthony Discenza is a visual artist, adjunct professor at CCA, and resident of Oakland. His sound installation A Viewing (The Effect) is on view through June 17 as part of the Descriptive Acts exhibition.]

Do you collect anything?

I maintain an extensive collection of beautiful, hand-blown anxieties, fears, and intimations of doom.

If you could spend an afternoon with anyone, living or dead, who would it be?

Hmm, that’s a tough one. Maybe Philip K. Dick, he’s def in my top five. (... More

If it is true that there has never been a movement for justice without the arts, and I believe it is, then the recent history of movement building in the Bay Area exists in part through the work of Melanie Cervantes and Dignidad Rebelde, the collaborative project of Cervantes and Jesus Barraza. If you have ever attended a protest in the Bay Area organized by a coalition of social justice organizations and activists or the Occupy movement, you have seen their work: bold digital and screenprints depicting community members demanding justice and a... More

[Five questions to SFMOMA artists, staff, or guests. Alejandro Cartagena is a photographer from Monterrey, Mexico. His work is on view in the Photography in Mexico exhibition through July 8. This Friday he speaks live on the web for Rooftop TV. Blue Bottle Coffee also created a flight of ice cream inspired by Cartagena's photography. Yum!]

Do you co... More