Nathaniel Dorsky’s films are the opposite of language, and don’t need it. He talks about poetry, but only because he is talking about what’s ineffable, about what is beheld by the eyes, but also held inside of the body. His camera stares, and when, in the dark of the theater, the slow, silent images are illuminated by light, look... More

I almost spilled coffee on myself yesterday when I read this bombastic headline in the New Republic: “How Occupy Changed Contemporary Art.” Then I laughed out loud.

It’s just that I die inside a little bit more each time when I read yet another “art review” written by someone purporting to be an authority on the subjec... More

“Every rhythm is a sense of something.” —Octavio Paz

Filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot reuses photographs and bits of old film already set tightly inside the grammar of history. He stacks or lists the sequences of archival pictures into new rhythms and velocities. The films are inflected by the aging body of media; the familiar grain of film sto... More

Has social media made us all stupid? During the Boston manhunt for the marathon bombers, the #tweeters, the Facebookers, and Reddit users spread all kinds of erroneous rumors, provided tons of false leads, and misidentified several individuals as the bombers. If that wasn’t bad enough, several mainstream media outlets ran with stories that weren’t true.

First, during the Boston manhunt, CNN’s John King breathlessly reported the bomber was a dark-skinned male who had just been arrested. Of course, that went viral immediately. U... More

Nobody wants to get that call, but at 3:41 am this morning I got it. Carlos Villa had passed away. I didn’t want to write an obituary, and so I am not mentioning his numerous awards and such – so this is not an obituary – OK?

It’s just that I had worked with him at the San Francisco Art Institute and saw how he had been a role model and father figure for so many students in the Bay Area and not saying something about that doesn’t seem right.

Also – it’s worth noting that while a cast of colorful charact... More

Since I first saw Vertigo at the age of 17 at the Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto, it’s been a fantasy of mine to see it in its original imbibition Technicolor format. Unquestionably the greatest 35mm color motion-picture format ever created — due to its dye-transfer process, which produced prints known for their fantastically beaut... More

This is part two of a two-part essay on “Until the Quiet Comes”- a film by Kahlil Joseph that recently won the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Special Jury Award. Part one of the essay covered the film’s opening sequences and their relationship to African cosmology. This concluding part of the essay focuses on what I perceiv... More

I’m still looking at Kahlil Joseph’s film “Until the Quiet Comes.” Released in September of 2012 and more recently the 2013 recipient of the Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Special Jury Award – it is presently my favorite piece of art. The consensus of opinion amongst my peer group is that Joseph’s short film is pure genius.... More

Ever since seeing Chris Marker’s La Jetee decades ago, I’ve loved movies about time travel. My addiction to Turner Classic Movies delivers a subtle kind of time travel movie every night. Take for example Van Dyke’s San Francisco, made in 1936 about an event in 1906. Seen from my position in 2012, the nuances of time echoes are enough to get my head spinning. The earthquake was for them a relatively recent phenomenon–thirty years previous. However, those thirty years were tumultuous–World War One, Prohibition, the Depression. Victorian San Francisco of 1906 must’ve seen very quaint to these hardened people. We are seventy-six years displaced from that Clark... 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

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

“… One of the reasons that we as cultural producers fail to organize — or even communicate — effectively around economic issues is because we’re taught to believe that funding is a private concern, a lack of money is shameful, and payment is linked so conclusively to merit that further knowledge can’t possibly benefit, or harm, any pote... More

I find myself drawn to Open Space when I have a story to tell about “behind-the-scenes” experiences I have in my role as a curator in rural Northern California. I was recently invited to Redding to judge the 62nd Annual Student Art Show at Shasta Junior College. It was an experience that I am still thinking about two weeks after the fact.

Back in the days when the NEA was a tad wealthier than it is today, there was a wonderful program that sent practitioners around the country to do site visits at peer organizations. The ostensible ... More

Today’s post on Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots, by SFMOMA Managing Editor of Publications Judy Bloch, refers to Picturing Modernity, SFMOMA’s regular rotation of our photography collection, as well as State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970, currently on at the Berkeley Art Museum. Highway ’71 Revisited cross-posts today at the excellent BAM/PFA blog, blook.

No sooner had Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots (1971–73) come off the wall at the close of SFMOMA’s 1970s-focused installation of Picturing Modernity than the work app... More

Whenever I feel surprise at having become an an art dealer, I remind myself that at 14 years old, like some suburban Medici prince, I commissioned my first work of art. For the grand sum of twenty dollars, or bag ‘o weed of same value, I got my friend Lance, who was something of an artist, and something of a hustler, to paint the cover of Rel... More

From Lisa J. Sutcliffe, assistant curator of photography.
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the Tohoku earthquake, which measured 9.0 on the Richter scale and triggered the massive tsunami that hurtled toward the northeast coast of Japan, devastating everything in its path.

Karen Fiss

Though I first encountered Ana Mendieta and Francesca Woodman when I was barely 20, few artists since have made as strong an emotional and physical impact on me. I suppose one could write this off as the romantic over-identification of a young woman wrapped up in her own artistic attempts to express a female voice that would resist silencing. Their deaths bracketed my college years — Woodman committed suicide the year I started at Brown, while Mendieta died in a fall from a window (pushed, as I and many others believe, by her husb... More

As I made my way through the pantheon of exhibitions on display for L.A.’s current citywide retrospective Pacific Standard Time (PST), which celebrates the city’s fertile postwar period of art production, I couldn’t help but ponder: what of today’s many visionary young L.A. artists? What does all this history mean to them? Given the fifty-f... More

The enormous conceptual art project also known as Occupy Wall Street is in the news again, and this time it’s all about Oakland. Last week 409 people were arrested during confrontations with police. But in a march of 500 protesters that means almost everyone was arrested. And it’s weird because around the country, even in New York, where I am, the protests have all been nonviolent. So maybe it’s worth asking: Why is Oakland so different? Why are these kids throwing things at police when they know they might end up in jail? Mor... More

“The only thing you have to hold on to is your own natural savagery, and your ability to recognize your own natural savagery has been given to you by this art, which in turn is the cause of your anxiety about not being able to recognize anything but yourself. And that is the last thing one wishes to recognize.”
—Frank O’Hara

There were... More

Occasionally, I find myself paying more attention to the visitors in a museum than to the works on view. Does this make me a voyeur? Maybe, but I doubt I’m alone. I don’t think there is any other art form that offers as much face-time with other people’s experiences — with the possible exception of the mosh pit at a rock concert. In the lat... More

Commodified Cinema: Art, Advertising, and Commodities in Film, plays at noon on December 6 as the free Tuesday program. Museum and program admission are free.

Some years ago, I tipsily cornered Peter Kubelka at a small gathering being held in his honor. Here was my opportunity to grill him regarding his stunning Schwechater, surely the greatest one... More

Did you hear about the Wall Street rioting over the weekend? If you are outside of New York, you probably didn’t. For some reason there was a media blackout. Early Sunday morning people reportedly heard gunshots and explosions. Then there was talk of guns and tear gas. Police clashed with masked men. Eye witnesses even reported seeing angry mobs of people trying to kidnap what looked like bankers and Wall Street executives. Hundreds of people dressed in black were seen fighting police in the street near the Stock Exchange.

Early reports said Occupy Wall Street protesters were to blame — their camp over at Zuccotti Park is just two blocks away — and so some were confused as to what exactly started the skirmish. But surveillance footage confirmed one thing: that it was not the angry mobs at Occupy Wall Street, but actually it was a number of scenes being shot for the new Christopher Nolan film, The Dark Knight Rises.

(more…)

Guy Fawkes Day has been celebrated for centuries in Great Britain, but it only became popular in the United States after the graphic novel V for Vendetta was made into a movie. In V for Vendetta (by Alan Moore), the main character is a masked anarchist who seeks to topple the fascist government ruling the Great Britain of the near future. The mask he wears is purported to be the face of Guy Fawkes. In the film, the masked avenger, named V, methodically assassinates and/or bombs his way through the key figures in the regime, hoping to inspire oth... More

After a terrific run at SFMOMA this past summer, during which we welcomed more than 350,000 visitors, The Steins Collect has now moved on to Paris, where it opened October 5 as Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso … L’aventure des Stein. Part of what I heard again and again about our exhibition is its appeal had as much to do with the stories as... More

Please welcome curator John Zarobell on Images in Dialogue, currently on view.

Paul Klee has long been known as an artist’s artist. Though he was a seminal figure in modern art, he has never had the name recognition of a Picasso or Matisse. But he worked prodigiously (the catalogue raisonné of his work is nine volumes), inventing more worlds tha... More

If big banks, credit card companies, and Wall Street firms can get hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and loan forgiveness, why can’t the students of America? Or more precisely, the art students of America? The way I see it is that the most creative people in the country are waiting tables, slaving away as secretaries, and doing menial jobs because their art degrees haven’t translated into earning potential. As a consequence, possibly tens of thousands — or maybe hundreds of thousands — of creative people around the country have given up their art and switched to non-art activities in order to pay the rent. So in 2009 (most recent year for census data), out of the 89,140 BFAs, 14,918 MFAs, and 1,569 PhDs granted in fine arts, just how many of those people are really making a living in the arts? My guess is: not many.

Does that seem fair? When the housing bubble popped and the economic crisis began, politicians never expected the bankers and Wall Street traders to give ... More

In celebration of our landmark exhibition The Steins Collect, Open Space is pleased to present a special two-part feature from essayist, cultural critic, and poet Wayne Koestenbaum. For this year’s Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture, SFMOMA commissioned Wayne to write and perform a new work related to the exhibition. His topic: painting and writing. The result: “The Desire to Write.” Enjoy. (Part one is here.)

The Desire to Write about André Derain

Matisse’s 1905 portrait of André Derain attracts me because thick paint ... More

As we enter the last few weeks of our landmark exhibition The Steins Collect, Open Space is pleased to present a special two-part feature from essayist, cultural critic, and poet Wayne Koestenbaum. For this year’s Phyllis Wattis Distinguished Lecture, held on June 2, SFMOMA commissioned Wayne to write and perform a new work related to the exhibition. His topic: painting and writing. The result: “The Desire to Write.” Enjoy. (Part two, next Monday.)

The Desire to Write about Blue Nude
Writing, alas, is never nude. Grammar cloth... More

When I was living in San Francisco I didn’t realize just how many guys went to prostitutes — not once in a while, but all the time. It was like no big deal to them. One person I worked with told me he just wasn’t a relationship kind of guy and said that he couldn’t stand all the nagging, all the complaining, and all the BS girlfriends would give him. Hookers, he told me, knew what their job was, did it, then left. No endless talking about problems, no criticism, just simple.

Well one day he and I and my other coworke... More

Our guest writer today is SFMOMA’s head of graphic design, Jennifer Sonderby.

Blueberry Muffin, Cochise, Lake Placid, Soft Leather, Turtle Trail. Unlike the Stein family, the group of names that describe the paint on the walls of The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde are anything but modern. The hues, on the other... 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. The exhibition is also an unusual collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum, and over the course of the year, Open Space presents texts from each of the 10 curators.

What are the “things” in the phrase “the more things change”? In the old adage, the word may mean anything or every... More

I am standing on top of the Empire State Building in New York, where King Kong once stood, and it’s tempting to try and calculate how many tiny, insignificant San Franciscos would fit into Manhattan. It’s tempting because I had the idea to just levitate all my friends and the whole peninsula across the country and just sort of set it down somew... More

Our guest writer today is architect Chris Downey. Welcome!

Stepping through the lobby and into the atrium of SFMOMA, you may be greeted by strange sounds of dripping water, metallic pings, or intermittent clicks. Just as you think you might recognize the sound, it vanishes. Sometimes it seems to travel right past you, while other sounds seem to swerve somewhere near you. It’s hard to tell, though, as there’s no evidence of anything around that could be making the noise — or so I’m told. I cannot see and came to visit the museum with a number of friends, most of them also blind or visually impaired. We came to experience Sonic Shadows, the temporary site-specific sound installation by San Francisco’s own Bill Fontana. We didn’t know it at the time, but it was Bill’s work that greeted us as we stepped toward the atrium.

Bill Fontana, audio clip of site-specific installation Sonic Shadows, at SFMOMA, 2011.

This was an incredible experience on many levels. We had the opportu... More

In a previous post I blogged about being detained for jury duty for the first time and the peculiar sort of conceptual art that unfolds in the courtroom. At this point, my service is complete; a decision was made. I’m at liberty to discuss the details, which were, to my surprise, notable enough to be reported in a compact Yahoo News item that a f... More

The Chase plays tonight at 7 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, as part of the retrospective  Arthur Penn, a Liberal Helping, showcasing 9 of the 10 major works by the great director. Click here for more information about this series.

In 1965, the United States was splitting apart at the seams. In February, Malcolm X was assassinated.... 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. The exhibition is also an unusual collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum, and over the course of the year, Open Space will present texts from each of the 10 curators.

The periods of most inventive change in 20th-century art were times of economic prosperity and relative political tra... More

Last week I was called in for jury duty. Like most everyone who was instructed to report to the Civic Center courthouse that morning, I hoped to be ignored, or to find a way out of it with strong opinions. Alas, I was the second person to be called into the jury box for interrogation as potential juror. While I was screened by the defense attorney,... 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. The exhibition is also an unusual collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum, and over the... More

Bouvard and Pécuchet, characters in Gustave Flaubert‘s last (and unfinished) novel, are two copy-clerks, men of a certain age who meet by chance on the hot summer streets of 1840s Paris. As they walk, live, and explore the world together, they discover an infinity of shared habits and interests: writing their surnames in their hats in case of loss, inspecting public works, and an eternal quest for knowledge.
In dozens, even hundreds, of discussions and arguments characterized by thesis, antithesis, and on occasion, synthesis, B and P skim over a dynamic world of discoveries and information, dipping into book after book as if floating through an old-fashioned library. Converting a surprise legacy from an estranged uncle into a country homestead, they take up agriculture, scientific experimentation, and an autodidactic confusion of theory and practice, hoping to live in a state of eternal emergence. Many of us might want to do the same today.
Their crops fail to grow, or combine i... More

On the occasion of Open Engagement, a conference hosted by the Social Practice Department of Portland State University, Christian Nagler and I presented our research under the title “The Aging of Social Practice, or How to Get to Know Your Parents through Political Economy.” As the final gesture of the presentation, we offered a direct address to the subject of our research, the Baby Boom Generation, those born between 1946 and 1964. This address was an attempt to translate some of the basic tenets of socially engaged art practice by rewriting a text by Charles Baudelaire entitled “To the Bourgeois,” the preface to his text about the Salon of 1846. It was written two years before the French revolution, and was a respectful challenge to the bourgeois majority to consider the new prerevolutionary currents of Parisian art practice. Thanks to the wonderful Brandon Brown for pointing us to this text.

As 40% of the adult population, you are a majority — in number ... More

Max Weber famously distinguished, in Theory of Social and Economic Organization, between “charismatic” and “institutional” forms of authority. Navigating these tendencies is among the salient challenges of working as a curator in a large museum. One’s own inspiration and convictions come to bear, alongside those of collaborators and colle... More

Looking down Woodward Avenue on a February morning, 2011

It was easier to tweet when I was in Detroit than it’s been to blog after returning home. It’s quite a stretch to fly from warm, wet and crowded San Francisco to cold, dry and quiet Detroit, and the minute you land in snowy Romulus and drive into town you are reminded of the Thre... More

This may seem like a facetious question, but I’m really quite serious. Naturally, I’m not talking about the plastic soda bottle you’re kicking down the sidewalk or the paper cup you should be composting, but about physical items that are part of the cultural and historical record. The way we think about preserving cultural record... More

Media and genres collide and merge in the work of Russian artist Anna Parkina, and her works on paper — on view now — reflect on the changes in Moscow since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, assistant curator John Zarobell on working with Anna on her current New Work exhibition.

On February 25 SFMOMA opened New Work: Anna Parkina, an exh... More

Designed in collaboration with renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the exhibition How Wine Became Modern explores the visual culture of wine. It includes historical artifacts, architectural models, design objects, artworks and installations, including a “smell wall,” to probe many aspects of wine culture. Today, welcome Erin H... More

Yes, that’s right – the F-22 Raptor can literally fly faster than a speeding bullet! Think about that. While an average bullet flies between 500 and 1,000 mph, the Raptor is capable of flying at speeds between 1,200 and 1,500 mph. Since the F-22 is one of the fastest aircraft flying today, it is also one of the most expensive. According to the the Government Accountability Office the F-22 costs $361 million per per jet. All those millions in tax dollars translate into an airplane that is super stealthy, supersonic and almost invisib... More

I’m an archivist of what I call ephemeral films — films made for specific purposes at specific times, not intended for posterity. These include industrial and advertising films, home movies, and the occasional educational film. A few weeks ago, I drove down to Hollywood to move some film into our cold storage vault. Since we don’t ha... More

While poets and writers may wonder if anyone pays attention to their words, nobody can deny the power of images.

Just ask the religious right. They are, after all, the ones who object the loudest, push the hardest, punish the harshest, and pray the loudest. More than anyone, they know the value of symbols, signs and metaphors. Lest we forget – th... More

So, how do you feel about Paris Hilton?

It’s a funny question, I know. Funny, because largely I find no one has much of any feeling at all “about” Paris Hilton. Especially these days. When I put the question on the Facebook, “So, how do you feel about Paris Hilton?” OPEN SPACE blogger Scott Hewicker responded wisely, “Who?”

And yet w... 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. The exhibition is also an unusual collaboration among all five curatorial departments at the museum, and over the course of the year, Open Space will present texts from each of the 10 curators.

Things Will Have to Change

The title The More Things Change was Curator of Architecture and Design Henry Urbach’s idea. ... More

In 2004, I really wanted to try and watch 1 Night In Paris, or at least to try and see what it looked like. The stills that accompanied news articles about its release made it seem like a painting: the scene seemed so green, filthy, the Rembrandt-light of surveillance footage. Not real sex with real bodies, but colliding glass and Black American Ex... More

On red-letter days in the gastronomic calendar, from harvest home (“thanksgiving”) to the saturnalia at the turning of the year, the issue of “food miles” has become a staple of conversation around Bay Area dining tables — a ritual culinary mea culpa which no tithing by gourmet penitentes at local farmers’ markets c... 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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

[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

[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

I just spent a whole month of my life glued to all manner of screens devouring world cup football (or soccer as you call it here in America). There were many things I should have been doing, instead I was watching the beautiful game unfold in South Africa. Now I know that for most of the American public this is a sport that lacks excitement, a game can end with no one scoring any goals; and confuses, the offside rule. FIFA’s refusal to allow instant playback is seen as archaic and nonsensical. But if you grow up anywhere outside the USA, th... More

This is the second in a two-part series on a screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love, to be presented by the Film on Film Foundation as part of its on-going series Film Maudit/Accursed Films, on Sunday, August 22nd at 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive.  Disclosure: this is a presentation in which I’m personally involved.  Co... More

This is the first in a two-part series on a screening of Franco Zeffirelli’s Endless Love to be presented by the Film on Film Foundation on Sunday, August 22nd at 4 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive.  Disclosure: this is a presentation in which I’m personally involved.  Consider yourself warned and invited! Click here for more informat... More

This week SFMOMA hosted a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography, with two intensive panel discussions Thursday evening and Friday afternoon. Yesterday’s reports are here. The initial texts from the symposium participants are here. Other blog posts addressing the question “Is Photography Over?” can be fou... More

This week SFMOMA is hosting a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography, with events last night and this afternoon. Today’s reports on last evening’s discussion are from Joshua Chuang, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Yale University Art Museum, and Sarah Miller & Brendan Fay, both postdoctoral fellows,... More

This month SFMOMA hosts a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography. Thirteen thinkers and practitioners will convene for a two-day state-of-the-medium summit, in advance of which they’ve each been asked to respond to the symposium’s central question: Is photography over? These texts will be used to kick off the opening panel discussion this Thursday, April 22. Throughout the month, we’ve been featuring three additional responses here at Open Space. Very pleased to have a post today from Sandra Phillips, the senior curator of photography here at SFMOMA. Look for day after event reports this Friday and Saturday mornings.

If photography is over, it might be useful to remember when it seemed as though photography had just begun. In 1964 I was a very serious young painting student who had grown up in New York and visiting museums was a part of my life as well as my study. One day I discovered the Steichen Center for Photography at the Museum of Mode... More

This month SFMOMA hosts a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography. Thirteen thinkers and practitioners will convene for a two-day state-of-the-medium summit, in advance of which they’ve each been asked to respond to the symposium’s central question: Is photography over? These texts will be used to kick off the o... More

This month SFMOMA hosts  a major symposium on the current state of the field of photography.  Thirteen thinkers and practitioners will convene for a two-day state-of-the-medium summit, in advance of which they’ve each been asked to respond to the symposium’s central question: Is photography over? These texts will be used to kick off t... More

SFMOMA turns 75 this month. We’ve just published a new collection catalog, 75 Years of Looking Forward, highlighting, as the curators of The Anniversary Show and the catalog, Janet Bishop, Corey Keller, and Sarah Roberts, write, both “the inarguably significant and the admittedly idiosyncratic” of the museum’s collecting, ex... More

SFMOMA turns 75 this month. We’ve just published a new (and very beautiful) collection catalog, 75 Years of Looking Forward, highlighting, as the curators of The Anniversary Show and the catalog, Janet Bishop, Corey Keller, and Sarah Roberts, write, both “the inarguably significant and the admittedly idiosyncratic” of the museum&#... More

“What was it? A meteorite that fell to earth? Or a visitation from outer space? Whatever it was, there appeared in our small land a miracle of miracles: the ZONE. We sent in troops. None returned. Then we surrounded the ZONEwith police cordons… We did right… Although I’m not sure…” –From an interview with Prof. Wallace, Nobel Prize winner, on RAI.  (epigraph to Stalker)

With every passing year the legend of Andrei Tarkovsky grows more intense and intoxicating. In a career spanning a quarter-century, Ta... More

[The film series The Future of the Past, starting this Saturday, explores the rich cinematic history of imagining the future. Released from 1965 through the iconic Orwellian year 1984, the films present not-too-distant worlds that reflect extremes in the social, moral, and political trends of their time.]

A few months ago Frank Smigiel, associate c... More

Getting a purchase on Chantal Akerman, the Paris-based film and video artist, who over the last forty years has created a monumental body of work from ignored and abandoned images, and the hidden rhythms of the everyday, is no small or easy task. There are many routes of approach, and almost as many identities and communities to claim her. The da... More

[SFMOMA associate curator of Public Programs Frank Smigiel arrived on the scene here a year and a half ago, and in record time he's implemented a whole new SFMOMA programming vehicle, Live Art. This blog has been following his projects with interest, in part because of their boundary-pushing & often community-attentive nature, but also because, on more than one occasion, there's been cabaret involved. Here Frank waxes prophetic (as opposed to nostalgic) on last year's Valentine's Day-era cabaret extravaganza Weimar New York: A Golden Gate Affair, and its seedling relationship to his ever-expanding set of Live Art programs.]

Just before the holiday weekend last year I was immersed in a week of activities surrounding Weimar New York, a radical cabaret created by curator, producer, and all-around downtown New York impresario Earl Dax. The show uses Weimar-era Germany as a rubric & reference to gather burlesque, cabaret, comedy, drag, and East Village-flavored performance artists. The ... More

Bay Area artist Stephanie Syjuco weighs in here on the successes and pitfalls of ‘participatory’ art, and takes a close look at New York design firm Freecell‘s Stack-to-Fold project, currently in use in our second-floor “D-space“.

“(T)hese objects, once they are assembled, will lend themselves to certain function... More

[This Saturday, as part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and timely to our winter holidays, we'll be screening Bay Area filmmaker Caveh Zahedi's I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore. Winner of the prestigious Critic's Prize at the Rotterdam International film festival, this real-life documentary comedy follows Zahedi on a road trip to Las Vegas w... More

[This Saturday! As part of our "Vegas Highs, Vegas Lows" film series, and in conjunction with the exhibition Double Down: Two Visions of Vegas, we're screening Viva Las Vegas (1pm) and Showgirls (3pm). Not to be missed!]

Never have there been two films so ripe for reassessment as George Sidney’s Viva Las Vegas, and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Made thirty years apart, they both reside in that basket reserved for the culturally unsanctioned. Maybe it’s due to the stain of Vegas — that fata Morgana that has traditionally made the highfalutin see red. Now, in the true era of anything goes, in which the Vegas aesthetic has established itself as the norm, it’s just possible their time has come…

Why reassess an Elvis movie? ‘Cause this one’s so damned fun! There are a few decent Elvis movies. Viva is the only great one. The King is as close as the United States ever came to producing an autochthonous deity. The lack of a worthy consort mig... More