In celebration of Slow Art Day, we invited four special guests to commandeer SFMOMA’s Twitter account for 30 minutes of live tweeting from the galleries. Artist, writer, theorist Tina Takemoto closed out our week with a slow close look at Glenn Ligon’s White #13. Check out the rest of our hijack transcripts here.

In celebration of Slow Art Day, we’ve invited four special guests to commandeer SFMOMA’s Twitter account for 30 minutes of live tweeting from the galleries. This afternoon’s team of hijackers: Will Brown, a collaborative project based in a storefront space in San Francisco’s Mission district. Will Brown is Lindsey White, Jordan Stein, and David Kasprzak. Their slow-looking session on Francis Picabia’s L’Homme aux gants (Man with Gloves) included responses from visitors in the gallery, as well as from an open call o... More

In celebration of Slow Art Day, we’ve invited four special guests to commandeer SFMOMA’s Twitter account for 30 minutes of live tweeting from the galleries. Here’s the transcript from yesterday’s hijacker — the legendary Guillermo Gómez Peña.

In celebration of Slow Art Day, we’ve invited four special guests to commandeer SFMOMA’s Twitter account for 30 minutes of live tweeting from the galleries. Yesterday artist Gay Outlaw took the reins to talk about Trisha Donnelly — enjoy the transcript!

Matthew Harrison Tedford

Finding My Place in History

Growing up in suburban Southern California I developed a rather indirect relationship with history. Except for the occasional Franciscan mission or Mexican rancho, I rarely experienced history firsthand. I felt like Indiana Jones if I was in a building constructed before World War II, and there w... More

Emily Jain Wilson

For a long time I went to SFMOMA just for Pollock. First, in a Danville school bus helmed by my rock ’n’ rollin’ high school creative writing teacher; later, BARTing in from Berkeley just to stick my nose in the lower left hand corner of Guardians of the Secret. “Jackson,” I’d ask the painting, “how did you do that? I wanna do that!” Still fascinated with the means of production, I now mostly beeline for Mondrian’s Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1935–42.

I kind of can’t believe it. Mondrian? Ya k... 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

Recently I worked on a digital hub for the SFMOMA website, called Story Board, which expands on the exhibition Six Lines of Flight and other SFMOMA projects by braiding together museum-produced content with links to the web at large. The interface allows for new associations among the different stories that we tell around artworks and artists. For me, the most compelling of these stories are those that deal in cultural critique.

If, like me, you have progressive values, it’s hard not to feel trapped by culture — even counterculture. Capital... More

Christian L. Frock

A pair of your daughter’s shoes sits on your desk: diminutive yellow Mary Janes with a leather ruffle T-strap. Of course, she didn’t choose them — she was an infant when you bought them, accessorizing vicariously through her. Once they were outgrown, you kept them like a souvenir from your life and a distillation of that mo... More

Miranda Mellis

Certain models of mind say that consciousness and environment are inseparable. As a figure (a representation of consciousness) contiguous with an abstracted ground (environment), Richard Diebenkorn’s Woman in Profile (1958) enacts and prophesies this theory of indivisibility. Her left hand is becoming a paw while her right seems to melt into the creamy table. The outer seam of her torso literalizes the concept of a blurred border, in this case between a painted skein of light and a lighted skein of paint. The visible (paint) an... More

Tim Svenonius

I cannot say for sure whether I already saw a recumbent figure there beneath the dark foliage, before finding the protagonist’s name nested deep within the title. It’s difficult now to look at this cocoon of feathers and flowers without pondering who is entombed or entangled within.

Its surfaces erupt in clusters of fabric flo... 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

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

 Corina Copp

There’s something inside a human being that no one has thought of putting into a machine.

— Lee Miller, 1945

Thought to mark the occasion of her marriage to Roland Penrose in 1925, the title of a Valentine Penrose mixed-media piece, “À mon Époux, Reconnaissance (Dit-on),” translates as “To my husband, with gratitude (as they say).” Eventually, V. Penrose left R. Penrose (they remained lifelong friends), and R. Penrose fell for and married Surrealist photographer-turned-docujournalist Lee Miller, who had redisc... More

“We’re so in tune with technology now that we slip into it so well. . . . We’re like cyborgs in the way that we can sort of use a camera as an extension of ourselves.” — Janet Cardiff, in SFMOMA’s Artcast

Thanks to the social networks that have built webs through and between our lives, navigating the everyday has become an activity that... More

“Making Sense of Modern Art Mobile,” SFMOMA’s handheld multimedia tour, includes a one-minute, two-second clip of Andy Warhol and an unidentified bottle-blond man making a silkscreen painting. The clip, titled Andy Warhol at Work on the SFMOMA website, is captioned: “Archival film footage showing Andy Warhol making a silkscreen painting.”... More

The return of the One on One: artists, poets, and others reflect on single works in SFMOMA’s collection. Please welcome writer Robert Glück.

In 1951 Jess made The Mouse’s Tale, the first of his large collages, or “paste-ups,” as he called them. Only a few years before he had been a radio-chemist working on the production of plutonium for the U.S. government. He abandoned science and rational method when he dreamed the world would come to an end in 1974. The nude in The Mouse’s Tale crouches on contradictory perspectives of a ... More

During Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees. You can listen to the series here. For our final SECA Art Award talk last week, Hung Liu (1992 SECA Art Award) spoke about Rosana Castrillo Diaz’s (2004 SECA Art Award) Untitled.

Hung Liu on Rosana Castr... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30pm an artist talks about something on view. Last week, Rebeca Bollinger (1996 SECA Art Award) talked about  Giorgio Morandi’s Natura Morta (Still Life), “translating” the painting five ways. Two of the translations are represented in detail below.

Rebeca Bollinger on Giorgio Morandi’s Natura morta (Still Life).

Detail, Rebeca Bollinger on Gio... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week Jordan Kantor (2008 SECA Art Award) talked about On Kawara’s MAR. 16, 1993, from the Today series:

Jordan Kantor on On Kawara’s MAR. 16, 1993, from the Today series

Jordan Kantor (2008 SECA Art Award) is a San Francisco–based artist. When he delivered the talk on On Kawara archived here, h... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week Josephine Taylor (2004 SECA Art Award) talked about Mitzi Pederson’s Untitled:

Josephine Taylor on Mitzi P... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30pm an artist talks about something on view. Last week, Chris Finley (1998 SECA Art Award) talked about Vija Celmin’s Blackboard Tableau #1 :

***Our audio recording ... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week, Shaun O’Dell (2004 SECA Art Award) talked about Kamau Amu Patton:

Shaun O’Dell on Kamau Amu Patton.... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week, Maria Porges (1992 SECA Art Award) talked about Janine Antoni and her sculpture Lick and Lather:

Maria Porges o... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week, Kathryn VanDyke (2000 SECA Art Award) talked about Agnes Martin and her painting Falling Blue:

Kathryn VanDyke ... More

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30 p.m. an artist talks about something on view. Last week Squeak Carnwath (1980 SECA Art Award) talked about Vija Celmins’s  Blackboard Tableau #1:

Squeak Carnwath on Vija Celmins’s Blackboard Tableau #1. Carnwath mentions Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés and Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World.

Squeak Carnwath (1980 SECA Art Award) received... More

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

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve restyled our weekly in-gallery talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art awardees. Each Thursday at 6:30pm an artist talks about something on view.   Last week, sculptor David Best (1977 SECA Art Award) talked about Joan Brown, and her painting Noel in the Kitchen:

David Best on Joan Brown’s Noel in the Kitchen, and in conversation with the audience.

David Best (1977 SECA Art Award) is well-known for his fantastic art cars and immense temporary temple construc... More

This is called an architectural drawing, but is it really? To look at it, the architecture seems almost spectral, while the landscape pulses with vitality. We are used to thinking of architectural drawings as prospective — putting to paper a structure that does not yet exist, detailing precise instructions for its realization. There is, of course, a long tradition of visionary drawings whose features will never be actualized in three dimensions. But Solomon’s work is something else again: studies of existing buildings where the primary ... More

Tomorrow night sculptor David Best (1977 SECA Art Award), well-known for his fantastic art cars and immense temporary temple constructions at Burning Man, kicks off a new iteration of our One on One talks with an in-gallery chat about Joan Brown’s Noel in the Kitchen. It’s going to be awesome.

In conjunction with Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, we’ve temporarily restyled our weekly curator talks with a superb lineup of past SECA Art Awardees, who will give us their particular takes on something on view. Mark cale... More

When I was 22 I couldn’t imagine life going on any longer. It wasn’t because I was sad or depressed, though I probably was. It was because I could not see beyond that year, at the end of which I would graduate from college. That event — my graduation — had loomed for so long as a destination, I could not fathom that it could also be a starting point.

The summer before my final fall semester I had a conversation in a bar on Cape Cod with a boy who woke up every morning that August and drank vodka with cranberry juice, refilling his glass... More

Gay Outlaw constructed Nest (1999) out of colored pencils, glued together and then belt sanded into the shape of a wasp nest. It is one of a series of pencil pieces the artist created in the 1990s.

Critics relate Outlaw’s work to minimalism. Fair enough. Outlaw acknowledges the influence. Her sculptures explore materiality, form, and space... More

from Jessica Brier:

It is unusual to think of an artist as contemporary, of our own moment, years after her death. Even more unusual is a museum exhibition that focuses on work made in art school and as the artist was just beginning to develop a practice. SFMOMA’s retrospective Francesca Woodman, organized by Corey Keller, does both. Woodman’s work seems to touch a nerve in almost everyone who looks at it; many viewers connect the strong emotional content of the work to her suicide at age 22. But to me this emotion is also (and maybe more i... More

Images have always had as much to do with the hand as with the eye. This photograph is elegant proof of image-making as an inherently physical, haptic act.

Although, is this what we call an image? It’s not the result of someone holding her hand in front of a camera for an exposure. “Digital effluvia” comes from pressing — the hand of the attributed photographer’s relative, in this case — into the toxic gelatin silver of the wet negative paper or plate. “Effluvia” meaning an invisible emanation, a lightless image made rather than... More

Click image for larger view and better detail of the individual photographs.

Faced with the totally administered, a sort of mysticism becomes a last resort, a line of flight from countless mundane tyrannies of the contemporary soul. In Matt Mullican’s Bulletin Boards series, the existence of everyday objects — a lamp, a sewer grate, a telephone, the banister of a staircase — is rendered both generic and numinous. Photographs of interior spaces (windows, doorframes, hallways) redouble the mental experience of looking. There is no whole, ju... More

Our One on One series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome media artist and writer Abigail Child.

Postscript:

I write the piece below and am reminded by a friend that Lux’s photographs verge on kitsch... More

On a visit to SFMOMA back in 2007, I turned a corner on the second floor and found myself sharing the gallery space with a heaping blue mountain. I walked the perimeter slowly, curious, tentative, dwarfed. As I came to the front of the blue mass, I saw a wooden table, and seated at this table, a live human figure hunched over a book, hard at work.

I think Julia Margaret Cameron understood that a photograph cannot present a clear distinction between a sleeping child and a dead one. In a photograph there is no motion to indicate breath: no warm arm to touch, no murmur or cry. The connection of an infant to its own life is barely established, and for most of human history, tenuous.

A sleeping i... More

This summer we enjoyed a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honored writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gave a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwork on view.... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwork... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwo... More

This summer we’re enjoying a special poets-in-the-galleries series, organized by Small Press Traffic. Inspired by The Steins Collect, the series honors writer Gertrude Stein and her relationships with the visual artists of her day. Each Thursday evening in July and August a poet gives a reading, talk, or performance about an artist or artwor... 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

Our guest today is writer and editor Juliet Clark.

“Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many.”—Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

There are so many things to see in The Steins Collect, it w... More

This is the seventeenth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my frie... More

This is the sixteenth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend... More

This is the 15th in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Da... 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

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today I’m so pleased to welcome artist, educator, and writer Arnold J. Kemp.

Untitled, 1933

( )

( )

( )

( )

( )

( )

Here is the statue of queen whats-her-name
she feel fever roof
a real black mother of black equestrian vivacity.

Perhaps you are too.

yes yonder
you you you

But nothing
Blond Negress
but no

other bodies are coming to take her c... More

This is the fourteenth in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Dar... More

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today our guest is Jill Dawsey, acting chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and former SFMOMA assis... More

This is the 13th in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Darr, ... More

Jack Spicer was an American poet, born in 1925 in Los Angeles, and something of the grit and the gold of Southern California clung to him throughout his life, even after moving to Berkeley, then San Francisco, when the Second World War ended in 1945. There’s supposed to be a giant feud between LA and SF, but I can’t say I’ve seen it in actio... More

Robert Bechtle on Richard Diebenkorn’s Coffee (1959). “An artist looks at those hands and says, ‘That guy knows how to paint hands, but he’s not trying to prove it to you. They’re doing what they need to do to get that coffee cup up to her lips, and that’s it.’ ” Click thumbnail for larger version, yo... More

Our beloved Megan Brian, education and public programs coordinator, who can clearly do anything, stepped in at the 11th hour when one of our speakers couldn’t make her talk, and gave us this brilliant bit on Marilyn Minter’s Strut (2005). More on the artist.

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen:... More

Artist (and recent SECA awardee) Kamau Patton on Nata Piaskowski’s Untitled (Playing Handball) (1950).

We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen: tomorrow, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA&#... More

Artist Leslie Shows on Arthur Dove’s Silver Ball No. 2 (1930). “I love the literalness of using metallic silver paint to depict a silver ball … yet he also uses this silver paint in the atmosphere around the silver ball, so the silver depicts not only silver but depicts the luminousness of moonlight, luminousness of the atmosphere... More

Jeffrey Fraenkel opened his San Francisco photography gallery more than 30 years ago. On Diane Arbus, and A Young Brooklyn Family Going for a Sunday Outing, N.Y.C. (1966, printed ca. 1971): “I come back to her work because of what she tells me about what it’s like to be human.” Thanks so much, Jeffrey.

NEWS: We’ll be revisi... More

Kaja Silverman, art historian and film theorist, on Robert Rauschenberg’s Cy + Roman Steps (I – V) (1952).

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January... More

Poet Lisa Robertson, on German artist Eva Hesse’s Sans II (1968). “Identity is the state’s authority.”

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last... More

Rachel Rosen, director of programming for the San Francisco Film Society, on Eadweard Muybridge’s Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill (1877).

NEWS: We’ll be revisiting the 75 Reasons to Live talks on the big screen on Tuesday, January 4, 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Join us!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks him... More

This is the 12th of a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian Darr, pro... More

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome artist John Davis, who also works for the museum part-time as a film projectionist.

MYTHOLOGY IN FACT

I was initially drawn to t... More

This is the eleventh in a multipart series unofficially conjoined to the publication of Radical Light: Alternative Film & Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, and the accompanying film series currently being presented by the Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco Cinematheque (in partnership with SFMOMA).

With my friend Brian... More

Our “One on One” series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding to works in SFMOMA’s collection. You can follow the series here. Today’s post is more “Two on Several” than “One on One”: Every year since 1974 the photographer Nicholas Nixon has made ... More

[Our "One on One" series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding  to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, please welcome Cincinnati poet, the marvelous Mr. Dana Ward ... And a happy belated to Art Garfunkel, 69 last Friday.]

When I set out to write about Cory ... More

Bill Fontana is a composer and sound artist. SFMOMA has commissioned what will be a truly fantastic new site-specific installation by the artist, opening this month.  Bill talks here about his appreciation for the sound qualities of Dan Graham’s 1994 sculpture Double Cylinder (The Kiss).  I remember that after his talk, one listener sugges... More

[Our "One on One" series features artists, writers, poets, curators, and others from around the country, responding however they wish to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, very pleased to welcome Darrin Alfred, associate curator of architecture, design, and graphics at the Denver Art Museum. ]

Not long after S... More

[Today’s post is from Cindy Keefer, archivist and curator, Center for Visual Music. She’ll be here this Thursday introducing that evening’s screening, Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane.]

Jordan Belson is an enigma and a legend of the experimental film world. He has produced a remarkable body of over 33 abstract films over six decades, richly woven with cosmological imagery, exploring consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself. His films have been called “cosmic cinema,” and the imagery is not terrestrial — it is of skies, galaxies, halos, suns, stars, auroras. He works with a vocabulary of film images he’s created since the 1940s, but does not use compu... More

[For the last couple of years we've been posting “One on One” pieces from SFMOMA curators or staff. Now the column will feature artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding however they wish to a collection work of their choosing. You can follow the series here. Today, we are very pleased to welcome Lindsey ... 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

[For almost two years we’ve been running a regular “One on One” series of posts, featuring curators or SFMOMA staff on a single work of art from our collection. Beginning today, the column will feature artists, writers, poets, curators, and others, from around the country, responding in any manner they like on a work of their choosing. It’s a distinct pleasure to begin this new iteration of the series with a post from Patricia Maloney, editor in chief of Art Practical.]

On September 11, 2001, I was walking down 6th Avenue and had reache... More

Carey Perloff is the artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater. She likens Robbert Flick’s Along Ocean Park, Looking West, Summer (1980) to a curtain rising at the theater. Thanks, Carey, for so fantastic a talk. Readers, click the thumbnail for a larger image and slightly better view on the small pictures that make up the whole work... More

Kenneth Foster is the executive director of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He’s speaking here about Joanne Leonard’s Sad Dreams on Cold Mornings (1971), and particularly on the competing impulses and contradictory themes taking place in this picture. Thank you, Ken!

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? Last January, during SFMOMA’s three-day 75th anniversary celebration, 75 people from the Bay Area creative community gave extremely short talks — 7.5 minutes or less! — on a single collection work of their choosing. Someone called it “manic splendor” — and it was. You can follow the 75 Reasons to Live talks as we post them by checking in here.