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.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash ... 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.

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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:

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Jordan Kantor on On Kawara... 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:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Pla... 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:

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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:

Audio clip: Ad... 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:

Audio clip: Adob... 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:

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Squeak Carnwath on Vija Celmins’... More

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 husband, Carl A... 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:

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David Best on Joan Brown&... 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.

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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

( )

( )

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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 Darr, proprietor of the great Bay Area cinephilia blog Hell on Frisco Bay, I’ve been scouting out the San Francisco locations used in Christopher Maclaine’s Masterpiece, THE END. What began as an attempt to identify and document what physically remains of the often mysterious places at which THE END was shot has evolved into a larger project to also analyze the film, and to identify all its many actors and extras, all of whom appear uncredited. To read the full version of these preliminary remarks, including info on how YOU can participate in this project, click here. For further information on Maclaine, chec... 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, you might find it helpful while listening to the artist.

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 Manh... 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: 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’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.

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’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.

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.” [Jennifer Sonderby's 75 Reasons talk on Leslie is here.]

NEWS: 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’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 che... 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 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’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.

Kaja Silverman, art historian and film theorist, on Robert Rauschenberg’s Cy and the Roman Steps (I, II, III, IV, 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, 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.

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 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.

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 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.

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, proprietor of the great Bay Area cinephilia blog Hell on Frisco Bay, I’ve been scouting out the San Francisco locations used in Christopher Maclaine’s Masterpiece, THE END. What began as an attempt to identify and document what physically remains of the often mysterious places at which THE END was shot has evolved into a larger project to also analyze the film, and to identify all its many actors and extras, all of whom appear uncredited. To read the full version of these preliminary remarks, including info on how YOU can participate in this project, click here. For further information on Maclaine, check out the intro, which serves a... 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

Nicholas Nixon, _The Brown Sisters, Allston, MA_, 1983; Collection SFMOMA, fractional and promised gift of Carla Emil and Rich Silverstein; © Nicholas Nixon, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

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 a portrait of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters. Please welcome Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on The Brown Sisters.

When Suzanne asked us to write something on Nicholas Nixon’s The Brown Sisters, we began by wondering what we might possibly say. We’ve been working together on writing some things about feminism and how it shows up or not in our small psychosexualsocial poetry scene. So we tend to talk a lot about women’s relations wi... 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 suggested that the  disorienting visual and acoustic properties inside the sculpture were as dizzying as a fabulous first kiss. We all agreed. More Dan Graham.

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.

[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.

Chip Lord is a media artist working with video and digital photography, and was a founding member of the art and architecture collective Ant Farm. He’s talking about Terry Fox‘s 1976  sculpture, A Metaphor. And for more Terry Fox, see Sarah Roberts’s talk on Pendulum Spit Bite, just below. Thank you, Chip!

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.

Sarah Roberts is SFMOMA Associate Curator of Collections and Research, and she’s talking here about Terry Fox’s print Pendulum Spit Bite (1977). It’s quite delicate and especially difficult to read in the video, click the thumbnail for a slightly better view. Or come down and see it in person! The work is only on view through nex... More

Peter Samis isSFMOMA Associate Curator, Interpretation, Education. (Which distinguished title barely covers it!). He’s speaking here about Wright Morris’s Storefronts, Western Kansas (1939). I thought it nice to post this one in advance of our upcoming Free Tuesday program Where Was the Home Place? Wright Morris at 100. (next Tuesday, noon, the Wattis theater, FREE.)

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.

Craig Baldwin is a filmmaker, curator, and publisher, and as long-time host of ATA‘s Other Cinema has been premiering experimental, essay, and documentary works for over a quarter century. He’s talking about the legacy of  Wallace Berman and the art/poetry journal Semina (1955-1964). Keep your eye out for Rick Prelinger w/ video camera ... More

Rick Prelinger is a archivist, writer and media-maker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives.  Here he’s talking about Willard E. Worden‘s Observatory in Ruins, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco (1906), imagining the observatory’s contested construction and subsequent collapse by earthquake, as prophecy towards a proposed re-siting of the digital panopticon. Does that sentence make sense? Rick shows up in a number of other 75 Reasons talks side of frame. Look for him in Craig Baldwin’s, coming up next.

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.

Iain Boal is a writer and historian. He’s speculating here (to quite a crowd) about the couple in Elaine Mayes‘s Interracial Couple and Baby, Golden State Park, August, 1968. If you click the thumbnail at left, the image will open larger in a new window; you may find it helpful to be able to be able to click back and forth to the picture while listening to Iain.

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 pe... More

Martin Venezky is a designer, and the owner of Appetite Engineers. He’s speaking here about a untitled tintype, taken in a portrait studio ca. 1870 by an unknown photographer, of a young man in cowboy attire. “I look at it more as a picture of aspiration rather than occupation.”  (Click the thumbnail for a larger view.) A wonderful selection of some of the many works by Martin in SFMOMA’s collection, here.

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

Jennifer Sonderby is SFMOMA’s head of graphic design. Jennifer’s talking about Leslie Shows’s painting Two Ways to Organize (2006), and how she decided to put it on the cover of the (massive) anniversary catalogue, 75 Years of Looking Forward. Many thanks to Jen for a fantastic talk, and equanimity in an extremely noisy, crowded gallery, complete with screeching babies.

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.

Allison Smith is an artist. During the anniversary weekend, two of her SMITHS projects were running simultaneously on our fifth floor, so we especially appreciated her coming down to give her talk on J. Wilbur Sandison‘s photograph Quilt (ca. 1940s). “I love the idea of an artwork that is as much the conversation as the material residue of that conversation.” Click the thumbnail for a better view of the picture.

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

Anne McGuire is an artist whose work plays with conventions of perception.  In her talk on Anne Bremer‘s Sentinels (1920), Anne imagines prairie girl Laura Ingalls Wilder‘s life as compared to the life of the cosmopolitan painter and poet Anne Bremer, born as they were just one year apart. Thank you Anne!

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.

Duane Deterville is an artist and writer (and Open Space blogging alumni). He’s talking here about Picasso‘s 1907 Tête de trois quarts (Head in Three-Quarter View). Welcome back, Duane!

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.

San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit‘s forthcoming book Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas reimagines traditional map-making in 22 inventive maps, 7 of which SFMOMA is issuing this year in broadside copies linked to a series of Live Art events. The second program of the series is this weekend. Rebecca speaks here about what it meant, especially in the 50s, to be a West Coast, Bay Area artist, touching on Wallace Berman, George Hermes, Bruce Conner, Jess, Wally Hedrick, Michael & Joanne McClure, Joan Brown and Manual Neri, and indeed Jay DeFeo, and The Verónica (1957). More Jay DeFeo. More Rebecca at Alternet. Come see the painting, it’s extraordinary, and nothing but seeing it in real life will do. Only up through the end of the month.

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... More

Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker living in San Francisco. For a possibly irrelevant anecdote from me on Sam’s selection of this curious untitled photograph by an unknown photographer, see my note on Anne Walsh’s talk, here. Click the thumbnail for a larger view of the picture.

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

Anne Walsh is a visual artist. (And former Open Space columnist!) I can’t resist offering a bit of program back-story on her selection of this untitled picture by an unknown photographer: When I asked our speakers to participate, I sent them long lists  of every work expected to be on view during the Anniversary weekend, that is, hundreds and hundreds of objects and pictures. Anne was one of two speakers who deliberated carefully—well into the eleventh hour—on their selection. At the last possible second before sending our program to print, and after frantic begging and pleading on my part, I got emails from each of the two deliberators, not an hour apart. After weeks of consideration, and unbeknownst to each other, they’d both decided on this tiny, unusual thing. The other speaker was Sam Green. Posting both videos today. Look for Sam’s here, in just a bit.

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

Larry Rinder is the director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and is speaking here about Lebbeus Woods‘s San Francisco Project: Inhabiting the Quake 1995). I’ve been posting these talks out-of-sequence per their anniversary-weekend chronology, however it’s worth mentioning that Larry gave the 75th talk of the weekend. Thanks so much, Larry! A direct link to Woods’s blog, here.

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.

Renée Green is an artist, writer, and filmmaker, and her fantastic talk is on On Kawara‘s  MAR. 16, 1993, from the “Today” Series (1993). “What is life anyway? A series of repetitions, but not exactly?” Thank you, Renée.

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.

To Shirley Goldfarb, thanks for everything, David Hockney: On David Hockney’s Shirley Goldfarb & Gregory Masurovsky

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of giving a gallery talk on David Hockney’s double portrait, Shirley Goldfarb & Gregory Masurovsky, currently on view in From Warhol to Calder: Introducing the Fisher Collection. I ap... More

Stephen Hartman is a psychoanalyst. He’s also written for us here at Open Space, during our summer of Berlin Alexanderplatz. He’s talking here about Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Golden) (1996); contradiction; shame and ecstasy; and neutrality and disclosure in psychoanalysis. Yes, that is a wetsuit our friend is wearing. Stephen, welcome back! For a totally other take on this work: Rudolf Frieling, curator of media arts, here. More on Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

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.