The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to host a series of posts highlighting Mrs. Haas’s network of personal connections from SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Caitlin Haskell and featuring graphics by designer Adam Machacek.

Agnes E. Meyer diagram by... More

The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to host a series of posts highlighting Mrs. Haas’s network of personal connections from SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Caitlin Haskell and featuring graphics by designer Adam Machacek.

Elise S. Haas diagram by ... More

The Elise S. Haas Bequest: Modern Art from Matisse to Marini is on view until SFMOMA temporarily closes its doors June 2, and as we wind down these last few days, Open Space is pleased to host a series of posts from SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Caitlin Haskell highlighting one of the museum’s most important benefactors, Elis... More

In Sacramento, one of the girls who stood vigil outside a Los Angeles courtroom waiting for her “father to be released” in 1969 makes headlines again six years later. Charles Manson follower Lynette Fromme attempts to assassinate President Gerald Ford in a gesture that she claims is in defense of the Redwood Forest.
“I stood up and waved a gun (at Ford) for a reason,” Fromme says. “I was so relieved not to have to shoot it, but, in truth, I came to get life. Not just my life but clean air, healthy water and respec... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. We close the series with a heartfelt missive from the University of Illinois library to Lebbeus Woods, discovered in the university’s archives by Daryl McCurdy, architecture and design department assistant... More

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, looki... More

From now until closing time on June 2 we are celebrating the unique and inspiring personal style of some of our gorgeous SFMOMA visitors. Follow the series.

What’s your name?

Monica S.

Where are you from?

Originally from Chile, just moved to San Francisco

What brings you to SFMOMA today?

I am a glass artist, came for inspiration.

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. Today, please welcome SFMOMA’s architecture and design department assistant Daryl McCurdy.

In 1960, a 20-year-old Lebbeus Woods arrived at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to pursue a master’s degree in architecture. Already a highly skilled draftsman, Woods began to offer his illustration skills to scholars for their academic papers. One of Woods’s clients was Dr. Heinz von Foerster... More

I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.
Bob Dylan (musician and poet)

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?
Friedrich Nietzsche (philosopher)

My house is run, essentially, by an adopted, fully clawed cat with a mean nature.
Anthony Bourdain (chef and author)

The order of the world is always right — such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
Jean Baudrillard (philosophe... More

From now until closing time on June 2 we are celebrating the unique and inspiring personal style of some of our gorgeous SFMOMA visitors. Follow the series.

What’s your name?

[indecipherable but cute baby noises]

Eva’s mom: My name is Maralee B., and her name is Eva L., after Eva Hesse.

Where are you from?

[more indecipherable baby talk]

Eva’s mom: We live in the Mission in SF.

What brings you to SFMOMA today?

[Eva smiles]

Eva’s mom: Our SFMOMA trip was all about Eva. She played on the geometrical cushions in the... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. Today, please welcome SFMOMA’s Assistant Curator of Architecture and design Jennifer Dunlop-Fletcher.

Lebbeus Woods and Conceptual Architecture, New York, 1970–85

In a 1971 essay, architect Peter Eisenman asked if conceptual architecture was possible. Eisenman was the founding director of the Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), a small New York nonprofit organization that led the dis... More

A 747 crashes due to rough weather conditions northwest of Washington, D.C., killing all 92 people on board.
A bomb in the cargo hold of a TWA flight leaving Athens explodes 18 minutes after takeoff and sends the plane crashing into the Ionian Sea; 88 people die.
All 346 people aboard a DC-10 bound for London perish when the flight crash-lands in a woods north of Paris. The destruction is so severe that only 40 of the bodies are identifiable. Turkish families on vacation, English rugby players, British fashion models, Japanese ... More

It’s easy to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall, it’s a painting. If you can walk around it, it’s a sculpture.

What do you get if you cross a painter with a boxer? Muhammad Dali.

What happened when a ship carrying red paint collided with a ship carrying blue paint? Both crews were marooned.

How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools.

Recently a guy in Paris nearly got away with stealing several paintings from the Lo... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. Today, please welcome architect Dwayne Oyler.

Words Unspoken

Over the last few months, it’s been astounding to hear of Lebbeus’s vast influence, sometimes from the most unexpected people. Countle... 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

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

From now until closing time on June 2 we are celebrating the unique and inspiring personal style of some of our gorgeous SFMOMA visitors. Follow the series.

What are your names?

Iman H. and Briana B.

Where are you from?

Both from Berkeley

What brings you to SFMOMA today?

Research for a school project

More great looks.

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

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Open Space is pleased to be hosting a series of posts on Woods’s work and legacy. Today, please welcome artist Kiki Smith.

I think Lebbeus and I were an eccentric combination. I played the straight man, grounding both works that we made — Skypool in Lapland, Finland, as well as our piec... More

Over at our crowd-sourced Tumblr project we are running a new experiment related to Slow Art Day, asking our fast-moving internet audience to slow down and spend ten uninterrupted minutes looking at something, anything, and write about it. The submissions over there are a lot of fun, and we’ll share some of them here too. We’d love to see what you might do. Submit!

From now until closing time on June 2 we are celebrating the unique and inspiring personal style of some of our gorgeous SFMOMA visitors, starting today. Follow the series.

What are your names?

Sammy D. and Zarina Z.

Where are you from?

Zarina: Originally from Russia, lives in SF

Sammy: From L.A., lives in SF

What brings you to SFMOMA today?

Sammy&... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA till June 2. Throughout the run of the exhibition, we’re featuring a series of posts reflecting on Woods’s work and legacy. Below, thumb through the pages of a sketchbook Woods worked on in New York, San Francisco, Vienna, Kraljevica, Vico Morcote, and NYC; 1995–98. You can see all the pages at a ... More

Lebbeus Woods, Architect is on view at SFMOMA til June 2, and we’ll be featuring regular posts reflecting on Woods’s work and legacy throughout the run of the exhibition. Our inaugural post is from SFMOMA’s assistant curator of architecture and design Joseph Becker.

Experimental architecture has long been a focus of the Architecture and ... More

Our regular feature Collection Rotation. Each month a guest organizes a mini “exhibition” from our collection works online. Today, please welcome local comedian George Chen, who will be performing this Thursday night at SFMOMA, in the program A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Museum, 7pm in the Koret Visitor Education Center.

A lot of a... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Crawling on my belly in the garden, I photographed snails at their eye level and sometimes so close up the camera bumped into the snail. These images were often of exquisite beauty. I proje... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

Adrian Piper staged a number of collaborative performance events entitled Funk Lessons (1982–84) in which participants were invited to get down and party together. In the process of learning to discuss, dance, and listen to funk music, the events opened up individual awareness of the complex personal associations of this popular dance form with racial and cultural boundaries. The experie... More

Our regular feature Collection Rotation. Each month a guest organizes a mini “exhibition” from our collection works online. Today, please welcome filmmaker Kerry Laitala.

This work evokes a sphinx-like enigma through its closed zipper eyes. I really wanted to touch the zippers and open them to reveal an interior world. The constellation-like pa... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Probably nobody knows what Diane Arbus as a person was all about. As a photographer, some people admired her work, others reviled it and some simply ignored it. Rarely, if ever, have I seen such deification of a personality and that person’s work as has followed Diane Arbus’ suicide. [...] It was with singular visceral reaction that I received Edmund Shea’s announcement of... More

Unlikely as it sounds, former president George W. Bush is apparently a Sunday painter. Several of his works were recently brought to light when a hacker broke into the Bush’s family email account.

The paintings are two self-portraits – one of him looking at himself in a bathroom mirror and the other is a point-of-view of himself in the ... More

Receipt of Delivery is a weekly series featuring Bay Area exhibition mailers selected from the SFMOMA Research Library’s collection of artists’ ephemera.

“Owner of the gallery and sponsor of the happening is W.O. Thomas Jr., ex-cable car gripman and self-taught painter and sculptor. He spent two years preparing the event, having completely re... More