This morning, SFMOMA unveiled new design details of the expanded building project. The expansion, as you likely know by now, is being designed by architectural firm Snøhetta in collaboration with SFMOMA, and this morning Craig Dykers, one of the principals of the firm, talked SFMOMA staff through a presentation of the new designs. There will b... More

Thanks to the marvelous readers of SFWeekly, who have nominated Open Space for a 2011 Web Award for Best Arts Blog! We’re honored and excited to be in a stellar group of Bay Area nominees (which includes some of our fantastic collaborators).

You can help vote Open Space into the finals from now through August 30, when the online voting close... More

Snøhetta! The press release is here. Pictures (click for larger view) are here:

You can find out more, and follow details of SFMOMA’s expansion, here.

FROM THE GUGGENHEIM:

In response to the recent arrest and detainment of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Beijing, the Guggenheim has launched an online petition to express concern for Ai’s freedom and call for his release.

In response to the recent arrest and detainment of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Beijing, the Guggenheim has launched an online petition to express concern for Ai’s freedom and call for his release. Leading museums around the world have joined and launched the online petition through their Web sites, Twitter, and Facebook sites,... More

SFMOMA launches a collections campaign with another spectacular cache of artwork: 195 promised gifts from nine Bay Area collectors, including major works by Diane Arbus, Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman, Jackson Pollock, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, and David Smith, and others, spanning all media, from modern and contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, and design, to new media and conceptual-based works. The full press release is here. Some nice pictures, here:

(more…)

Remember the end of Manhattan, when Woody Allen asks himself what makes life worth living? About this time 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 work of their choosing from the museum’s collection. As The Anniversary Show and the museum’s 75th anniversary year are drawing soon to a close (Jan 16, to be exact), we’re going to celebrate by screening these videos all day long, TOMORROW, in the Phyllis Wattis Theater. Do come down.

11 a.m.–5 p.m. FREE.

AND: Following the 75 Reasons marathon, we’ll be screening David Wojnarowicz’s FIRE IN MY BELLY, beginning at 5:30 p.m. There will be a public discussion, with members of the Bay Area arts community and SFMOMA curators, following the screening. ALSO FREE.

SFMOMA and assistant curators Apsara DiQuinzio (painting and sculpture) and Tanya Zimbardo (media arts) have just announced the 2010 SECA Art Award winners. For those more far than near, this prestigious biennial award honors Bay Area artists who are working independently at a high level of artistic maturity but who have not yet received substantia... More

All of us at SFMOMA are delighted to wish Wayne Thiebaud a very happy 90th birthday!

ARTHUR ALLAN was recently commissioned to do a Public Service Announcement for Yerba Buena Gardens. The announcement aired this past weekend at an event held in the gardens and was attended by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

In a nice bit of news: a local, San Francisco–based architecture firm—EHDD—will partner with Snøhetta on the museum’s expansion. And, for anyone out there wondering where exactly SFMOMA plans to put all those extra feet of museum, a map:

ø, Snøhetta!

In other expansion news, our website now has a special section devoted to tracking deve... More

SFMOMA SELECTS SNØHETTA TO WORK WITH MUSEUM ON DESIGN OF EXPANSION

Truly thrilling news. Snøhetta will collaborate with SFMOMA to design our expansion. Take a look at what else they’ve built, or are building, and just think what we might be bringing home to the bay. Absolutely stunning:

The National Opera and Ballet, Oslo:

Hamar Town Hall, ... More

Hey everyone, I’d like to take a moment to welcome three new columnists to Open Space for the summer-into-fall season. Til now we’ve been running a five-person cohort of columnists, with a new group starting every four months or so. Now, we’re going to try staggering our groups, so that they have some overlap between them, adding three here, two there, and one again, etc.

Brandon Brown is a poet, translator and curator. He’s written for Open Space before, back in the long-ago summer days of June Alexanderplatz, when a group of us spent a month watching Berlin Alexanderplatz, the “Mount Everest of Modern Cinema” and talking about it online. Brandon writes critical prose about contemporary rap at http://brandonbrown.blogspot.com.

Brion Nuda Rosch is an artist, curator, and educator. Many of you will already be familiar with his curatorial projects Hallway Bathroom Gallery (now Hallway Projects), Paper Awesome!, which he organized last February for Baer R... More

From the SFMOMA multimedia vaults: the legendary, much beloved, much admired artist on becoming a sculptor. On geometric forms. On gender roles. As it happens, SFMOMA will be showing Brigitte Cornand’s Louise Bourgeois Trilogy on three consecutive Thursdays in August, something to look forward to. Rest in peace.

SFMOMA has selected architecture firms Adjaye Associates, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Foster + Partners, and Snøhetta as finalists in our upcoming expansion project. Normally I leave this kind of announcement safely in the hands of the PR dept, but this kind of thing is my personal obsession, so I include details about each of the four candidate fir... More

Various environmentalists and luddites have passed through Bay Area radio waves and into my house for the last few days, leading me to some odd places and unexpected things on the internet. This morning’s news brought word that the British Royal Navy is dispatching ships to pick up folks stranded worldwide, and haul them back to Britain. I was looking at Rebar’s beautiful pics of Iceland’s volcano clouds, and shaking my head over the ship-rescue of air travelers, when I came across the New Yorker magazine’s blog about... More

I’m tremendously pleased this morning to welcome our latest cohort of columnist-bloggers to Open Space, as they begin to get started this week:

Renny Pritikin was director of New Langton Arts for more than a decade, chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and is currently director and curator of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Art Collection at UC Davis. He’s written a zillion catalogue essays, and is also a poet.

Dodie Bellamy is a novelist, essayist, poet, and teacher. Without giving too much away, I’ll say Dodie will be writing Open Space’s first long-form commission…

Anne Walsh is a visual artist who works with video, performance, audio, photography and text, and she’s already started! with two posts just below this one.

Many of our readers I know are already fans of the great Brecht Andersch, filmmaker and SFMOMA projectionist, who’s been writing about film here at Open Space intermittently since the get-go.

Last, and not even metaph... More

Hey everyone, I want to take a moment  to say thanks to our fall/winter columnists just now winding down their term. It’s been great to see how same-but-different the temperature of the blog could be with a new group posting in. Please give standing ovation to Joseph del Pesco, Michelle Tea, Duane Deterville, Stephanie Syjuco, and Cedar Sigo.... More

HERE’S THE LINK.

For those of you who somehow missed the news, or for those in parts more distant: SFMOMA turns 75 this January 18. Bay Area, if it hasn’t happened already, you are about to become intimately familiar with this pretty starburst, as SFMOMA prepares to spend 2010 celebrating 75 long years of life.

This post is a ‘save the date’ card for our long weekend anniversary extravaganza, happening January 16, 17 and 18 (Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend).

Six special anniversary exhibitions, showcasing hundreds of objects from the permanent collection, will be open that Saturday. There will be installations by Bill Fontana (in the Wattis) and Allison Smith ( on the fifth floor); the Mike Shine Show will be parked out on our Minna pad—in a borrowed SFMOMA artists gallery truck—on Saturday and Sunday; the Schwab room (that ground floor room off of the Atrium, where the cocktail bars normally live at the member openings) will be opened to Caffè Museo as a cafe extension/lounge; Bl... More

from Corey Keller, SFMOMA associate curator of photography:

On Sunday, December 13, photographer Larry Sultan passed away at home, surrounded by his beloved family. For several months he had been fighting a rare and virulent cancer, one that would not respond to treatment. In a series of humorous, thoughtful, and heart-breaking emails, he kept us a... More

The Fisher Collection + SFMOMA

This morning SFMOMA announced the development of what looks to be one heck of a partnership with Gap Inc. founders Doris and Don Fisher:  One that will tuck their renowned collection—one of the world’s leading in contemporary art—neatly at home at our museum.

The Fisher Collection includes more than 1,100 works, by artists such as Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Anselm Kiefer, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol.

Huge. Chron article here.

An official first welcome to our fantastic new crew of columnist-bloggers, who are already well underway this week with the posting, and for which I thank them. Your fall hosts on Open Space are:

MICHELLE TEA!, writer, poet, and founder of RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit; DUANE DETERVILLE!,  artist, writer and cofounder of the Sankofa Cultural Institute; the visual artist STEPHANIE SYJUCO!;   JOSEPH DEL PESCO!, independent curator, art journalist and web-media producer; and the poet CEDAR SIGO!

I a little overdo it with the all-caps... More

Jeff Koons‘s porcelain sculpture, always of great curiosity to the crowds when it’s up in the galleries, and one of my favorites, of Michael Jackson and Bubbles. You already know the news about the King of Pop. About the sculpture, more here. We’ll miss you, Michael. No 1980s living room would have been the same without you.

[From Elizabeth Gand, SFMOMA assistant curator of photography.]

It’s a sad spring in the world of photography: Helen Levitt passed away at the end of March—quietly, in her sleep, at the age of 95. New York has lost its great visionary poet, who photographed scenes from everyday life with unsurpassed wit and imagination. We feel the loss acutely here at SFMOMA, where her work has been admired, collected, and celebrated. In 1991, SFMOMA collaborated with the Met on Ms. Levitt’s first retrospective—a major event that brought renewe... More

Happy Mother’s Day! The rooftop sculpture garden is open at last, it’s a lovely spot, and this man definitely deserves a glass of champagne. This concludes our week-long experiment with DirectorCam. We’ll follow up in weeks and months to come, of course!  More soon. xxoo, SS

Ellsworth Kelly, on our rooftop sculpture garden for the first time, in front of his 1973 sculpture Stele I.

Many more pictures coming soon.

I know by now you’ve all seen President Obama’s Official White House Photostream on Flickr, launched just last week. Yes? I thought I’d take the President’s cue and do something similar with our director, Neal Benezra, especially this week, as Neal, along with the whole staff, prepares for the opening of our brand new Roofto... More

SFMOMA’s Education & Conservation teams have been working together on an SFMOMA Oral History Project, and have the unusual opportunity to interview Ellsworth Kelly on Thursday, re: the trajectory of his (sixty-year) career, and about some of his works  in our collection.  What would you ask him, if you could? Questions that land in the comment box before end of day Wednesday I’ll pass along to the team doing the interview.

Have you noticed what’s been happening here on the SFMOMA blog of late? COLUMNISTS.

Launched late April, with Kevin Killian’s first post: our very first ‘cohort’ of extra-SFMOMA contributors. Our rotating columnists are writing in an editorial free zone, covering all things visual culture in the Bay Area. All local [most of] the time, they’re just getting started and have already taken on public art and redevelopment in the Mission; visiting filmmakers; the problems of exhibiting design objects in museums; and what Susan Boyle and local artist Matt Keegan have in common even though only one of them is ‘younger than Jesus’.

Please welcome (and admire!) our fabulous first group of writers:

Poet, novelist, playwright, critic KEVIN KILLIAN
Art historian JULIAN MYERS
Independent curator and writer ANURADHA VIKRAM
Designer & educator ERIC HEIMAN
Independent curator and recent CCA grad ADRIENNE SKYE ROBERTS

We’ll still be doing interviews, ... More