As part of the Here, There, and Elsewhere festival, SFMOMA’s Public Programs team had the opportunity to pair with sister institutions around town. With Carolina Caycedo’s piece We Have All the Ingredients, we took over seminar spaces and the roof gardens of both the California Academy of Sciences and the San Francisco Art Institute. Carolina took us from the microscopic to the telescopic, but the treat of each performance was the cleansing tea that she prepared for us. Get a leg up on the New Year and try this delicious cleanse at... More

Location & Practice: A Roundtable Discussion

In this brief excerpt from the exhibition catalogue for Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art, Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, in conversation with SFMOMA curators Dominic Willsdon and Apsara DiQuinzio, talks about what it has meant for Futurefarmers to have made a commitm... More

This Saturday, as the centerpiece of the Here, There, and Elsewhere festival, SFMOMA is hosting a daylong symposium, on- and offline, on the subject Creating the Periphery. What and where is a “periphery” in contemporary art? When does a single city contain elements of activity that feel both center AND periphery? Aaron Levy, the execut... More

A bit of sound for you, as we roll into the multi-day, multi-program Here, There, Elsewhere festival. Playlist of tracks from some of the countries included in  Six Lines of Flight, provided by the exceptionally awesome Chris Dixon, proprietor of Explorist International, a record store in San Francisco’s Mission district, specializing in eclectic and esoteric vinyl from around the world. Chris can often be heard DJing around the city, too, under the name Phengren Oswald, spinning ’60s and ’70s soul, international underground ... 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

“…artistic and cultural projects that take a critical and emancipatory approach and attempt to resist the new oligarchy and its cultural alliances are emptied of real political substance and neutralized through the process of commodification. At the same time, the fervent embrace of iconic architecture…and the inflexible replication of the conventions of Western artistic modernism… have a devastating tendency to undermine the most inventive and original aspects of local cultural and creative energy.” Hou Hanru

“The medium of performance, with its economical nature and inherent element of surprise … has proved most appropriate to the precari­ous, unstable context of life in Cali..” — Michèle Faguet

“Bay Area artists’ communities rub up against (and are occasionally funded by) the power centers of wealthy risk-takers, disciples of innovation who possess the will to promote social transformation while remaining largely uncritical of (or actively complicit in) military technology and the erosion of civil guarantees of access to resources... More

“In the absence of an institutional structure for ephemeral practices—installations, performances, leaflets—artists circulated their work in the urban environment. Labeling Beirut as “proto-institutional,” Western critics would later imply that this body of work emerged from a postwar tabula rasa: no organizations, no market, and no audiences. Yet…this certainly was not the case.” — Sarah Rogers

The 21st century has greatly expanded what used to be just a cruel way to identify one’s cattle or an extremely questionable fraternity hazing ritual into the lingua franca of the communication design business. Fortune 500 companies, sports teams, charity foundations, Kim Kardashian, your mom. They’re all brands now. One smart phone cou... More

“The Bô Văn hoá (Vietnamese Communist Cultural Ministry) carefully monitors all public organized cultural activity … Art events are particularly bothersome to the robotic, directives-as-bible, power-hungry officials who police such activities.” –Zoe Butt

This text is a selection from the exhibition catalogue for Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art. The exhibition convenes artists from six cities around the globe: Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; San Francisco, United States; and Tangier, Morocco.

“This transcript is in many ways the key to the project and serves as an important starting point for unlocking cross-cultural understanding. The roundtable revolves around a discussion of ‘the periphery,’ the notion ... More

“It has become increasingly apparent that contemporary art is no longer defined by a few primary centers; it is now composed of many centers, small and large, each possessing unique histories, constituencies, and ethnic identities.”

—Apsara DiQuinzio