Advance Exhibition Schedule

Last updated: Wednesday, May 23, 2012

• 

  Jim Campbell: Exploded Views

  November 05, 2011 - October 23, 2012
  [ I / M / S ]

  This new installation in SFMOMA's Haas Atrium will feature hundreds of flickering LED lights creating the illusion of figurative images that explore and reflect the human experience. As visitors move through the space, the vantage point alters and the shadowlike figures begin to take shape, blurring the boundaries between image and object. At once abstract and representational, sculptural and image-based, Campbell's suspended installation will illuminate the Atrium like a chandelier as well as function as a cinematic screen when seen from the museum's second-, third-, and fourth-floor landings. This exhibition marks a significant new step in the San Francisco–based artist's career as Campbell continues to explore image resolution and reduction while exploding the image into a three-dimensional form.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  ArtGameLab

  January 15 - August 12, 2012
  

  This exhibition in the museum's Koret Visitor Education Center highlights a selection of crowdsourced games designed by SFMOMA's community, for SFMOMA's community. Last summer the museum put out an open call for inventive, low-cost game ideas. Visitors can now view the results; pick up instructions for playing prototype experimental games in the museum's galleries and other public spaces; and build their own games through a hands-on game design station.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Descriptive Acts

  February 18 - June 17, 2012
  [ I / M / V ]

  This group exhibition features contemporary video and installation works that specifically address acts of recording, speaking, and writing, underscoring the performative quality of much contemporary art practice. Works by Anthony Discenza, Shilpa Gupta, Lynn Marie Kirby and Li Xiaofei, and John Smith will be included, as well as three recent acquisitions by artists Dora García, Aurélien Froment, and Tris Vonna-Michell, which receive their U.S. museum debut with this presentation. In García's Instant Narrative (2006–8), visitors enter a seemingly empty gallery with a video projection of gradually appearing text, only to discover the running description of the space and visitors is typed in real time by a performer seated nearby. Froment's video Pulmo Marina (2010) consists of a single long shot of a jellyfish in an aquarium, the voice-over drawing attention to the conditions of display as experienced in natural history museums, educational films, or commercials. Vonna-Michell's room installation GTO: hahn / huhn, variation 1 (2010) evokes an archive of personal narratives by the artists with an arrangement of slide, photographic, and audio materials to explore, including his rapidly delivered monologue of  impressions, emotions, and urban histories of Berlin and Detroit.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Mark Bradford

  February 18 - June 17, 2012
  [ P ]

  Organized by Wexner Center for the Arts, this major traveling exhibition is the first museum survey of the work of Mark Bradford, a Los Angeles–based artist and MacArthur Foundation "genius" award recipient who is a leading figure in American contemporary art. The presentation features works in a variety of media but concentrates on Bradford's often monumentally scaled collages on canvas, which are akin to abstract paintings. The artist's early works incorporate permanent-wave end papers, an influence from his family's beauty parlor in South Central Los Angeles. Later works employ various collaged materials—billboard paper, newsprint, carbon paper, wrapping paper—often salvaged from the street and dramatically manipulated with nylon string, caulking, and sanding. While striking in its formal beauty and subtle craft, Bradford's art also evokes allusions to urban landscape and probes the structures of urban society, often defined by race, gender, and class. Sound and media pieces also will be included. Copresented in San Francisco by SFMOMA and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this comprehensive account of Bradford's career to date will be on view at both venues, offering more than 50 works spanning 2000 to 2010, including those produced in response to Hurricane Katrina for Prospect.1, the first New Orleans Biennial. Catalogue.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective

  February 18 - May 28, 2012
  [ PH ]

  Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective, coorganized by SFMOMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, presents the artist's first midcareer retrospective in the United States. Over the past 20 years Dijkstra has revived and reexamined portraiture in contemporary art. Most often, she photographs people in transition, such as adolescents, new mothers and army recruits, during formative periods in their lives when change is perceivable. The extraordinary complexity and presence of her work is evident from her earliest sustained series, in which she photographed adolescents on the beach in front of a nearly abstracted space of sea and sky, to her most recent videos of young people dancing in front of a minimal backdrop at European clubs. This intense scrutiny permitted her not only to record the outward appearance of her subjects, the kinds of clothes they wear, and the way they present themselves to the photographer but also to suggest their internal selves. This exhibition features nearly 70 photographs alongside five video works. Catalogue.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Photography in Mexico: Selected Works from the Collections of SFMOMA and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser

  March 10 - July 08, 2012
  [ PH ]

  This exhibition explores the diverse tradition of photography in Mexico, from the medium's first flowering in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the explosion of the illustrated press at midcentury to the intense documentary investigations of the 1970s and '80s and more recent considerations of the U.S./Mexico border region. Drawn from SFMOMA's world-class photography holdings and highlighting recent major gifts and loans from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the selection underscores particular strengths in the collections, with photographs by Edward Weston, Tina Modotti, and Paul Strand, who, along with many other American and European photographers, found Mexico to be a place of great artistic inspiration. The exhibition also showcases the wide-ranging approaches of important Mexican photographers, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Hector Garcia, Lourdes Grobet, Graciela Iturbide, Pedro Meyer, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, and Mariana Yampolsky.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area

  March 31 - July 29, 2012
  [ D ]

  The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and though he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas spawned many local experiments in the realms of technology, engineering, and sustainability—some more successful than others. The first to consider Fuller's Bay Area design legacy, this exhibition features some of his most iconic projects, primarily drawn from the recently acquired print portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One. The 13 works in the portfolio date from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s and include Fuller's 4D House, Geodesic Dome, World Game, and Dymaxion car, among other important inventions. The other half of the exhibition presents Bay Area endeavors inspired by Fuller's commingling of technology, ecology, and social responsibility, specifically projects concerned with improved living systems such as dwellings (temporary inflatable structures by Ant Farm and tents by The North Face and Sierra Designs); transportation (the Plastiki sailboat); and better access to information (Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and smart phones by Apple and Google). Fuller's radical idealism kept him from realizing most of his projects, and he never achieved the success he would have liked. Paradoxically, the view of Fuller as a nonconformist is exactly what links him to the many successful Bay Area innovators who aspire to the kind of visionary thinking the designer has come to embody.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Parra: Weirded Out

  March 31 - July 29, 2012
  [ WP / D ]

  This exhibition combines a 60-foot-long mural and a selection of print works by Dutch graphic artist Parra in his first U.S. museum presentation. Parra began his illustration and design career drawing party flyers and posters in Amsterdam several years ago. The artist's playful, witty, and often raunchy works engage viewers with a bold but minimal color palette, and his esoteric compositions of bird-beaked humanistic characters, pedestrian objects, and freeform typography have attracted a near cult-icon status.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  New Work: Katharina Wulff

  April 13 - September 09, 2012
  [ P ]

  Imbued with whimsy and gloom, vulnerability and strength, Katharina Wulff's figurative paintings depict imaginary, far-off locales often populated by strange animals and alluring visages. Her canvases and works on paper encompass diverse styles and art historical references ranging from the decorative motifs of Pierre Matisse and the unsettling figures of Pierre Kosslowski to the otherworldly symbology of William Blake and the dark satire of George Grosz. Yet despite these far reaching resonances, Wulff, who was born in Berlin and is currently based in Marrakesh, is becoming known for a body of work that is distinctly her own. This latest installment of SFMOMA's New Work series—and the artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States as well as the first time her work will be shown on the West Coast—features a selection of paintings and drawings made during the past five years, along with several new works created for the exhibition.

  Press release  |  Press images

• Contemporary Painting, 1960 to the Present: Selections from the SFMOMA Collection

  May 18 - August 12, 2012
  [ P ]

  This exhibition of works from the SFMOMA collection explores the richness, diversity, and continuing vitality of painting over the last 50 years. Contemporary Painting showcases the breadth of the museum's collection, bringing together iconic pictures with others that have been rarely exhibited. With galleries thoughtfully organized around particular historical moments, geographic centers, or sets of formal issues, the exhibition provides fresh insights into a classic yet ever-evolving medium. Among the many artists featured are Vija Celmins, Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Brice Marden, Kerry James Marshall, Lari Pittman, Gerhard Richter, Amy Sillman, and Andy Warhol.

• 

  Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media

  July 14 - October 08, 2012
  [ M ]

  Exploring the blurry line between the fine arts and the performing arts, this thematic exhibition presents works in various media from the past three decades that respond to and embrace theatricality in contemporary art practice. Works include Janet Cardiff's The Telephone Call, a participatory project in which visitors can check out a video camera and follow a self-guided narrative through the museum; Guy Ben-Ner's Stealing Beauty video, which shows the artist and his family in IKEA model rooms; and a new project from Bay Area–based artist Tucker Nichols, commissioned by SFMOMA for the exhibition's in-gallery cinema and performance space. Also in the exhibition are seminal historic works by Charles Atlas, James Coleman, and General Idea, as well as more recent works by Sharon Hayes, Craigie Horsfield, and Mika Tajima, among others. The exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial.

• 

  Cindy Sherman

  July 14 - October 07, 2012
  [ PH ]

  Cindy Sherman is recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists of the last 40 years and arguably the most influential artist working exclusively with photography. This retrospective, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, traces the groundbreaking artist's career from the mid-1970s to the present. Bringing together more than 150 key photographs from a variety of Sherman's acclaimed bodies of work, the presentation constitutes the first U.S. overview of her career in nearly 15 years, and draws widely from both public and private collections. Sherman has served as her own model for more than 30 years, generating a range of guises and personas that are by turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. The exhibition showcases the artist's greatest achievements to date, from her early experiments as a student in Buffalo in the 1970s to her recent large-scale photographic murals. Cindy Sherman will premiere in New York in winter of 2012 before traveling to SFMOMA and then to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Catalogue.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories

  July 28 - November 04, 2012
  [ PH ]

  Organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, this internationally traveling exhibition gathers than 100 photographs and two videos by one of Japan's leading artists, marking his first solo exhibition in the United States. Born in Iwate Prefecture, in 1958, Hatakeyama is known for austere and beautiful large-scale pictures that capture the destructive powers routinely deployed to shape nature to our will. Drawn to landscapes in transition, his awe-inspiring photographs of factories, quarries, mines, and slag heaps reveal activity that often goes unseen. Most recently Hatakeyama returned to his hometown to record, with quiet precision, the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that destroyed his village. Natural Stories brings together photographs from Hatakeyama's entire career, offering a new perspective on his practice and place in the rich history of Japanese photography, as well as the ways in which the human and natural worlds have both coexisted and clashed. The artist received the Kimura Ihee Photography Award in 1997 and represented Japan in the 2001 Venice Biennale. The San Francisco presentation will be overseen by Lisa Sutcliffe, SFMOMA assistant curator of photography. Catalogue.

• 

  Field Conditions

  September 01, 2012 - January 06, 2013
  [ D ]

  This focused ensemble of works aims to address relationships between conceptual art and theoretical architecture, specifically concerning the subject of fields. In this context, the term "field" refers to an array of objects or marks, accumulating and building to the point of becoming a kind of system. Works gathered here seem to deny the idea of boundary and act as windows into a potentially larger expanse. Exploring concepts such as networks, layering, and confluence while simultaneously providing grounds for a dialogue on the representation of both "place" and "non-place," Field Conditions provokes one to imagine beyond the frame. Some 20 projects featured in the exhibition—including works from established architects to emerging contemporary artists —could be considered spatial experiments that both call attention to and abstract typical notions of representation, reality, and imaginary landscapes. The exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial.

• 

  Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art

  September 15 - December 31, 2012
  [ A / F / M / P / PH / S / WP ]

  An international group exhibition, Six Lines of Flight features key artists from six cities around the world who have developed unique artistic organizations and/or collectives, contributed to their own communities, and helped each city become a burgeoning art center. The cities include Beirut, Lebanon; Cali, Colombia; Cluj, Romania; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; San Francisco, USA; and Tangier, Morocco—places that, like San Francisco, are not considered primary artistic centers but act as critical cross-cultural platforms for those living and working there. Cultivating an awareness of our collective, international contingency is a primary motivation underlying the exhibition.  The exhibition will feature artwork by Yto Barrada, Tiffany Chung, Wilson Diaz, Futurefarmers, Adrian Ghenie, Helena Producciones, Lamia Joreige, Dinh Q. Lê, Victor Man, Oscar Muñoz, Ciprian Muresan, The Propeller Group, and Akram Zaatari. Catalogue.

• 

  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Frequency and Volume

  November 03, 2012 - February 03, 2013
  [ M ]

  One of the most important international media artists to emerge in the 1990s, Mexican-born artist Raphael Lozano-Hemmer explores the intersection of architecture, public space, media, and performance. His interactive video and sound installation Frequency and Volume (2003) uses radio equipment to allow participants to tune in and listen to different radio frequencies by using their own bodies. According to the artist, he originally developed the piece in response to the Mexican Government shutting down informal or "pirate" radio stations in indigenous communities in the states of Chiapas and Guerrero, addressing the fundamental question of who has access to public space. The work's technical equipment will be on view in an adjacent gallery as a sculptural component, communicating visibly the museum's status as both a receiver and producer of frequencies in a larger network of Bay Area culture. The exhibition is part of the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial.

• 

  Jay DeFeo

  November 03, 2012 - February 03, 2013
  [ P / S / WP / PH ]

  Premiering at SFMOMA, this major traveling retrospective considers the entire career of Bay Area artist Jay DeFeo (1929–1989), bringing together paintings, small-scale sculptures, photographs, and works on paper, including a number that have not been seen in decades or been on view before. The exhibition will place DeFeo's best-known painting, The Rose (1958–66), in the context of her larger body of work and trace leitmotifs across more than four decades of output. It will also include ephemeral materials such as notebooks, exhibition announcements, and documentary photographs. Jay DeFeo is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in close collaboration with the Jay DeFeo Trust. The debut presentation in San Francisco will be overseen by Corey Keller, associate curator of photography, SFMOMA. Catalogue.

• 

  Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye

  November 03, 2012 - February 03, 2013
  [ P / S / WP ]

  A remarkably strong relationship has developed over the past forty years between artist Jasper Johns and various museums and private collectors in the San Francisco Bay Area. Johns's painting Land's End (1963), given to SFMOMA in 1972 by Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, remains a cornerstone post-war work in the museum's collection. In 1978, SFMOMA presented a major survey of Johns's career, and in 2000 organized Jasper Johns: New Paintings and Works on Paper, which traveled nationally. Continuing SFMOMA's significant involvement with the artist, this exhibition brings together for the first time works from Bay Area collections both public and private, and will be supplemented with key works in the Johns's own collection. Organized by Gary Garrels, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA, in close cooperation with the artist, the presentation features approximately 85 major paintings, works on paper, lead reliefs, and sculptures representing all periods of the artist's work from the 1950s to the present. Catalogue.

• 

  South Africa in Apartheid and After: Photographs by David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, and Billy Monk

  December 01, 2012 - March 03, 2013
  [ PH ]

  Continuing SFMOMA's renowned scholarship in the field of documentary photography, this exhibition examines the work of three photographers—David Goldblatt, Ernest Cole, and Billy Monk—who have depicted what they have seen during a vital and difficult period in the recent history of South Africa. Goldblatt's book project In Boksburg (1982) portrays a typical suburban white community not far from Johannesburg shaped by what the artist calls "white dreams and white properties." The late Cole, a self-taught black South African photojournalist, documented the other side of the racial divide until he was forced to leave his country in 1966. Recently Goldblatt recovered a group of Cole's original prints, organized a retrospective tour of the work, and championed an accompanying book project, Ernest Cole, photographer. Selected works from the book—deeply human without a trace of sensationalism—add an important dimension to Goldblatt's work included here. Monk was a gregarious self-taught photographer who worked as a bouncer in a rowdy Cape Town nightclub in the 1960s. His work, also recovered and reprinted after his death with assistance from Goldblatt, made a raw and beautiful record of the port city's racially mixed population. These three groups of pictures will be complemented by a selection of Goldblatt's post-apartheid photographs. Organized by SFMOMA's Sandra S. Phillips, the exhibition will include approximately 130 works.

• 

  The Logan Collection: Celebrating 15 Years at SFMOMA

  December, 2012 - May, 2013 (Dates subject to change)
  [ P / PH ]

  In 1997, renowned art collectors Vicki and Kent Logan made a gift to SFMOMA of more than 250 contemporary works that significantly strengthened and extended the museum's collection. Additional gifts followed, with 330 total works gifted to the museum over the years. This exhibition marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Logan's gift, highlighting 37 masterworks from the 1960s to the 1990s.  Pieces by Chuck Close, Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, and Andy Warhol exemplify the foundations of the collection.  Works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, John Currin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Cady Noland, and Jeff Koons, among others, significantly broadened the museum's holdings of artists working in New York after 1980. The Logan gift also transformed the museum's representation of artists working internationally from the 1980s forward, with pieces by the 'Young British Artists' such as Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin; European artist such as Marlene Dumas; and Chinese and Japanese artists such as Takashi Murakami and Zhang Xiaogang.  A commission for the museum's atrium by Gu Wenda, which first premiered in the exhibition Inside Out: New Chinese Art in 1997, will be re-installed for the first time since that exhibition.

• Garry Winogrand

  March 09 - May 31, 2013
  [ PH ]

  This retrospective, organized by SFMOMA under the direction of photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien, is the first major touring exhibition and catalogue in 25 years dedicated to the work of Garry Winogrand (1928–1984). Despite being widely recognized as one of the preeminent American photographers of the 20th century, Winogrand has to date been inadequately published and thinly explored by critics and art historians. Postponing the editing of his prodigious body of work and coming abruptly to the end of his life, he completed only five modest books, which contain just a fraction of his total work and merely suggest to the public his great importance to the history of photography. The curatorial research undertaken for this project has made possible the first exhibition and catalogue that reveal to the public the full breadth of Winogrand's oeuvre—a jubilant, epic portrait of America that is Whitmanesque in its ambition to encompass the whole of the nation's life. One of the principal artists in any medium of the eruptive 1960s, Winogrand combines a sense of the hope and buoyancy of American life after World War II with a powerful anxiety, presenting America shining with possibility while also threatening to spin out of control. The exhibition will premier at SFMOMA before traveling to the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Catalogue.

• New Work: Trisha Donnelly

  March 09 - May 31, 2013
  [ M / P / PH / S / V ]

  Working across a wide range of media—performance, video, sound, photography, drawings, painting, and sculpture—San Francisco native Trisha Donnelly attempts to give visual and sonic form to that which is in essence incapable of being expressed. She is largely interested in representing the immaterial forces that inform lived experience, such as sound wave vibrations, electric currents, or moments of equilibrium—things that affect us in the world but that we do not see. Donnelly's installations typically yield many more questions than answers. If anything, her exhibitions can be understood as provocations for inquiry. For SFMOMA's New Work series she will debut a new body of work that responds to the unique characteristics of the museum environment. This will be her first solo exhibition in San Francisco.

• 

  Rooftop Garden

  Ongoing
  [ S ]

  SFMOMA's long-awaited space for large-scale sculpture features a combination of well-known, rarely seen, and recently acquired works from the museum's collection. Sculptures spanning the last five decades by artists such as Robert Arneson, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Tony Cragg, and Ellsworth Kelly are featured in the Rooftop Garden, in both open-air and enclosed spaces. In addition, a site-specific installation by former SECA Art Award recipient Rosana Castrillo Díaz animates the glass-walled bridge that leads visitors from the interior fifth-floor galleries out onto the rooftop.

  Press release  |  Press images

• 

  Selected Histories: 20th-Century Art from the SFMOMA Collection

  Ongoing
  

  This installation of works from SFMOMA's collection is conceived as a series of chapters that illuminate key moments and themes in 20th-century art. Each gallery examines a particular subject, such as still lifes and interiors; movement, such as Surrealism; or geographic region, such as Latin America. By presenting a range of conversations among varied works, the exhibition explores the many narratives the museum's collection can suggest about the history of modern art.

• 

  Picturing Modernity

  Ongoing
  [ PH ]

  This changing selection of pictures from SFMOMA's world-renowned photography collection includes photographs from the mid-1800s to the present that capture key moments in the development of the medium.

• 

  Paul Klee

  Ongoing
  

  Revered Modernist Paul Klee (1879–1940) often utilized the genre of portraiture to explore artistic, social, and personal ideas and created images of himself, friends, and imagined others that invoke myriad psychological states. This focused exhibition presents a selection of Klee's works, which are featured on an ongoing basis in SFMOMA's Djerassi Gallery as part of SFMOMA's permanent collection.