Vocabulary My child uses words I so rarely use. Thankfully, these are not baby talk words only ever ending in “y” or “ie.” “Surely” is a regular. (That does end in “y.”) As in, “Dad will surely not find us here!” Or, only slightly less charming, “Mom, it is surely time to get up.” He [...]
Installation view of Nairy Baghramian’s Beliebte Stellen/Privileged Points (2017), in SOFT POWER at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2019; Photo: Ian Reeves Space. I’ve often thought about it as I’ve walked through SFMOMA. The well-frequented staff doors to the fourth-floor galleries open onto a display of Ellsworth Kelly paintings — those angular, monochrome [...]
When shelter-in-place started, I thought I’d finally have more free time to process film at home rather than take it to a lab. Long days spent at the museum would no longer be a deterrent. Money would be saved. Six months have now passed without knowing what my photos look like. Do I need to [...]
On February 27th, we held a party in SFMOMA’s Koret Education Center for Printed Publics: Contemporary Art and Design Publishing in the Bay Area, which surveyed a variety of printed matter being produced by local artists and designers today. Participating publishers were invited and they in turn invited friends and collaborators, resulting in a convivial [...]
Our Fall 2020 columnists in residence are writer and performer Diana Cage, writer and researcher Evan Kleekamp, and art and dance historian Megan Metcalf. If you’re having a feeling of déjà vu, it’s because Diana, Evan, and Megan were our Summer 2020 CIR cohort. But then, some things happened. And each of them decided, understandably, [...]
Eliana, 2018, watercolor, 22”x15”; by Michelle Thomas The art history I studied in early twenty-first century North America was largely devoid of faces like mine. Historical images appeared in a National Geographic sense, in an ethnographic context — making only the occasional cameo, usually in a documentarian’s catalogue of conquered peoples and places. Artists with [...]
An initial staff attempt to summarize what it’s like to work at SFMOMA right now. “It’s good in a way. Peel back the band aid and look at the rot.” A friend wrote these words a few weeks ago as we were texting about our respective institutions’ self-inflicted public crises. They’ve been in my mind [...]
Our summer magazine was scheduled to launch today, but business as usual feels hollow, given the pain and rage our communities are experiencing in the wake of yet more unjust killings of Black people. We offer this moment of publishing silence in mourning for those deaths and in solidarity with the protests spreading across the [...]