The Eclectic ~ Unconventional And Always Fascinating ~ San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Written by Taylor Fulbright Wednesday, 06 July 2011 20:31

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art. SFMOMA was founded in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied the fourth floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue in the Civic Center. A gift of 36 artworks from Albert M. Bender, including The Flower Carrier (1935) by Diego Rivera, established the basis of the permanent collection. Bender donated more than 1,100 objects to SFMOMA during his lifetime and endowed the museum's first purchase fund. SFMOMA was obliged to move to a temporary facility on Post Street in March 1945 to make way for the United Nations Conference on International Organization. The museum returned to its original Van Ness location in July, upon the signing of the United Nations Charter. The museum rose to international prominence in the 1970s and 80s under director Henry T. Hopkins, adding "Modern" to its title in 1975. Since 1967, SFMOMA has honored San Francisco Bay Area artists with its biennial SECA Art Award. In the 1980s SFMOMA took on an active special exhibitions program, both organizing and hosting traveling exhibitions. In January 1995 the museum opened its current location at 151 Third Street, adjacent to Yerba Buena Gardens in the SoMa district. Swiss architect Mario Botta designed the new US$60 million facility which is now an iconic presence within the cityscape of San Francisco. Since it opened in 1995, the building has become a hub of the downtown South of Market (SoMa) area. The current five-story structure features a stepped and patterned brick facade topped by a soaring cylindrical turret. In Botta's signature style, the turret is finished in alternating bands of black and white stone and topped with a radial pattern of the same material. The rooftop Sculpture Garden opened in 2009. Visitors enter the 14,400-square-foot garden from a spectacular glassed-in bridge created by local architect Mark Jensen. Works on view include those by Ellsworth Kelly, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder. Visitors can enjoy impressive views of the cityscape and take in lunch or coffee at the new Blue Bottle Coffee cafe. Since opening the new building the museum's collection has more than doubled in size and annual attendance has tripled to around a million visitors annually. The 225,000 square foot building is about to be expanded further, architecture firm Snøhetta having been commissioned to create a new extension to accommodate the ongoing growth of the museum's programs and audiences and to showcase the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art. The total projected budget for the expansion is $480 million and is expected to take approximately six years to complete. SFMOMA's Research Library was established in 1935 and contains extensive resources pertaining to modern and contemporary art, including books, periodicals, artists’ files, and lecture recordings. SFMOMA also contains the Phyllis Wattis Theater, accommodating lectures, symposia, seminars, film presentations and performances and the Schwab Room, a multiple-use event space. The innovative Koret Visitor Education Center offers both drop-in access and scheduled programs and activities while the basement houses the museum's Library and Archives and the photography and graphic arts study area. The museum also houses a restaurant, Caffè Museo and museum shop. Visit the museum’s re-designed website (which enables users to browse the museum's permanent collection) at … http://www.sfmoma.org

SFMOMA has a long history of excellence in exhibiting and collecting the foremost artists and designers of our time. From its inception in 1935, SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted to modern and contemporary art and has consistently championed the most innovative and challenging art of its time. The internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art includes more than 26,000 works and continues to grow. With strong holdings in photography, painting and sculpture, architecture and design, and media arts, SFMOMA strives to present key examples of Modernism as well as more recent works that reflect a variety of artistic developments occurring regionally, nationally, and around the world. SFMOMA's painting and sculpture collection comprises more than 7,000 works created between 1900 and the present. It features important examples of movements ranging from Fauvism and Cubism to Pop art and Minimalism, with exceptional strength in Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, German Expressionism, and the art of California. In addition, the department has committed itself to collecting particular artists' work in depth. These key figures include Robert Rauschenberg, Clyfford Still, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, Doris Salcedo, and Philip Guston. Highlights on display include Henri Matisse (“Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat)”), Constantin Brancusi (“La Negresse Blonde (The Blond Negress)”), Georges Braque (“Violin and Candlestick”), Marcel Duchamp (“Fountain”), Jasper Johns (“Land's End”), Frida Kahlo (“Frieda and Diego Rivera”), René Magritte (“Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values)”), Franz Marc (“Gebirge (Mountains)”), Agnes Martin (“Falling Blue”), Giorgio Morandi (“Natura morta (Still Life)”), Jackson Pollock (“Guardians of the Secret”) and Robert Rauschenberg (“Collection” (formerly ”Untitled”)). In 2009 the museum gained a custodial relationship for the important contemporary art collection of Doris and Donald Fisher of ‘The Gap’. The Fisher Collection includes some 1,100 works from 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, among many others. The collection will be on loan to SFMOMA for a period of 100 years. In February 2011, the acquisition of 195 new works was announced, including paintings from Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Francis Bacon. The works will be permanently displayed along with the Fisher collection upon the museum's expansion, slated to be completed in 2016.

One of the first museums to recognize photography as a legitimate art form, SFMOMA has been collecting and exhibiting photographs since 1935. Tracing the development of the medium from its invention in the 1830s to the present day, our photography collection comprises more than 14,000 pictures and is particularly well regarded for its concentrations of photographs related to California and the West, the European Avant-Garde, and American Modernism. Other areas of strength include Japanese photography, landscape photography, and a growing 19th-century collection. Dedicated to the examination of visual culture in all its forms, the department is notable for its active interest in collecting and exhibiting vernacular photography (anonymous snapshots), documentary evidence, and other photographic images never intended to be viewed as art. In addition to a full program of special exhibitions, the museum organizes ‘Picturing Modernity: Selections from the SFMOMA Collection’, an ongoing presentation that reveals the medium's transformation from a scientific invention into one of the most prevalent art forms of the modern era. Throughout its history, SFMOMA has provoked and participated in discussions about architecture and design via exhibitions, publications, and public programs. An impressive number of design and architecture exhibitions were presented at the museum before 1983, when the Architecture and Design Department was formally established. The department collects historical and contemporary works of architecture, furniture design, product design, and graphic design, as well as works of art that address these design disciplines. In the late 1990s the collection began to develop concentrations in several areas, including experimental architecture and typography, Bay Area design, modern furniture, and installation architecture. Today the Architecture and Design Department's holdings include the conference room from Charles and Ray Eames's design studio; furniture by the late Japanese designer Shiro Kuramata; drawings, models by the experimental architect Lebbeus Woods and works by important Bay Area designers, including Bernard Maybeck, Timothy Pflueger, William Wurster, John Dickinson, Jennifer Morla, and Jack Stauffacher. Amongst the highlights on display are Ron Arad “AYOR (At Your Own Risk)”, Tobias Wong “Ju$t Another Rich Kid Coke Spoon 01”, Mauro Restiffe “Empossamento #9 (Inauguration #9)”, Lebbeus Woods “Photon Kite”, and Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa “Tea and Coffee Tower”. SFMOMA has been a leader in the presentation, collection, and preservation of media art since the early 1970s. The Department of Media Arts, established in 1987, was among the first of its kind in the United States and today encompasses the diversity of time-based media installations, including video, film, slide, sound, computer-based, and online works. Reflecting the history of technological and conceptual developments in art, the collection ranges from work by early practitioners such as Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum, Peter Campus, Dan Graham, Gary Hill, Nam June Paik and Steina Vasulka, to more contemporary pieces by Eija-Lisa Ahtila, Matthew Barney, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe and Steve McQueen. In recent years the Media Arts Department has commissioned important video installations from Christian Marclay, Pipilotti Rist, and Sylvie Blocher, among others. Works by Bay Area artists, including Jim Campbell, Bill Fontana, Howard Fried, Doug Hall, Paul Kos, and Alan Rath, are one ongoing focus of our collection and provide a context for understanding the region as a historic center for experimental media.

Amongst the exhibitions currently on view at SFMOMA, “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870” (until April 17, 2011) investigates the shifting boundaries between seeing and spying, the private act and the public image, challenging us to consider how the camera has transformed the very nature of looking. Bringing together historical and contemporary photographs, films, and video works by both unknown photographers and internationally renowned artists, this provocative exhibition examines some of the camera's most unsettling uses, including pornography, surveillance, stalking, and witnessing violence. ‘Exposed’ poses compelling and urgent questions about who is looking at whom, and why. Also until 17th April, 2011, “How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now” explores the visual culture of wine and its stunning transformation over the last three decades. Designed in collaboration with renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the exhibition combines historical artifacts, architectural models, design objects, newly commissioned artworks, and enticing installations, including a "smell wall," to probe many aspects of wine culture, among them the globalization of wine, concepts of terroir, wine in popular media, and new strategies in label, glassware, and winery design. An ongoing exhibition, “Selected Histories: 20th Century Art from the SFMOMA Collection” is an installation of works from SFMOMA's painting and sculpture collection, conceived as a series of chapters that illuminate key moments and themes in the art of the 20th century. 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. A grand atrium staircase draws visitors from the ground floor up to four levels of skylit galleries. The second floor houses selections from the painting and sculpture collection and provides space for the architecture and design program. A series of more intimate galleries on the third floor are devoted to photography, while the more airy environs of the top two floors accommodate special temporary exhibitions, media arts, and large-scale contemporary art from their collection.