This presentation of masterworks and experimental pieces from SFMOMA’s collection of painting and sculpture explores themes that have shaped the history of modern art from the early twentieth century to our own time. Organized as a series of chapters, the exhibition focuses on revolutionary ideas, geographical centers, individual artists, and relationships between artists. Together, the […]
This exhibition — one of several highlighting contributions from the museum’s Campaign for Art — introduces the range and quality of these newly committed and gifted works in a multidisciplinary selection that strengthens and deepens SFMOMA’s collection. Asawa's Untitled (S.046a-d) is a rare instance where she created four separate works that are intended to be exhibited together.
Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933 – 1957 focuses on how, despite its brief existence, BMC became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. Figures such as Anni and Josef Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert […]
Making Space shines a spotlight on the stunning achievements of women artists between the end of World War II (1945) and the start of the Feminist movement (around 1968). In the postwar era, societal shifts made it possible for larger numbers of women to work professionally as artists, yet their work was often dismissed in […]
Focusing on works made from 1900 to 1960, Where We Are traces how artists have approached the relationships, institutions, and activities that shape our lives. Drawn entirely from the Whitney’s holdings, the exhibition is organized around five themes: family and community, work, home, the spiritual, and the nation. During the six decades covered here, the United States […]
Found in Translation: Design in California and Mexico, 1915–1985 is a groundbreaking exhibition and accompanying book about design dialogues between California and Mexico. Its four main themes—Spanish Colonial Inspiration, Pre-Columbian Revivals, Folk Art and Craft Traditions, and Modernism—explore how modern and anti-modern design movements defined both locales throughout the twentieth century. Half of the show’s […]
Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West considers mid-20th-century abstraction through its Asian-American practitioners, with a special focus on Hawai‘i artists. It is the first museum exhibition to bring artists of the New York School together with Asian-American artists who studied and worked in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, examining the influence […]
The exhibition will bring together a selection of key sculptures, paintings, and works on paper spanning Asawa's influential practice, as well as rare archival materials, including a group of vintage photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham.
Featuring work by Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, and Ray Johnson—all of whom were at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the late 1940s—this exhibition will explore both the aesthetic and personal dialogue between these artists during their Black Mountain years and beyond;
In commemoration of the 75th Anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the National Japanese American Historical Society presents Artists’ Eyes, Art of Incarceration. During World War II, Executive Order 9066 led to the registration, exclusion, forced removal and mass incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Two multigenerational art exhibits reveal a successive unearthing […]