February 3 is no ordinary Thursday. It’s a full-blown First Thursday at SFMOMA, which means one glorious thing: free admission for Bay Area residents. All that exorbitant rent is finally paying off!
This is no ruse, people. It’s happening. Residents from all of the nine Bay Area counties are the museum’s guests of honor from 4:00 – 8:00 p.m.,* and will be granted free access to the iconic institution, which currently houses curations of four dynamic, cutting-edge artists. Despite these creators’ palpable differences in form and content, their artistic objectives align to form a sumptuous feast for the mind-spirit of its viewers.
SFMOMA counsels its hopeful patrons to reserve their tickets pronto. Indeed, per the museum’s COVID-19 mitigation protocol, SFMOMA is restricting the number of patrons permitted in the galleries at one time, to promote social distancing. All this to say— without a reservation, all bets are off.
If you call the Bay Area home, and you fancy a free pair of passes, enter your bona fide zip code in the box labeled “promo code” in the final stages of the checkout process on the museum’s website.
You can pounce on those “tickets to paradise” here. 2 free tickets, coming your way!
*Qualifying counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.
Top to Bottom: A Gander at the Galleries of SFMOMA
Floor 7. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Unstable Presence
Jumbo-sized installations — both static and performative in nature — empower viewers to engage and participate in media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s exhibition, Unstable Presence. The ever-changing relationship between visitors and the artist’s creations makes the exhibition unpredictable and alive.
“I’m attracted by the ephemeral. I like artworks that reflect constant change,” the artist said to SFMOMA’s Cristina Chan. “Montaigne said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Artwork is a bit that way, too. Things disappear, and that reminding is beautiful.”
The protean and often paradoxical nature of Lozano-Hemmer’s work speaks to the artist’s desire to resist the static, reductive, and inflexibility of autocracy, revealing his anti-monumentalist ethos.
Unstable Presence closes on March 6. For more deets and treats regarding the exhibition, head here.
Floor 4. Tauba Auerbach — S v Z
‘Frisco native and science whiz/artist Tauba Auerbach returns home for their first museum survey, Tauba Auerbach — S v Z. The exhibition is inspired by a lot of ideas. The hidden complexities within reductive binaries, is one; the vagaries of perception is another. Also among the artist’s propelling phenomena are the failures of logic within rational systems of thought (like physics) and the hunt for the fourth color not included in the red-blue-green spectrum.
“I’m interested in specific subjects in those fields…because they are at the edge of our present understanding, at the edge of our capacity to understand in general, or seem to violate logic, space, time, or rules we’re familiar with,” the artist told the London-based culture magazine Elephant in 2020.
This 17 piece showing is replete with an incredible range of artforms, again underscoring Auerbach’s probing mind and fierce talent. To actualize their ideas, the artist proves themselves as truly interdisciplinary; weaving, practicing typography and also innovating with music. And that’s just the tip of the ‘berg.
Zap your “habituated gaze” (as Auerbach calls it) with this invigorating peek into the artist’s kaleidoscopic mind sometime before the exhibition ends, on May 1.
More info here.
Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue
Floor 3. Constellations: Photographs in Dialogue
Constellations weaves together 6 galleries of photographs from SFMOMA’s collection in a dialogue that stretches across time, place, and style. Contemporary photographs by the likes of Filipino artist Poklong Anading and others hang alongside household names like Imogen Cunningham and San Francisco-born legend Ansel Adams, coining new narratives as images are reimagined and reinterpreted in light of their counterparts in the curation.
The major threads running through this selection are Japanese photography, documentary, and the work of Bay Area artists (and a few others who don’t expressly fit in those categories).
The end result: a dialogue with conversation so divine, it flows like wine. See if you agree — the exhibition is on view through August 21.
Read up on Japanese photography courtesy SFMOMA here.