Feb. 3rd: Free SFMOMA Admission for Bay Area Residents

in Art, contemporary art, Culture, modern art, Museums, Neighbors, Recreation, Uncategorized

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.

 

 Heaven on Seven SFMOMA’s 7th floor is currently home to Unstable Presence, an exploration of anti-monumentalism. © SFMOMA

 

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.

Tune Time: On Thursdays from 7:00 to 8:00 pm, SFMOMA bumps up the thump on  their expansive speaker system to blast that perennially hot beat, “Erbarme dich, mein Gott” (Have Mercy, My God), to heighten your viewing pleasure. Photo Credit: SFMOMA

 

“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. 

It Takes Two (To Make a Thing Go Right) This functional two-person organ, cleverly clapped with the moniker Auerglass, was created by Auerbach and their collaborator, musician Cameron Mesirow (alias Glasser), in 2009.  This instrument requires two players at a time in order to produce sound; each organist must pump the wind for their partner’s notes. Nothing like teamwork to make the dream work, eh? © Tauba Auerbach; Photo Credit: Max Farago Tauba 

 

“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.

Past Blast This gouache and ink drawing, entitled F, is an example of Auerbach’s earlier work. This piece is included in the curation, which drew from pieces Auerbach created during the past 17 years. © Tauba Auerbach; Photo Credit: Benjamin Blackwell

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.

Carp Diem  Japanese photographer Kou Inose snapped this image in 1983. He dubbed the work Aomori, which translates to ‘blue (or green) forest’  and is also the name of Honsu’s northern-most prefecture and its capital city. The city of Aomori was largely decimated during WWII. It was rebuilt after the war, however, becoming a hub for commerce and politics. © Kou Inose; Photo Courtesy SFMOMA

 

 

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).

 

 

Star Quality This photo, entitled Fall,  was crafted by Crow artist Wendy Red Star in 2006 for inclusion in her four-part series dubbed Four Seasons. The images of the series humorously prod the assumptions non-natives tend to harbor about native people in the U.S. One example that Red Star challenges is the erroneously romantic idea that all natives exist in perpetual harmony with nature. © Wendy Red Star; Photo Courtesy SFMOMA

 

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.