The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the inaugural exhibitions for the expanded and transformed museum opening to the public on May 14, 2016. With nearly triple its previous gallery space, SFMOMA will showcase 260 works from the distinguished Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of postwar and contemporary art, more than 600 artworks promised to the museum through its Campaign for Art on view for the first time, cherished favorites from its permanent collection, as well as recent work commissioned for the new museum.

“The opening of the new SFMOMA celebrates extraordinary growth of many kinds,” said Neal Benezra, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “From a beautifully transformed building with dramatically enlarged gallery spaces, to our strategically expanded collection and enriched programming, SFMOMA embraces its enhanced role in the Bay Area and the international cultural world, offering its visitors unparalleled experiences with modern and contemporary art.”

Selections on view from the Fisher Collection will represent important works of American abstraction, Pop, Minimal and figurative art, as well as German art after the 1960s, a range of Calder works from the late 1920s to the late 1960s and sculpture by leading British artists. Exhibitions highlighting contributions to the museum’s Campaign for Art will introduce the range and quality of these newly committed and acquired modern and contemporary works, including special installations focusing on photography, contemporary art and drawings. On view in the new Pritzker Center for Photography — offering the largest exhibition, interpretation and study space dedicated to photography in any art museum in the United States — will be works drawn from the museum’s collection that illustrate photography’s complex and ever-changing relationship with time.

The museum’s vibrant commissioning program will be inaugurated in the new space with a site specific work by Dutch designer Claudy Jongstra. New California galleries will underscore
SFMOMA’s commitment to artists of the Bay Area and beyond. Architecture and Design exhibitions will include a look at how Snøhetta architects developed the design for SFMOMA
and an examination of the lineage of graphic design. A thematic Media Arts presentation centering on the notion of place will present works by five artists, including a surveillance-based
installation by artist Julia Scher that was conceived and adapted for each of SFMOMA’s sites with evolving technologies from 1993 to 2016. In addition, the first of a series of installations
focusing on selections from SFMOMA’s permanent collection will provide fresh perspectives on particular works, including recent acquisitions.

The Snøhetta-designed expansion, which incorporates the renovated Botta building that opened in 1995, includes 170,000 square feet of new and renovated galleries tailored to the collection,
enabling SFMOMA to display more of its outstanding holdings of more than 32,000 modern and contemporary artworks by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock,
Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman and numerous others. Deeply integrated into the city, the museum will include an art-filled ground floor open to all free of charge and will offer
free admission to visitors 18 and younger.

The new SFMOMA will be open seven days a week from 10 am to 5 pm through Labor Day. The museum will offer extended hours on Thursdays, as well as free early morning access to
the museum’s unticketed ground floor area. Permanent hours and a series of free community days will be announced at a later date.

Inaugural Exhibitions at the New SFMOMA The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection

Approaching American Abstraction: The Fisher Collection
Ongoing – Floor 4
This exhibition will explore the diverse approaches to abstraction developed since 1950 by selected American artists in the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection. In luscious paint strokes,
luminous planes of uniform color and dynamic constructions of wood and metal, the nearly 80 paintings and sculptures assembled will illustrate artists’ individual ideas about the making and
meaning of abstract art. Highlights on view in Approaching American Abstraction range from the forceful brushwork of Lee Krasner’s Polar Stampede (1960), to the enigmatic wood forms of
Martin Puryear’s Untitled (1990) and Malediction (2006-2007), to 26 contemplative canvases and reliefs by Ellsworth Kelly and an intimate, octagonal-shaped gallery devoted to paintings by
Agnes Martin.

Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art: The Fisher Collection
Ongoing – Floor 5
Drawn from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, this exhibition will spotlight painters and sculptors working in the 1960s and beyond who were associated with American Pop and Minimal art, as well as artists whose work explores the nature of representation and the potential of the human figure as a subject. Featured artists will include Carl Andre, Chuck Close, Dan Flavin, Philip Guston, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, among others.

Works such as Lichtenstein’s Live Ammo (Tzing!) (1962) broke away from the emotionally expressive style of abstract painting that had dominated the previous decade. Many artists in this period began engaging commercial fabricators, working collaboratively, or delegating to studio assistants. In shifting the emphasis from the creators to the concepts and means of production, works as different as Donald Judd’s To Susan Buckwalter (1964) and Andy Warhol’s Silver Marlon (1963) provoked a dialogue about the nature of art and its position within American culture. Painters such as Chuck Close introduced new figurative styles that drew on both Pop and Minimal approaches.

German Art after 1960: The Fisher Collection
Ongoing – Floor 6
German artists who emerged after 1960 explored their postwar landscape—situated between recent disaster and emerging prosperity—with a combination of skepticism, uncertainty and excitement to begin anew. Drawn from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, this exhibition will feature monographic galleries devoted to leading German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. Showcasing the span of entire careers or significant artistic phases, the installation will offer insight into these artists’ development and highlight the Fishers’ commitment to contemporary German art. German Art after 1960 will feature paintings of bold abstraction, such as Gerhard Richter’s Janus (1983), playful illusion as in Sigmar Polke’s Untitled (2003) and historically potent imagery such as in Anselm Kiefer’s Sulamith (1983).

Alexander Calder: Motion Lab
On view through September 10, 2017 – Floor 3
Alexander Calder revolutionized art in the early 1930s by introducing actual movement into his sculptural and pictorial compositions. Animated as if by a life force, these works quickly came to be known as “mobiles.” Featuring a selection of artworks installed both indoors and on adjacent terraces, the exhibition traces Calder’s explorations of motion from the late 1920s to the late 1960s. Highlights include intimate, manually activated wire sculptures such as Aquarium (1929), motorized works such as Quattro Pendulati (1943) and eclectic wall-mounted structures such as Tower with Painting (1951). Alexander Calder: Motion Lab is the inaugural presentation in SFMOMA’s Calder gallery and marks the first in a series of annual exhibitions about his work.

British Sculptors: The Fisher Collection
Through Fall 2017 – Floor 5
This exhibition will bring together more than 40 years of sculpture by eight artists born or making their permanent homes in Great Britain. Drawn from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, this presentation will include work by Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, who pioneered British abstract sculpture in the first half of the 20th century, as well as a diverse selection of more recent works such as Tony Cragg’s Guglie(1987), Richard Long’s Autumn Circle (1990), Antony Gormley’s Quantum Cloud VIII (1999) and Anish Kapoor’sVortex (2004). This exhibition inaugurates a new series of annual sculpture exhibitions that will be presented in a sunlit fifth-floor gallery.

Reinstallation of the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection is supported in part by the Henry Luce Foundation and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Campaign for Art

The Campaign for Art: Modern and Contemporary
On view through September 18, 2016 – Floor 4
One of several exhibitions highlighting contributions from the museum’s Campaign for Art, this installation will introduce a wide range of newly committed and gifted modern and contemporary works, filling in gaps and building on strengths of SFMOMA’s collection. Illustrating the extraordinary growth in every curatorial department, this exhibition will present a multi-disciplinary selection from the gifts and promised gifts to Painting and Sculpture, Photography, Media Arts and Architecture and Design. Highlights include: paintings by Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and an entire gallery dedicated to Joseph Beuys; a gallery devoted to the late work of photographer Diane Arbus; work by video pioneer Nam June Paik and Bay Area artist Lynn Hershman Leeson; a selection of chairs, each of a single material and experimental works of architecture by contemporary practitioners.

The Campaign for Art: Modern and Contemporary is presented by Bank of America. Major support is provided by the Prospect Creek Foundation. Additional support is provided by Robin Wright and Ian Reeves.

California and the West: Photography from the Campaign for Art
On view through September 5, 2016 – Floor 3
California and the West — a title appropriated from Edward Weston’s celebrated book — will consist of nearly 200 gifts and promised gifts to the museum that depict wild nature as a spiritual resource and native heritage, illustrate how land has been used over time and explore diverging photographic approaches — from documentation to self-conscious art making. Arranged chronologically from 1856 to 2014, the show will reveal changes in the landscape as well as shifts in photographic attitudes and subject matter by artists including Ansel Adams, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Lewis Baltz, Imogen Cunningham, Lee Friedlander, Jim Goldberg, Dorothea Lange, Ed Ruscha, Peter Stackpole, Larry Sultan, Carleton E. Watkins, Edward Weston, Minor White and others.

Major support for California and the West: Photography from the Campaign for Art is provided by Lisa and John Pritzker. Generous support is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher and additional support from the Black Dog Private Foundation.

The Campaign for Art: Contemporary
On view through October 30, 2016 – Floor 7
Comprised of contemporary art acquired through SFMOMA’s Campaign for Art, this exhibition will highlight works in a variety of mediums that reflect the diversity of art being made since 1980. Grouped by period, geography, artist or sets of ideas or themes, this exhibition will relate to long traditions while exploring new combinations of materials and techniques, blurring traditional boundaries and inventing new forms. The Campaign for Art: Contemporary will include key figures that emerged in New York such as Robert Gober, Jeff Koons and Sherrie Levine; important California artists such as Mark Bradford, Vincent Fecteau and Charles Ray and international figures such as Doris Salcedo, Thomas Schutte, Luc Tuymans and Ai Weiwei. Also included will be an installation by Matthew Barney, animations by Jim Campbell, John Gerrard, Takeshi Murata and video works by Cao Guimarães, Rivane Neuenschwander and Nicole Miller, as well as contemporary photography, including a large-scale work by Jeff Wall and a series by Cindy Sherman. This presentation will serve not only as a celebration of objects new to the museum’s collection, but also as an introduction to the extraordinary creativity that is the art of today.

The Campaign for Art: Drawings, Part I
On view through September 18, 2016 – Floor 2
This presentation of modern and contemporary drawings, highlighting art from 1914 through the 1970s, will inaugurate the museum's first space dedicated to works on paper. Part one of a two part exhibition, this gallery will reveal the rich array of drawings, collages and other works on paper pledged to the museum through the Campaign for Art, including a group of Ellsworth Kelly’s early collages and drawings; drawings by Arshile Gorky, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns and Robert Smithson; and early watercolors by Georg Baselitz, among others. Together they capture the creative possibilities of drawing, as manifested in radical abstraction, intimate works of restraint or expressions of emotion and psychological experience.

The Pritzker Center for Photography

About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change
On view through September 25, 2016 – Floor 3
This thematic exhibition will bring together work from 180 years of photographic history to consider how the medium’s complex and ever-changing relationship with time has shaped our ideas about permanence and obsolescence, history and memory, among other temporal themes. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and presenting a wide range of formats—from daguerreotypes to slide projections to video installation — About Time will place historical works by Wilson Alwyn Bentley, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martin Munkacsi in dialogue with contemporary works by Dawoud Bey, Phil Chang, Owen Kydd, Zoe Leonard and Simon Norfolk, among others. This exhibition will also feature a newly commissioned installation by Jason Lazarus entitled Recordings #3 (At Sea) (2014-2016).

Major support for About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change is provided by Lisa and John Pritzker. Additional support is provided by Kate and Wesley Mitchell.

New Commissions and New Work

Claudy Jongstra: Aarde
On view through April 2, 2017 – Floor 5
A monumental, site-specific textile mural by Dutch designer Claudy Jongstra, Aarde (2016) — meaning “earth” in English — will span a large wall on the museum’s fifth floor. The work will be a visceral landscape of texture and color, using wool from heritage sheep Jongstra raises outside of her studio in the Netherlands and hand-dyed from botanicals cultivated on her farm. For the first time, the artist will also utilize an application of local minerals and flora for an enhanced surface effect. Working within a closed loop of resources, Jongstra’s work exemplifies a contemporary, socially responsible practice.

New Work: Leonor Antunes
On view through October 2, 2016 – Floor 4
Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes will present a site-specific installation to inaugurate a new gallery dedicated to SFMOMA’s New Work series. Antunes creates sculptures that conflate physical, measurable experience with the effects of memory and time. Layered with historical and material references, her installations extract details and components from work by artists, architects and designers associated with modernism. For this exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum presentation on the West Coast, Antunes will intertwine research of an unrealized residential commission in San Francisco by architect and designer Greta Magnusson Grossman, measurements from existing Grossman homes in Los Angeles and Sweden and the woven work of Anni Albers, as well as Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi, two artists with strong ties to the Bay Area.

Architecture + Design

Model Behavior: Snøhetta’s First Concepts for SFMOMA
On view through January 16, 2017 – Floor 3
As a practice, Snøhetta architects begin each project by identifying a set of conditions inherent to the site — not merely its physical setting, but also its cultural context with the goal of designing spaces that frame a condition, direct attention and provide a deliberate experience. More than 50 sketch models and five sketchbooks on view will offer perspective on the process behind the SFMOMA expansion design, and a new mobile app will provide an additional museum experience of built architecture with a narrated walk-through of key design decisions in the new SFMOMA.

Typeface to Interface: Graphic Design from the Collection
On view through November 27, 2016 – Floor 6
On the occasion of a major gift from graphic designer and collector Aaron Marcus, this exhibition will present a selection of nearly 250 works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection of graphic design since 1950. Typeface to Interface will note the shift from analog to digital in visual communication, and will include important examples of communication tools that have shaped our relationship with graphic design. Oscillating between structured formalism and free form expression, the works on view will illustrate the rapidly evolving field of graphic design. Advertising, wayfinding and information systems will be displayed alongside artistic and conceptual experimentation, providing a view of the progressive discourse on what graphic design is and how it is used.

Media Arts

Film as Place
On view through October 30, 2016 – Floor 7
This thematic presentation will center on the notion of place from a variety of temporal and geographical angles. The five featured artists will address specific locations as a meeting of history, geography and cultural conditions. Film as Place will highlight Julia Scher’s Predictive Engineering, a surveillance-based installation first conceived for SFMOMA’s original Van Ness building in 1993, adapted by the artist for the museum’s Mario Botta-designed building in 1998, and now restaged for a third iteration in response to both the expanded Snøhetta-designed building and the technology landscape of today. Also on view will be Beryl Korot’s seminal Dachau 1974 (1974), an early multi-monitor video installation; and one section of rotating projections by three leading international artists — Shadow Sites II (2011) by Jananne Al-Ani (May 14 through July 10), The Pixelated Revolution (2012) by Rabih Mroué (July 16 through September 5) and Phantoms of Nabua (2009) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (September 10 through October 30). Together, the works in Film as Place not only offer an investigation of the local presence of history, but also reveal how time-based situations and narratives are perceived through a cinematic and political lens.

Single Gallery Presentations and Permanent Collection

Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture Since 1900
Ongoing – Floor 2
A re-envisioned presentation of works from the SFMOMA collection will follow a loosely chronological path from the beginning of the 20th century to our own time. Organized in chapters, this exhibition will focus on historical periods, geographical places, shared sets of ideas and relationships between artists. Highlights will include works widely recognized as masterpieces, such as Henri Matisse’s Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat) (1905) and Mark Rothko’s No.14, 1960 (1960) as well as those considered experiments with ideas, techniques and forms, such as Robert Smithson’s Nonsite (Essen Soil and Mirrors) (1969) and Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953). Open Ended will encompass new interpretations of the museum's collection and fresh ideas about the relative importance of artists and individual works of art.

Art of Northern California: Three Views
On view through November 2016 – Floor 2
Underscoring SFMOMA’s commitment to the art of California, and the Bay Area specifically, the inaugural installation of the museum’s California galleries will feature local artists in three groupings: artists associated with the University of California, Davis, including Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley; art by Joan Brown, Jess and Lee Mullican, emphasizing the personal, often spiritual, underpinnings of art produced in the region; and the Bay Area’s vibrant Conceptual art scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, explored through works by David Ireland, Lynn Hershman Leeson and Tom Marioni, among others.

Art of Northern California: Three Views is supported by Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr. and Sheri and Paul Siegel.

Paul Klee in Color
On view through September 2016 – Floor 2
This selection of 16 significant paintings and watercolors by Swiss-born modernist Paul Klee will be SFMOMA’s 45th exhibition dedicated to the artist since the renowned chemist and playwright Carl Djerassi first placed his holdings of Klee’s work at the museum in the 1980s. Exploring Klee’s use of color, which was both intuitive and theoretical for the profoundly experimental artist, works on view will range from a delicate miniature from 1917 to a luminous landscape built out of blocks of color from 1940, and will feature several pieces inspired by the artist’s travels.

Learning to Love You More
On view through August 21, 2016 – Floor 2/Koret Education Center
Launched in 2002, before the rise of the blogosphere and social media, Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July’sLearning to Love You More (2002-2016) invited people from all over the world to respond to creative assignments that ranged from shooting short lo-fi documentaries to initiating lecture series. Through 2009, more than 8,000 submissions were collected and published as a web project, and Learning to Love You Morenow comprises the online archive, mailed-in objects and images. In the spirit of the project, Fletcher and July stipulated that exhibitions of the work may be curated by other artists. For this presentation of video, photography, sculpture and performance, SFMOMA commissioned artists Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan, the editors of the object-based publication THE THING Quarterly, to curate the work.

This presentation of Learning to Love You More is the inaugural exhibition for SFMOMA’s new Koret Education Center. Exhibitions in this space will complement the museum’s programs in Education and Public Practice by exploring public collaboration involving a varied and inclusive range of makers, thinkers and writers.