The San Francisco Museum of Art (SFMOMA) has announced recently acquired acquisitions by more than 65 artists including Virgil Abloh, Farah Al Quasimi, Beverly Buchanan, Mire Lee, and Christian Marclay, among many others. The acquisitions represent SFMOMA’s ongoing commitment to shine a light on both celebrated artists and artists deserving of greater recognition while further enhancing the representation of women, artists of color, and those from California and the Bay Area within its holdings.
Infinity Mirror Room
Among the many highlights is Yayoi Kusama’s Dreaming of Earth’s Sphericity, I would Offer My Love (2023), the newest of the celebrated artist’s beloved Infinity Mirror Rooms. The work, which first premiered at David Zwirner in New York in spring 2023, was met with overwhelming audience enthusiasm. When it was featured in SFMOMA’s special exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinite Love, it drew over 170,000 visitors to the museum. The acquisition allows this Infinity Mirror Room to remain on long-term view at SFMOMA until January 2025, where visitors can experience it as part of general admission to the museum.
Video installations
SFMOMA acquired several works by multimedia artist Isaac Julien. Included is the major nine-channel video installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), a meditation on unfinished journeys, specifically the story of 23 Chinese cockle pickers from Fujian Province who drowned off the coast of northwest England. The multiscreen installation is a kaleidoscopic cinematic experience challenging the colonial gaze and providing a non-Western perspective on storytelling and the movement of people across countries and continents. Julien’s art explores an ongoing interest in examining notions of a “better life” within the context of migration and global displacement.
Photography
The wide range of works in the acquisition include photographic works by artists including Hal Fischer, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Jarod Lew, and Deanna Templeton. Thematically, many of the photographs depict the human experience in a way that promotes connection and understanding.
Fox Solomon exemplifies this approach in her black and white portraits from her acclaimed series, Portraits in the Time of AIDS (1987–88). Many of her portrait subjects in this series stare straight into the camera, confronting the viewer via eye contact and in the process demystifying a frightening disease with relatable humanity.
Yael Bartana’s video Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) asks, “What if women ruled the world?” where an all-women government must take a stand on an imminent nuclear threat from a foreign nation.
Innovations in the medium are represented by artists like Kunié Sugiura, an under-recognized artist who has been working since the 1960s. Sugiura combines photographic, painted, and drawn imagery to create powerful hybrid art forms in her photos Yellow Mum (1969) and Deadend Street (1978).
Additional highlights
Untitled LXXX (2023) by Merikokeb Berhanu is a quiet meditation on the impact of industry and urban life on the natural world, and the resulting distance between humanity and nature. Her unique approach to layered paint and contrasting color patterns creates a frieze of connection between the huddled figures.
Yael Bartana’s video installations, films, and performances explore the imagery of identity and the politics of memory. Two Minutes to Midnight (2021) asks the question, “What if women ruled the world?” Partially inspired by previously staged performances grappling with the same theme, the video focuses on a fictitious all-women government facing an existential threat. Staged in a style reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 war comedy Dr. Strangelove, female leaders are forced to take a stand on an imminent threat from a foreign nation.
Amy Sherald’s For Love, and For Country (2022) is a large-scale painting that reinterprets the iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a woman in V-J Day in Times Square (1945) by Alfred Eisenstaedt through the lens of queer black experience. Created as a direct response to the increasing legislation restricting the lives of LGBTQ+ individuals across the United States, the work offers a space to reflect on the power of love.
Amy Sherald, For Love, and for Country, 2022; SFMOMA purchase by exchange through a gift of Helen and Charles Schwab; © Amy Sherald; photo: Joseph Hyde, courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth
“The acquisitions announced capture an incredible depth of artistic ambition, formal innovation, and social and cultural experience,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA’s Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “The group reflects SFMOMA’s driving vision to enhance our collection with works by a diverse spectrum of artists who engage with an equally diverse range of subject matter, whether focused on aesthetic experimentation or on grappling with central issues of their time. I’m grateful for the thoughtful consideration that our curatorial teams have brought to this selection and to our broader acquisition strategies. I look forward to sharing these extraordinary works, and the narratives they hold, with our community.”
