The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) launches Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc, the largest installation of the multimedia artist’s career. Bamboo and Japanese paper, fashioned into hand-built kites, are suspended from the ceiling in a cloud canopy. The site-specific installation will cover the museum’s ground-floor, admission-free Roberts Family Gallery from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The installation will also be visible through two-story windows facing Howard Street, engaging passersby.
Inventing complex worlds
Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colo., in 1973, studied at Carleton College, and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. Living and working in Ossining, N.Y., Hashimoto creates complex worlds using sculpture, painting, and installation. His layered, modular components draw on video games, virtual worlds, and cosmology. Model boats, bamboo, paper kites, and even astro-turf-covered blocks keep Hashimoto grounded in traditional forms reminiscent of landscape-based abstraction, modernism, and handcraft.
A sense of play
The colorful, detailed nature of the images on the cloud canopy invites playful contemplation. The inspiration from video games and virtual worlds is suggested in the pixilation-influenced appearance of the multitude of brightly designed paper shapes, sparking the imagination. The public can look up at the cloud canopy and imagine myriad things, much like the way we look at the clouds in the sky, and the mind’s eye can turn them into almost anything. “This giant arc of kites, color, and pattern will be at once chaotic and meditative, playful and considered — a generous artwork that invites viewers to spend time in the gallery. It will be an enticing, intriguing overture to the museum itself,” said Hashimoto about the project. “The gravity of Giant Arc is its universality. …This essential nature allows people to find what they might need in the work-mysteries if people want them, stories if people desire them, narratives to spin and twist, experimental maps and aerial geographies to explore.”
Northern California elements
Hashimoto has been constructing his large-scale installations using kites for 30 years. These installations have appeared in various locations around the globe, including the recent exhibit Path to the Sky at the Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy, 2025; Not After a Million Years at the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skarhamn, Sweden, 2024; and The Fractured Giant, at the Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho, 2022 as well as permanent projects at locations from the Tokiwabashi Tower in Tokyo Japan to the U.S. Embassy in Windhoek, Namibia.
Giant Arc at SFMOMA is the artist’s latest evolution of the kite installation, and utilizes new elements built specifically for this installation including patterns and designs inspired by the flora and fauna of Northern California. The hundreds of existing patterns will be complemented by subtle graphic references to the dahlia, San Francisco’s official flower, the checker lily, a plant native to the Bay Area, and the Sonoran blue butterfly, which is found along California’s coast.
Roberts Family Gallery
The Jacob Hashimoto installation continues SFMOMA’s mission to support free art spaces in San Francisco. “Our mission at SFMOMA is radical hospitality for all — these efforts include filling over 45,000 square feet of free public space with irresistible contemporary art,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “Jacob Hashimoto’s enveloping and breathtaking commission in our free-to-visit Roberts Family Gallery promises to welcome visitors of all ages, imbuing all who experience it with wonder and awe.”
Giant Arc opens Thursday, Aug. 20. An opening celebration that evening will feature a conversation between Hashimoto and Joseph Becker, SFMOMA’s curator of architecture and design, followed by a live performance by experimental composer, songwriter, and producer Nico Georis, 6 to 8 p.m.
