SFMOMA Reopens

SFMOMA reopened to visitors this weekend after an aborted reopening last fall was shuttered by winter's pandemic surge.

The museum has weathered a tough year. Early in the pandemic the institution laid off 135 employees, and recently laid off another 55. Neal Benezra, the Director for the last 19 years, has just announced that he's stepping down. (Click here for a Hyperallergic article by Valentina di Liscia).

Then there was a BLM/Instagram controversy in May that was yet another cautionary lesson in the perils of social media use by institutions that want to be woke but are as establishment as they come. (Click here for a roundup of the mess by Jonathan Curiel at SF Weekly.) People seem to forget that the main benefactors of SFMOMA are the San Francisco family dynasties of Don Fisher and Charles Schwab, right-wing Republicans in a one-party Democrat town. The photo above is me in front of a painting by the late Philip Guston, who has been in the center of another racially charged art world controversy. (Click here for a great Peter Schjeldahl article in The New Yorker on the subject.)

The limited attendance really did make the place feel safe on the Members Only opening Saturday, and we took an empty elevator to the top, seventh floor. However, the only installations there were two videos in enclosed rooms, with an actual line to get into them which struck me as the last thing I wanted to do during the still extant pandemic, vaccinated or not. We made our way to the Photography third floor where the opening signage was more artful than the exhibit.

I was hoping for wild, off-the-wall installations but instead each of the five artists' rooms were actively dull.

We made our way to the Permanent Collection second floor and went in the back way rather than the entrance with Matisse's la femme au chapeau. We wandered through the ultimate modern art installation, completely blank white walls, and got slightly lost before a museum guard pointed the way to the paintings.

There were some great new pieces, including the 22-year-old Jordan Casteel's 2020 Aurora.

These rooms all have silly mini-themes like "Beauty" or "People, Places and Things," but the art transcends the labels, like Yinka Shonibare's 1999 Gay Victorians cloth sculpture, framed by Mickalene Thomas' 2011 Qusuquzah, une très belle négresse 1.

Thomas's painting is part of the new collection made possible by a controversial deaccessioning of a Mark Rothko painting two years ago (click here for an artnet article). Also recently purchased is the 2018 Elder Sun Benjamin by the 87-year-old Guyanese painter Frank Bowling, which looks like a warmer, happier, African Rothko.

It was a joy to see a few old California favorites like Wayne Thiebaud's 1975 Buffet...

...one of my favorite Richard Diebenkorn paintings...

...and Joan Brown's 1964 Noel in the Kitchen.

Austin perversely sat on the bench in front of the major Rothko the museum owns with his back to the painting, while I dodged fierce ancient Filipina museum guards who had finally noticed I was carrying a plastic bottle of water because there were no drinking fountains open on account of the pandemic. "You can't have that water bottle in the galleries." "I'm not drinking from it." "Then put it in your bag." "I don't have a bag." "You can't have that water bottle in the galleries." I was no match for them and fled.