A huge exhibition of Mexican artist Diego Rivera's work from the 1920s to the 1940s has opened at SFMOMA, and it is drawing large crowds.
Though I love Mexican art and its 20th century muralists, Rivera's work has not been aging well for me, and this exhibition managed to confirm all those prejudices.
His socialist realism style depicting
los indios of Mexico now often looks like dated, earnest kitsch. Interestingly, the art of his fellow Mexican communist and muralist José Clemente Orozco is aging brilliantly, and so are the surrealist self-portraits of Rivera's wife Frida Kahlo whose work was virtually unknown outside of a small cult until the 1980s.
On the top floor of the museum is a highly conceptual exhibit called
Shifting the Silence, featuring 32 contemporary women artists. The curators write: "[These 32 artists] use the radical language of abstraction to enhance our understanding of the world we inhabit. Named after artist Etel Adnan’s 2020 book about history and existence,
Shifting the Silence embraces experimentation, impermanence, and subjectivity — bold yet poetic characteristics that mark the art of our time...The exhibition harnesses their defiant, yet enlightened energy to explore visual culture, the motivations of its practitioners, and its varied influences." Though the artspeak is ridiculous, some of the art is delightful, such as the 2004 painting
Stadia I by Julie Mehretu.
In a dark, scary room of its own, a series of mirrors and metal grids hang from the ceiling in Haegue Yuang's 2008
yearning melancholy red. The cool part of the piece is a drum set hidden in a dark corner, complete with cymbals, that any patron is welcome to play, and when they do so, a series of lights throughout the room respond to the sounds. Don't be shy and be sure to get a few licks in yourself because it's tremendous fun.
When I told the smart, amusing ticket woman that the Rivera was a disappointment, she said, "Be sure to go to the
Sightlines photo exhibit on the third floor." She was right.
In this exhibit, the curators have done a marvelous job of offering an eclectic sampler of photography from the museum's permanent collection, and it's filled with treasures without being bogged down by art theory.
, where she created self-portraits in airplane bathrooms using the materials at hand, including carefully crafted toilet paper.
There's a nice selection of Southern California artist Laura Aguilar, who created nude self-portraits in nature, posing her large body as a sculptural object. The 2006 photos above are
One whole section of the exhibit is devoted to photos that are not quite photos, such as the wall-size 2015 cyanotype by Meghann Rieppenhoff,
The artists are international, including the Chinese Tseng Kwong Chiwho who created a series called
in the 1970s and 1980s, where he posed in a Mao jacket in front of iconic United States sites. Above is the 1979
One of the chief delights of the museum is people watching, and my favorite sight of the afternoon was an elegant gay man dressed in white who glided around the galleries in his snakeskin boots looking like a perfect work of art himself.
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