SFMOMA Reopens With Focus on Visitor and Staff Safety

The museum has reopened with a range of timely and thought-provoking exhibitions including Close to Home: Creativity in Crisis, highlighting seven local artists’ responses to the pandemic; Off the Wall, featuring photography-based installations by five international contemporary artists whose inventive approaches stretch the boundaries of the medium and engage visitors in unconventional ways; and New Work: Charles Gaines, a new installation of two major works that explore the history of racism in the U.S. by returning to the 1857 Dred Scott Decision.

Inspired by the long history of murals in the Bay Area and their recent resurgence, SFMOMA has commissioned large-scale wall projects by local artists as part of a series titled Bay Area Walls. Vibrant works by Muzae Sesay and Twin Walls Mural Company that opened last fall remain on view. The series continues with a sweeping mural by Liz Hernández and poignant photo-based projects by Erina Alejo and Adrian L. Burrell that respond to murals in San Francisco and Oakland created during the pandemic.

Later this month the museum will present Contemporary Optics: Olafur Eliasson, Teresita Fernández, and Anish Kapoor, an exhibition that transports viewers to visually captivating, other-worldly landscapes including Eliasson’s One-way color tunnel, a visitor favorite that returns to the museum’s Oculus Bridge.

In May, SFMOMA will be the exclusive U.S. venue for Nam June Paik, the major retrospective of Paik’s radical and experimental art organized with Tate Modern, London. Bringing together over 200 works that span a five-decade career, this immersive exhibition will offer an in-depth understanding of the artist’s trailblazing practice and his vision of a multidisciplinary, interconnected future.

In a groundbreaking partnership with City College of San Francisco (CCSF), SFMOMA will also host Diego Rivera’s monumental mural The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent—more commonly known as Pan American Unity—in the museum’s free Roberts Family Gallery beginning in Summer 2021. An accompanying exhibition, Diego Rivera’s America, which offers the most in-depth examination of the artist’s work in more than twenty years, will now open at SFMOMA in 2022.

In accordance with City and State guidelines, on-site tours including public, school, and scheduled self-guided tours are currently suspended, as is SFMOMA’s Art Express program for K–6 grade classes. Artwork guides, art project instructions, and more are available for all ages online.

SFMOMA will continue to offer a wide array of online public programming, including biweekly Instagram Live events and monthly roundtable art talks and family programs.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States and a thriving cultural center for the Bay Area. Our remarkable collection of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts is housed in a LEED Gold-certified building designed by the global architects Snøhetta and Mario Botta. In addition to our seven gallery floors, SFMOMA offers 45,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space open to all.