Yesterday we invited members of the press to preview our newest photography exhibition, South Africa in Apartheid and After. See exclusive photos from inside the preview here!

Paul Klee’s Circus presents a selection of works featuring acrobats, jugglers, clowns, and buffoons. Come dodge the rain TODAY w/ food + fun at our Pop-Up Lunch inspired by the exhibition! We’ll be in the Schwab room from 11:30am-1:30p, where sliders by Straw SF and cotton candy by Blue Bottle will be for sale :)

Image: “Paul Klee’s Circus” installation view featuring Alexander Calder’s “Tightrope Walker,” 1944.

Happy 92nd Birthday to Wayne Thiebaud! 

From our website: Thiebaud is best known for his paintings of cakes, pies, and candies arranged in classic diner or cafeteria style. Thiebaud depicts these objects as commodities, their emphasis on appearance as much as taste. He achieved this effect through serial repetition, synthetic colors, and, famously, by painting with a knife, as if he were spreading the “frosting” onto his cakes. By focusing on sugary foodstuffs, Thiebaud updated the traditional still-life genre for the age of mass production and consumption.

Pictured: Blue Bottle pastry chef Caitlin Williams Freeman’s sweet interpretation of Thiebaud’s Cakes (click through to see the original painting!), shot last year for Martha Stewart. Blue Bottle will be baking cakes from this series today, so come stop by for a slice!

According to Jasper Johns, good paintings should convey a sense of life.

This wall text was taken from Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind’s Eye, now on view at SFMOMA.

SFMOMA staffer Tim Svenonius on Petah Coyne’s Untitled #1181 (Dante’s Daphne):

I cannot say for sure whether I already saw a recumbent figure there beneath the dark foliage, before finding the protagonist’s name nested deep within the title. It’s difficult now to look at this cocoon of feathers and flowers without pondering who is entombed or entangled within…

Read the full post on SFMOMA’s blog here.

Comprising more than 130 works, “Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective” brings together the artist’s paintings, drawings, photographs, collages, small sculptures, and jewelry designs—most of which have not been seen in decades or have never been exhibited before.

Pictured at center: Jay DeFeo’s “The Rose,” which is layered with nearly two thousand pounds of paint.

Click here to learn more about Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective.

Lots of great photos of SFMOMA members from our Jasper Johns / Jay DeFeo member preview party last Friday… view them all on our Flickr page here!

Tonight’s artist talk features internationally recognized media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose work is in not one but TWO exhibitions at SFMOMA right now! The talk will be followed by a performance of experimental composer Seth Horvitz’s Eight Studies for Automatic Piano, a work inspired by simple iterative processes, elegant geometry, the idiosyncratic behavior.

Click here for more info + tix!

Image: Field Conditions installation view, featuring Lozano-Hemmer’s installation “Homographies.” Photo by Matthew Millman.

The submissions to this year’s SFMOMA Staff Pumpkin Decorating Contest are KILLER! See ‘em all HERE.

What do Jay DeFeo, George Segal, and Damien Hirst have in common this Halloween? Read Juliet Clark’s  “It’s Hideous and It’s Eloquent” (A Bucket of Blood) on Open Space… IF YOU DARE!

Image: “I’m working on something, it’s not ready yet.” Left: A Bucket of Blood, 1959 (still). Right: Jay DeFeo working on The Rose, 1960; photo: © 2012 Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos

Happy Halloween from SFMOMA!

Pictured: An untitled photograph by an unknown artist. Spooky!