From filmmaker Kerry Laitala’s collection rotation on Open Space:  

Their bodies are fused together as if melting into one another and one of the forms is being carried with lifeless arms and hands that defy normal human symmetry. The crest of foam swirls in the background as though the figures arose from a primordial ocean…

Read more → 

Image: Raoul Ubac, Untitled (Variation of Les vases communicants), 1937/1980s

Happy 73rd Birthday to Vito Acconci!

Acconci’s artwork confronts ideas of surveillance, social interaction, and the self.  Shown here is an installation view of Command Performance (1974), in which a television set broadcasts a monologue by Acconci. His voice exhorts visitors to sit on an illuminated stool nearby, saying “Come to me… Now you are there, where I used to be… It’s your turn to play the fool for them.” Read more…

In the spooky spirit of #OrangeOctober and last night’s big SF Giants win, we bring you Art Rogers’s photograph, The Pumpkin People-Petaluma, California (1980). World champs!!!

Some things never change :)

Below: Pirkle Jones, Log and Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, from Portfolio Two…, 1952; ca. 1968

Today would have been digital artist and painter Jeremy Blake’s 41st birthday.

From the NYTimes:

Mr. Blake began to make a name for himself in the late 1990’s with digital projections that combined colorful abstract geometric forms with photographic images — poolside cabanas, Modernist interiors, patio lights, skylines — that suggested scenes from movies. Some art critics described the work as Color Field paintings set in motion. He called much of his work “time-based paintings,” and wrote that he drew his subject matter from a fascination with “half-remembered and imaginary architecture” and images borrowed from “Hollywood’s psychic dustbin.”

He began to veer more toward the narrative and documentary in works like his “Winchester” video trilogy, which was shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005. The videos focused on the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, Calif., a 160-room mansion with mazes of hallways and dead-end staircases, built by Sarah Winchester, the widowed heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, to try to protect herself from ghosts of gunshot victims whom she believed would haunt her.

Pictured: Blake’s Guccinam, 2000

chromaticattic:

Femme au chapeau (or, Woman with a Hat) by Henri Matisse, 1905.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

One of my favorite paintings I saw today. I really like, and am fascinated with, Matisse’s use of vivid colors and his eclectic color palette. The subject of Femme au chapeau is his wife, Amélie. 

Learn a whole bunch about Matisse’s Femme au chapeau in this interactive feature!

wiblog:

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), from the portfolio Untitled, 1975, 1975

via Tammy Fortin’s most awesome collection rotation.

Tammy Fortin thinks that Tom Friedman’s Untitled (pictured) would make a good book cover for Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. See what other artworks she thinks would make good new covers for old classics here.

What work of art do you see making a great new cover for a classic work of literature?

Happy 100th Birthday to John Cage!

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. - John Cage

Pictured: Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), which influenced Cage’s seminal silent composition, 4’33”. See Robert Rauschenberg pay tribute to John Cage here.

Happy 104th birthday to the father of modern photojournalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson!

In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.The little, human detail can become a Leitmotiv. - Henri Cartier-Bresson

Pictured: Seville, Spain, 1933, printed ca. 1950

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Charles Henri Ford, Paris, 1935

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marilyn Monroe during the filming of “The Misfits,” Nevada, 1960

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Scanno, Italy, 1951

scissorfights:

nemel on Flickr.

Detail of Barry McGee work currently on view, 2nd-floor.