“You are a bear lost in a forest, and there is an old woman with long gray braids baking pies for you, and your job is to keep following the smell of pie. That’s your job—learning how to keep turning toward what is most delicious to you.”
Posted on Tuesday, May 21st 2013
How do we remember a career that did not leave behind a canonical trail? How do we fit the machine designed to illustrate a philosophical idea into a history of computing, or fit the plans for a city that can exist only in the imagination into a history of architecture?
Read more →
Image: Lebbeus Woods, Concentric Field, from the series Centricity, 1987
Posted on Friday, May 10th 2013
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. – Pablo Picasso
Posted on Tuesday, May 7th 2013
Read D-L Alvarez’s most recent Open Space post, 1972.
Image: Elizabeth Zvonar, Face 2010, digital LightJet print of a handcut collage
Posted on Saturday, April 20th 2013
Artist Tucker Nichols’s official notice about our upcoming closure for expansion construction :)
Posted on Tuesday, April 9th 2013
Collection Rotation: George Chen
I wrote this guest blog post for SFMOMA Open Space in their Collection Rotation series, where they ask people to organize pieces out of the museum’s permanent collection.
Woah, this GIF says it all! Read George Chen’s collection rotation on our blog here.
Posted on Wednesday, March 27th 2013
Reblogged from George Chen
Since I first saw Vertigo at the age of 17 at the Aquarius Theatre in Palo Alto, it’s been a fantasy to see it in its original imbibition Technicolor format… Read more →
Posted on Wednesday, March 20th 2013
After moving to San Francisco, I began experiencing history differently — I inhabited history. The things I’ve read about happened in the buildings I see all day, every day. Relics of the Gold Rush and the Gilded Age populate the city. I walk past a building as old as the State of California every morning on my way to get coffee. The transition from suburbia to history left me searching for the notable everywhere I walk, but it has also left me looking for the familiar in historical texts or photographs.
Image: Carleton E. Watkins, Golden Gate, San Francisco, number 669 from the Pacific Coast series, 1867
Posted on Monday, March 11th 2013
NOW LIVE! We’re virtually sitting in a living room w/ Open Space columnist Chris Cobb observing a rare conversation between Nobel Laureate and novelist Toni Morrison (who just turned 82) and iconoclastic Bay Area novelist, poet, and MacArthur Genius Award recipient, Ishmael Reed.
This is truly a unique experience to hear from some of the greatest minds of our time in a live and informal setting! More info here.
Posted on Sunday, February 24th 2013
![Via Receipt of Delivery series on Open Space:
Adrian Piper staged a number of collaborative performance events entitled Funk Lessons (1982–84) in which participants were invited to get down and party together. In the process of learning to discuss, dance, and listen to Funk music, the events opened up individual awareness of the complex personal associations of this popular dance form with racial and cultural boundaries. Read more →
Image: Adrian Piper, Funk Lessons with Adrian Piper (Bootsy Poster), 1984. Poster advertisement for Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons Performance on Friday, March 23, 1984 at New Langton Arts, San Francisco. 18 x 24 in. (46.5 x 61.5 cm). Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin. Photocredit: Phillip Dixon. [quarter-folded poster copy in SFMOMA Research Library]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/e257e5e0db46684c8f99cfbbf7d50f7e/tumblr_mindsweGIU1r064gzo1_250.jpg)
Via Receipt of Delivery series on Open Space:
Adrian Piper staged a number of collaborative performance events entitled Funk Lessons (1982–84) in which participants were invited to get down and party together. In the process of learning to discuss, dance, and listen to Funk music, the events opened up individual awareness of the complex personal associations of this popular dance form with racial and cultural boundaries. Read more →
Image: Adrian Piper, Funk Lessons with Adrian Piper (Bootsy Poster), 1984. Poster advertisement for Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons Performance on Friday, March 23, 1984 at New Langton Arts, San Francisco. 18 x 24 in. (46.5 x 61.5 cm). Collection of the Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin. © APRA Foundation Berlin. Photocredit: Phillip Dixon. [quarter-folded poster copy in SFMOMA Research Library]
Posted on Saturday, February 23rd 2013
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…
Image: Raoul Ubac, Untitled (Variation of Les vases communicants), 1937/1980s
Posted on Thursday, February 21st 2013
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