Moma

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devotedsolely to 20th century art. The museum’s current collection includes over 26,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts.[1] The building complex was designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta.
SFMOMA's Research Library was established in 1935 and contains extensive resources pertaining to modern and contemporary art, including books, periodicals, artists’files, and lecture recordings.[2] The museum also houses a restaurant, Caffè Museo, and a coffee bar run by the Blue Bottle Coffee Company.[3]

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History
SFMOMA was founded in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied the fourth floor of the War Memorial VeteransBuilding on Van Ness Avenue in the Civic Center. A gift of 36 artworks fromAlbert M. Bender, including The Flower Carrier (1935) by Diego Rivera, established the basis of the permanent collection. Bender donated more than 1,100 objects to SFMOMA during his lifetime and endowed the museum's first purchase fund.[4]

The atrium of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The museum began its secondyear with an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse. In this same year the museum established its photography collection, becoming one of the first museums to recognize photography as a fine art. SFMOMA held its first architecture exhibition, entitled Telesis: Space for Living, in 1940.[4] SFMOMA was obliged to move to a temporary facility on Post Street in March 1945 to make way for the United NationsConference on International Organization. The museum returned to its original Van Ness location in July, upon the signing of the United Nations Charter. Later that year SFMOMA hosted Jackson Pollock's first solo museum exhibition.[4]
Founding director Grace Morley held film screenings at the museum beginning in 1937, just two years after the institution opened. In 1946 Morley brought infilmmaker Frank Stauffacher to found SFMOMA’s influential Art in Cinema film series, which ran for nine years. SFMOMA continued its expansion into new media with the 1951 launch of a biweekly television program entitled Art in Your Life. The series, later renamed Discovery, ran for three years.[4] Morley ended her 23-year tenure as museum director in 1958 and was succeeded by George D. Culler (1958–65)and Gerald Nordland (1966–72). The museum rose to international prominence under director Henry T. Hopkins (1974–86), adding "Modern" to its title in 1975.[5] Since 1967, SFMOMA has honored San Francisco Bay Area artists with its biennial SECA Art Award.
In the 1980s, under Hopkins and his successor John R. Lane (1987–1997), SFMOMA established three new curatorial posts: curator of painting andsculpture, curator of architecture and design, and curator of media arts. The positions of director of education and director of photography were elevated to full curatorial roles. At this time SFMOMA took on an active special exhibitions program, both organizing and hosting traveling exhibitions.,[6] including major presentations of the work of Jeff Koons, Sigmar Polke, and Willem de Kooning.
Untilthe opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1987 and the modern and contemporary wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco's museum tended to function as the state's flagship for modern and contemporary art.[7] In January 1995 the museum opened its current location at 151 Third Street, adjacent to Yerba Buena Gardens in the SOMA district. Mario Botta, a Swiss...