When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) opens its doors to the public next week, it will be the largest modern and contemporary art museum in the United States and the largest museum in Northern California. As impressive as these statistics are, they don’t include the numerous ways that the museum is much more than a physical building. Or the ways that UC Berkeley’s faculty, students, and alumni play pivotal roles in SFMOMA’s projects and plans.
The bonds between these two institutions are deep and ongoing, from SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra, who is a Berkeley alum, to Professor Emerita Squeak Carnwath, whose work is in the museum’s permanent collection. Collaborations between Berkeley and SFMOMA take the form of exhibitions, catalogues, conferences, publications and internships.
The award-winning author Rebecca Solnit worked at the museum when she was a graduate student at UC Berkeley between 1982 and 1984. She says, “Working with SFMOMA shaped the direction of my life in a lot of ways.” Assigned to a position with the research department, Solnit contributed to the 50th anniversary catalogue of the permanent collection’s highlights. “It was an incredible job and art education,” she says. “The best job I ever had.”
In conversations with alumni, faculty, and students, the word most often used to describe relationships between SFMOMA and Berkeley is “partnership.” Shannon Jackson, Berkeley’s associate vice chancellor for the arts and design, says, “Arts organizations are changing to become publicly engaged in very deep and systemic ways, and a public university like ours has a role to play in that evolution. My sense is that we rely on each other as partners as we redefine our roles in the 21st century.”
Institutions in transition
SFMOMA’s expansion, designed by the architectural firm Snøhetta, nearly triples the museum’s gallery space, and the cost of construction was $305 million. Between June 2013 and April 2016, when SFMOMA was “building-less,” the museum’s curators created a program called SFMOMA On the Go. They worked collaboratively with Bay Area organizations to offer events in different arts spaces.
The seeds of these partnerships were planted a decade ago when Solnit designed Infinite City. In 2007, Solnit was approached by SFMOMA curator Frank Smigiel and asked to make a project to mark the 75th anniversary of the museum in 2010. Solnit proposed “a series of broadsides with events tied to them… To my amazement SFMOMA said yes. I am not an artist and this is not a standard art project.”
This proposal resulted in six months of programming, with projects at sites around the city, and a book that was published by UC Press in 2010 called Infinite City. Solnit adds that the many kinds of partnerships between the university and SFMOMA are a kind of “cross-pollination.”
“Berkeley is a premier educational institution creating a cultural dialogue that intersects with SFMOMA’s,” Solnit says. “For Infinite City, SFMOMA was a great venue for bringing in audiences, and the museum was interested in celebrating their locatedness in San Francisco. All the events took place off-site and it was about going into the community and connecting to different places, different historical lineages. We even did a map about the violent transformation of South of Market, turning it from a working-class residential neighborhood into the transient neighborhood for tourists, and convention goers, and visitors, and shoppers, and SFMOMA was totally behind that.”
In October, UC Press will publish Solnit’s Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, the third atlas and the culmination of the series that began with Infinite City.
Dominic Willsdon, SFMOMA’s Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Practice, says that Infinite City was “a prototype” of SFMOMA On the Go. In 2014 Willsdon organized an On the Go event: a town hall at SFJAZZ Center to discuss the future of the arts in San Francisco’s urban plan. Willsdon invited three speakers: Craig Dykers, Snøhetta’s partner-in-charge of SFMOMA’s expansion, Cheryl Haines of FOR-SITE Foundation, which plans and oversees site-specific and public art projects, and Shannon Jackson, whose research focuses on the arts and social engagement.
At the town hall, Jackson addressed the roles of arts centers. “We were thinking about partnerships between organizations, and I remember speaking about how urban planners often describe ‘anchoring’ institutions,” she says. “Unfortunately, some large institutions do not ‘anchor’ anyone but rather take all the oxygen out of the atmosphere for smaller or mid-size organizations. SFMOMA On the Go did the opposite. By partnering with a range of organizations, it brought oxygen back to the Bay Area arts ecology and shared it with everyone. SFMOMA functioned as both anchor and sail.”
Willsdon says he continually draws on Berkeley’s “network of minds” and the knowledge of faculty who think expansively and who are “greatly interested in how ideas can engage with people in other areas of academic life as well as outside of academic life too.”
He invited Julia Bryan-Wilson of Berkeley’s Department of Art History and Jennifer González of UC Santa Cruz to co-organize a conference in 2014. The event was called Visual Activism and examined topics spanning from displacement to transformations of neighborhoods to the roles of the “creative” industries in gentrification.