Review: ‘A New Big Museum of Modern Art’

Recently the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reopened after a period of renovation and expansion lasting about three years, adding almost three times as much exhibition space to its former building and making it one of the biggest museums for modern art in the USA.

The extension by Snøhetta architects was realized with the financial support of Doris and Donald Fisher, whose collection of contemporary art will be on loan to SFMOMA for the next 100 years and features prominently over three of the seven floors of the building. The Fisher Collection is displayed in thematic exhibitions, each with a separate title and theme such as “Approaching American Abstraction”, “British Sculptors”, “Pop, Minimal, and Figurative Art” or “German Art after 1960”, and contains a lot of what Carolina A. Miranda in Los Angeles Times calls “dude art”. In The New York Times, Roberta Smith is charmed by the museum’s new building, but describes the Fisher collection as having an “unalloyed mainstream focus”, and reminds the museum that “diversity … remains its big challenge”.

Read more: Metropolis M Online

Image: Roberts Family Gallery featuring Richard Serra’s Sequence (2006) at SFMOMA; photo Henrik Kam