The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the commission of Kara Walker to create the first site-specific installation for its admission-free, street-level Roberts Family Gallery. Walker has long been recognized for her incisive examinations of the dynamics of power and the exploitation of race and sexuality. For her SFMOMA commission, Walker will create a large-scale installation that responds to the glass-enclosed Roberts Family Gallery and plays with strategies of engagement and preservation inspired by historical museum displays. The exhibition is organized by Eungie Joo, SFMOMA’s curator of contemporary art, with whom Walker has collaborated multiple times over the past 25 years. Currently in formation, the commission will open to the public in July 2024.
“Informed by the fear and loss experienced as a global society during the COVID-19 pandemic, Walker’s new commission helps us consider the memorialization of trauma and the objectives of technology. Facing Howard Street and the world, her striking installation will allow us to move towards wonder and healing,” said Joo.
The new commission also builds on SFMOMA’s long-standing relationship with the artist. Her 1997 SFMOMA exhibition Kara Walker: Upon My Many Masters–An Outline featured remarkable watercolors and drawings as well as two black-paper silhouette installations—allegorical tableaus that suggest figures engaged in macabre, violent and sexual interactions. Part of the museum’s ongoing New Work series, it marked Walker’s first solo museum exhibition on the West Coast. Since then, SFMOMA has presented the artist’s work in group exhibitions and acquired her work for its collection. In 2018, the museum awarded Walker its Contemporary Vision Award, which celebrates creators, innovators and changemakers whose work foregrounds contemporary art as a vital part of public life. The forthcoming installation is the culmination of years of the artist’s research into 19th century visual culture, technologies and methods of display—research that has manifested as shadow puppetry, cycloramas and a steam-powered organ in the artist’s previous works.
To learn more about Kara Walker’s commission for SFMOMA, click here.