I was in San Francisco over the weekend and spent part of a day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I particularly enjoyed a wonderful exhibit of Frida Kahlo and the time my partner and I spent on a tour with one of the museum’s docents. The docent was very familiar with everything Frida and was a good, inspirational teacher. I also learned about the museum’s upcoming $555 million expansion project. The project is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2013 with a completion date in 2016. The SFMOMA will close down during some of this time and reopen with not only with a larger footprint but with a lot more modern art. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection offered SFMOMA 1100 new works from their noted collection which is one of the greatest private collections of modern and contemporary art in the world. SFMOMA has forged a historic partnership with the Fisher family (The Gap fortune) to share this extraordinary collection alongside works from the SFMOMA collection. Over the years, the Fishers have amassed a collection of works by 20th- and 21st-century American and European masters from movements including Pop Art, Figurative Art, Minimalism, Abstraction, Conceptualism, Photorealism, and Color-field painting. The collection features major works by Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. The architects for the new museum, Snøhetta, received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, and the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2009. Snøhetta is the only company to have twice won the World Architecture Award for best cultural building, in 2002 for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and in 2008 for the National Opera and Ballet in Oslo. If you follow the link below, you can find further information about the collection. More here: http://future.sfmoma.org/#transformation-expanded-home
If you love modern art, put 2016 on your calendar to visit San Francisco. The new museum will be architecturally stimulating and will house one of the most interesting and substantive modern art collections of our times.