SFMOMA Acquires 85 Artworks by Nan Goldin, Ruth Asawa, and Others

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced the acquisition of some 85 modern and contemporary artworks, from painting and sculpture to new media and photography. Some of the most notable names include Ruth Asawa (whose retrospective, currently at the Museum of Modern Art, debuted at SFMOMA last spring), Nan Goldin, Kay WalkingStick, Yoshitomo Nara, Dorothea Lange, and Eugène Atget.

In a statement, SFMOMA director Christopher Bedford noted that all the additions, “whether photographs or paintings, ceramics or fiber, design or digital media . . . demonstrate the relevance of art to better understanding our world and each other.” These new artworks, Bedford says, “will further the museum’s goal of telling a broader and more inclusive story about the art of our time.” 

To that end, SFMOMA has acquired several artworks by key Indigenous artists, among them WalkingStick, Raven Chacon, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Cannupa Hanska Luger. Luger’s video Mirror Shield Project: River (The Water Serpent) documents a 2016 performance at a camp site near Standing Rock, North Dakota, involving mirror shields; Chacon’s sound installation Storm Pattern, 2021, was also inspired by the Standing Rock resistance movement.

Chacon’s installation, along with videos by Gerald Clark and Luger, and kinetic digital kinetic paintings from the late 1980s by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby, will be on view on the museum’s first floor starting Jan. 24.

Some of the new works were gifted (eg. Nara’s urethane-coated bronze sculpture Long Tall Peace Sister, 2024, which came via Maria and Tim Blum) while others, like Sheila Hicks’s soft sculpture Rempart, 2016, Goldin’s photo Lola Modeling at The Other Side, Boston, 1972, and Lenore Chin’s painting The Family, 1991, were acquired via the museum’s deaccession fund.