Why go to a modern art museum? They’re expensive, stuffy and the art is often remote or, worse, something a toddler could make. Those are the typical lamentations, anyway. More contemporary grievances concern a lack of local emphasis and diversity within museum’s collections and institutional structures. How can these barriers to entry be lowered — or done away with?
The Examiner recently sat down with Christopher Bedford, the newly appointed director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to parse this question in the context of his vision for the museum’s future. Bedford made a case for a truly modern contemporary art museum that chronicles art history accurately and makes the greatest number of people feel welcome — and not a moment too soon.
The San Francisco arts community has been burned by SFMOMA before, and not in the too-distant past. In June 2021, the museum announced it would be cutting funding to three public-facing programs: the Artists Gallery, which exhibited local, emerging artists; the online publishing platform Open Space; and the long-running film program. A year prior, senior curator Gary Garrels resigned following a series of comments, in which he responded to questions about diversifying SFMOMA’s collection by saying that the museum would “continue to collect white artists” and “men.” The recent appointment of Bedford, himself a white man, has been met with understandable trepidation. But the museum’s shortcomings are something to which Bedford is particularly attuned.
“Museums position themselves as nonprofits that serve the public,” Bedford said. “Yet I’m not sure that we’ve always calibrated ourselves precisely toward engaging the public where they are.”
Paradoxically, smaller, for-profit art spaces, like the consortium of galleries at Minnesota Street Project, offer an experience essentially akin to a free contemporary art museum, boasting a democracy of access and representation that Bedford is interested in replicating.
To jumpstart this initiative, the entire second floor of SFMOMA will be free through May 29, coinciding with the 2022 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award exhibition, featuring up-and-coming Bay Area artists Binta Ayofemi, Maria Guzmán Capron, Cathy Lu, Marcel Pardo Ariza and Gregory Rick.
But the question remains: If commercial galleries, public art initiatives and several other nonprofits throughout The City offer free art experiences in spades, why bother with the museum at all? Bedford sees the unique position of the museum as an educational space.
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How he defines art history, however, is through a refreshingly radical lens. While many art museums across the world present only slight variations on the Western canon, Bedford would prefer that SFMOMA offer visitors “a moment of profound synthesis that narrates history as it actually unfolded in galleries that feel hyper-local and hyper-global concurrently.”
The historical narrative as it is typically trotted out might be all wrong, but Bedford sees it as malleable through a process of developing historical parallels.
By way of example, Bedford posited the following: “What would an exhibition look like that brought together New York City in the ’70s, Oakland in the ’70s, London in the ’70s, and showed the commonality as well as the deviation, discarding the old ideas of art history as a progression of style and instead embracing the idea of art history as something guided by the social? I think that’s really compelling and different.”
Bedford’s vision of “making the local global and the global local” seems to be shared by the museum’s curatorial staff. Recent exhibitions, the preparation of which only slightly predate Bedford’s tenure, include a major retrospective of local painter Joan Brown, and the ongoing Bay Area Walls mural project.
“I want us to collect, develop, present and interpret a new art history for the 21st century that opens every door to every person who wants to have that experience,” Bedford said. “If we’re successful in that, we’ll be a very different looking museum.”
If nothing else, these ambitions prove Bedford is listening to the demands of his audience. But is it all lip service? His track record would suggest otherwise. During his six-year tenure as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art before coming to SFMOMA, Bedford helmed a program of showing and collecting only women artists for an entire calendar year, and proposed an unprecedented — though ultimately unsuccessful — initiative to deaccession millions of dollars worth of work by canonical white male artists (think Warhol and Rauschenberg) to add more women and artist’s of color to the collection.
While the art historical canon might appear to be fabricated behind the closed doors of the ivory tower, it is advanced in practice. There’s no question that the present has the potential to be an incredibly transformative moment in the art world — but only if we actively create a new future by reckoning with our troubled past. That’s where the modern art museum comes in.
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