San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
New director sees canvas of opportunity at SFMOMA
As the new director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Christopher Bedford has one of the most powerful and prestigious jobs in the art world. After two pandemic years marred by public turmoil at the institution over issues ranging from program cuts to allegations of racial bias, it’s also one of the most scrutinized museum directorships in the region.
But in an exclusive interview with The Chronicle at the museum over two recent afternoons, Bedford said he is ready to set a new course for the 87-year-old institution.
“There was no reluctance whatsoever,” he said of his decision to succeed longtime SFMOMA director Neal Benezra in June. “I
thought the way that the search committee was constituted, the questions they asked, were very intentionally future-directed. There was no sense of dwelling in past trauma. There was a sense that we needed to absorb the learnings of that period of time, restructure ourselves in a different form, and move forward, unafraid, in the correct direction.”
For the 44-year-old, who left his role as director at the Baltimore Museum of Art after six years, one of the greatest lures of SFMOMA was the opportunity to create systemic change and expand the canon of contemporary art even beyond the institution.
“The idea was to take on conventional art history and use the resources on this board, the sheer space of the museum, the existing collection and the expertise of the staff in a hypercosmopolitan city to narrate a new art history,” Bedford said. “That is the chance I wanted.”
In his first few months on the job, Bedford said he’s largely devoted his time to getting familiar with the region and the local art community.
Until his wife, art historian Jennifer Bedford, and their children move out from Baltimore, he’s living in an apartment around the corner from SFMOMA to get to know the South of Market neighborhood. A fan of heavy metal, with tattoos below his wrists that peek out from under the cuffs of his shirt as he gestures, he names Metallica and San Jose’s Ripped to Shreds as favorite bands, and he hopes to explore more of the local music scene.
He’s had visits with Bay Area artists such as David Huffman, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Catherine Wagner, Catherine Opie, Dan Miller, William Scott and Tucker Nichols. And in an effort to better connect with SFMOMA staff and do away with some of the constraints of organizational hierarchy, he instituted an open-door policy where anyone could schedule time to meet with him.
Some on staff have already remarked that the Scottish-born, American-educated Bedford is a decidedly more outgoing personality than Benezra, who helmed SFMOMA for 20 years. Filmmaker and artist John Waters, a board member of the Baltimore Museum of Art who worked closely with Bedford to gift his collection to the institution in 2020, referred to Bedford’s “great sense of humor.” He recalled a conversation they had when Waters asked that a restroom at the Baltimore museum be named in his honor; that request was granted.
“He is very energized and excited, and he’s also bold in wanting to make things happen quickly,” said SFMOMA Design Director Bosco Hernández.
Museum trustee Komal Shah noted that since Bedford came aboard, there has been “palpable excitement” among the board and staff about the change in leadership.
“I think he comes at a time where we need his presence and his experience (to take) SFMOMA into a much more fair, equitable world where diversity is a natural state of being as opposed to a forced attempt that lasts for a minute,” Shah said.
Although Bedford said he initially committed to the museum board that he would be “quiet and measured” during his first year as director, to concentrate on listening, “I very quickly found that that was not what the staff wanted. What the staff wanted was vision and action.”
Hernández described conversations in the past with colleagues that highlighted issues at SFMOMA, such as feelings of academic elitism in the framing of some exhibitions and a sense of “unspoken rules” in the institutional culture. He said he’s had positive professional experiences at SFMOMA too but acknowledged “it hasn’t always been the easiest place to work.” When he heard about Bedford’s hiring, Hernández admitted he initially had “mixed feelings” — he was enthusiastic about Bedford’s priorities at the Baltimore museum, but disappointed a more diverse candidate wasn’t selected.
While he said it’s hard to measure Bedford’s impact on the museum this early, Hernández is encouraged by the conversations around equity the new director is having.
“That is a big shift from how we’ve been operating,” Hernández said. “It’s definitely rocking the boat.”
Now after nearly six months in charge, Bedford is beginning to lay out his vision for SFMOMA and announcing his first initiatives as director.
Coinciding with the 2022 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award exhibition, which opens Dec. 17, the second floor of the museum will be admission-free through May 29, a move partly meant to introduce the public to the work of SECA-winning Bay Area artists Binta Ayofemi, Maria Guzmán Capron, Cathy Lu, Marcel Pardo Ariza and Gregory Rick. The floor will also include the exhibitions “Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture, 1900 to Now,” featuring works from SFMOMA’s permanent collection, and “Joan Brown + Friends,” a companion show to SFMOMA’s major Joan Brown retrospective opening Nov. 19.
Additionally, SFMOMA plans to open Wu Tsang’s acclaimed 2022 immersive video and sound installation “Of Whales” on Dec. 17 in its vast atrium, where it will also be accessible to visitors for free. The
work, recently on view at the Venice Biennale, was acquired for the museum’s permanent collection.
Visitors and those just passing by should also expect to be greeted by Oakland artist Jocelyn Tsaih’s work as she premieres a series of her illustrations that will decorate the facades of SFMOMA at the building’s entrances on Third and Howard streets.
Plans also call for an installation of work by the late Berkeley artist Susan O’Malley for the corridor between Howard and Natoma streets, as well as a new graphic installation by Oakland’s Floss Editions at Steps Coffee on the museum’s second floor.
Finally, McCalls Catering & Events is slated to open a new ground floor restaurant at the museum’s Third Street entrance, with both indoor and outdoor seating.
All are intended as reminders to the community that SFMOMA is open and accessible to all, Bedford said.
At the core of Bedford’s vision is a desire to move away from telling a stylistic history of art and instead create a social history that is centered on people. That means including work by artists from marginalized communities, specifically artists of color, LGBTQ artists and artists with disabilities. Bedford also wants SFMOMA to further commit to protecting the environment through sustainability — for example, reducing exhibition waste with the elimination of temporary Sheetrock walls.
These pillars aren’t just programmatic for Bedford. It isn’t enough to create exhibitions featuring artists from underrepresented communities, he said, if the museum doesn’t make itself accessible to those communities through its policies. Key to that will be collaborating with institutions with strong relationships in those communities, and creating a board and staff that will look “more like the creative program itself … modeling the world, the work that we’re proposing.”
While Bedford’s appointment and track record as a proponent for diversity was met with positive reactions from many in the local arts community, it was not lost on anyone that Bedford was yet another straight, cisgender white man in the role after many on staff had expressed a desire for a more diverse leader.
San Francisco artist Rosanna Castrillo Diaz, who was a member of the director search committee, said that those concerns “were not overlooked in our conversations,” but that ultimately, “the committee felt that finding the right steward for this particular junction in time superseded any optics.”
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With a $56.7 million annual budget and 170,000 square feet of exhibition space downtown, SFMOMA is one of the largest and most storied museums in the region. Its cachet reaches beyond the Bay Area and it is a player in worldwide conversations about museum practices.
After a three-year expansion project on its building at 151 Third St., it reopened in 2016 with grand celebrations and a sense of possibility for many.
SFMOMA also entered into a long-term lease agreement with the Fisher family over the Fisher Collection, seen at the time as a coup for the museum.
But in 2020, SFMOMA was forced to grapple with a series of reckonings after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the deletion of a comment by former museum communications associate Taylor Brandon about the museum “profiting from Black pain” on an SFMOMA Instagram post. In the subsequent months, several artists severed ties with the museum and five significant leadership departures were announced. In February 2021, Benezra announced that he would vacate the directorship when a successor was found, a decision he said he had made in fall 2019.
The terms of the Fisher Collection loan agreement also resurfaced. Many questioned what the museum’s commitment to display a collection largely consisting of the works of white male artists meant while SFMOMA was committing to more diversity on its walls.
The frustration from both museum staff and the community culminated in summer 2021 with protests in front of the museum over the closure of its community-focused Artists Gallery at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture and the end of SFMOMA’s 85-year-old film program.
Meanwhile, Bedford had built up significant experience dealing with issues of diversity, equity and access at the Baltimore Museum of Art and earlier in his career.
As director from 2016 to 2022, he spearheaded projects that included commissioning Mickalene Thomas’ mixed-media installation “A Moment’s Pleasure” to transform the museum’s east gallery into a community-focused entry point, and initiating an arts education partnership between the museum, acclaimed artist Mark Bradford (a longtime colleague of Bedford’s) and Baltimore’s Greenmount West Community Center. While many of these efforts were well received, he got backlash from the community over plans to deaccession three works in the interest of buying more diverse works for the collection, and eventually canceled their sale. In March 2022, he also presented one of the most talked about exhibitions of the year: “Guarding the Art,” a show curated entirely by members of the Baltimore museum’s security staff — a possible show model he hasn’t ruled out for SFMOMA.
Bedford did not arrive as a stranger to SFMOMA. In 2021, he facilitated the collaboration between the Baltimore Museum of Art and SFMOMA for the 2021 Joan Mitchell retrospective. Two years earlier, he co-curated “Solidary and Solitary,” an exhibition of work from SFMOMA trustee Pamela Joyner’s collection, which emphasizes African American abstraction from the 1940s to the present day.
“We searched for a director who could build on the best of the museum’s past while setting an innovative path towards a more inclusive and equitable future,” said Joyner, who was cochair of the director search committee.
She cited Bedford’s “measurable track record of successfully implementing change” as one of the qualities that made him the unanimous choice. Joyner added that she and Bedford “share a common view of the museum and the art historical landscape.”
“Most importantly, we agree on key steps that need to take place in order to achieve constructive transformation,” she said.
And Bedford knows it’s just the beginning. He said he sees his work at SFMOMA as not only a matter of expanding art history, but correcting it.
“The story we’ve been telling is incorrect because it’s partial, and it’s structured by bias,” Bedford said. “What we’re proposing is, through our acquisition and exhibition-making activities, we are engaging in a fully self-conscious act of reparation that is intended to narrate an art history as it actually happened. That’s what I’m after. The truth.”
“He is very energized and excited, and he’s also bold
in wanting to make things happen quickly.” SFMOMA Design Director Bosco Hernández, on new museum Director Christopher Bedford