The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced the purchases of more than 90 modern and contemporary artworks between January and June 2026. The purchases include videos and video installations by Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser, Ana Mendieta, and Agniezka Polska; works on paper by Arakawa + Gins and Orlando Smith; sculpture and mixed-medium pieces by Betye Saar, Kishio Suga, Rose B. Simpson and Elaine Cameron-Weir; basketry by Jeremy Frey; and objects by architects Frida Escobedo, Bijoy Jain, and Architensions (Alessandro Orsini and Nick Roseboro). The museum also added to its photography collection with works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Justine Kurland, Danny Lyon, Joseph Rodriguez, and Malick Sidibé, and to its holdings of Bay Area art with pieces by painters Bernice Bing, Joan Brown, and David Huffman; photographer Jim Goldberg; and sculptor and painter Adaline Kent. In addition to these purchases, SFMOMA received more than 250 gifts of art to the museum. They included paintings and works on paper by Jennifer Bartlett, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Diebenkorn, Nicole Eisenman, Peter Hujar, Ellsworth Kelly, Maria Lassnig, An-My Lê, Charles Moore, Yasumasa Morimura, Yoshitomo Nara, Martin Puryear, and Kunié Sugiura, among others. “Our newest acquisitions feature celebrated and lesser-represented artists; visionaries with ties to our immediate community and those from across the country and the globe; and individuals with broad-ranging experience, vision and perspective,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA’s director. “This demonstrates our institutional commitment to collecting strategically and deeply to illuminate the fullest spectrum of narratives and artistic breakthroughs.” Below, a look at five works newly acquired by SFMOMA. Asian American artist Bernice Bing (1936–1998) spent much of her childhood in an Oakland, California, orphanage and among white foster families. At the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) she studied with Saburo Hasegawa, who introduced her to Zen Buddhism, Chinese philosophy, and traditional calligraphy, all of which would emerge in her later work. After graduating Bing became enmeshed in San Francisco’s beatnik subculture, painting in a largely Abstract Expressionist style. Velasquez Family No. II (1961), one of a series of paintings reinterpreting Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez, was made when the artist was 25 for her first solo exhibition. Best known for work attesting to histories of racism and survival in the face of it, California-based artist Betye Saar (1926–2026) once credited a 1967 visit to a Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Pasadena Museum as the inspiration for her transition from printmaking to assemblages. And she, like Cornell, had a personal engagement with mysticism—including, in her case, the spiritual and magical practices of the African diaspora. Conjuring a séance, this installation consists of four chairs pulled up to a card table embellished with connected handprints, Nordic runes, and Haitian Voudou symbols; surrounding the tableau are scattered tarot cards and flora from whatever location the piece is being shown. A pioneering exhibition and photobook by Jim Goldberg (b. 1953), “Raised by Wolves” (1985–1995) was shown at SFMOMA in 1997. Documenting the lives of homeless runaway youths in Los Angeles and San Francisco as they navigate the harsh world of the streets, the ten-year project incorporated photographs, interviews, handwritten notes, drawings, and found objects, handing its subjects the power to tell their own stories. Destiny’s Shiny Bracelet is one of 24 photographs from the work to be acquired by the museum. Born in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Indigenous artist Rose B. Simpson comes from a matriarchal line of ceramicists. Her work—which explores identity, resilience and ancestral knowledge—occupies the intersection of red clay pottery and modern technology, pushing the boundaries of Pueblo art. In addition to Simpson’s nearly 25-foot-tall cast-bronze sculpture Behold, SFMOMA has acquired the original ceramic maquette for the piece, preserving the hand-built sensibility integral to her art. Adaline Kent (1900–1957) lived and worked in the Bay Area for most of her life. A pioneer of midcentury modernism, she came of age alongside such contemporaries as Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi and was one of the few women artists to show with New York gallerist Betty Parsons. Kent was born into a family of early environmentalists—her parents donated the land for the Muir Woods National Monument in California—and found inspiration for her drawings and sculptures in California’s High Sierras. By the 1940s, the influence of Surrealism was also informing Kent’s increasingly abstract work, as in this newly acquired piece.
