Ten Things to Love in What Is Now the Nation’s Largest Modern Art Museum

Alexander Calder (1898-1976) taught art to dance – but many of his famous “mobiles” (a term coined in 1931 by Marcel Duchamp to describe his friend's work) hang statically in museums, far from any breath of wind. In the new SFMOMA’s Alexander Calder Motion Lab, doorways on either side of the gallery—opening to the outside world—allow fresh breezes to circulate through. The mobiles are hung so low, almost at eye-level, that even the motion of people walking by stirs them into action. The brightly painted shapes of metal move hesitantly, seeming to awaken from a long sleep.

It may sound strange, but one of the most wonderful features of the reimagined ten-story museum is its many maple-clad staircases, each of a different size, connecting every floor (and sometimes offering shortcuts into selected galleries). Illuminated by daylight, each is a unique experience—and a wonderful, and energy-efficient way to experience the new building. “They’re intimate, almost domestic in scale,” reflected Craig Dykers, founding partner of the architecture firm Snøhetta. “If you start your visit without taking the elevator, you’ll commit to the stairs!” It’s a worthwhile diversion, with visual rewards of its own. As visitors descend from the sixth to the fifth floor, for example, the facing stairway—seen through a pane of glass—appears to be a reflection, slightly out of synch with reality.

Looking down upon Richard Serra’s Sequence from the maple steps on the museum’s free-to-the-public second floor, the installation appears almost fragile; like twists of caramel ribbon, or delicately bent strips of deeply burnished wood. But the fragile appearance of the work is deceptive. Serra (b.1938) works with ideas of mass and space, and there are few better examples than this magnificent work. The 14-foot high steel walls are a kind of iron-age nautilus, a labyrinthine passageway constructed of twelve sections and weighing in at half a million pounds. Sequence was the first artwork installed in the new SFMOMA; once it was in place, the walls of the gallery were raised around it.

Designed by Habitat Horticulture founder and “botan-artist” David Brenner, the Living Wall—nearly 30 feet tall and 150 feet wide—is a literally a mural composed of 19,442 live plants. Its nearly 4,400 square feet include 37 species—21 of them native to California and the San Francisco Bay Area. The baby tears, huckleberry, ferns and pink flowering currant literally provide a breath of fresh air on the SFMOMA’s third floor patio. And unlike the other artworks on view, this already fragrant masterpiece will evolve as time goes by. What does Brenner hope for the living Wall’s future? “We’re already seeing pollinators, like hummingbirds, butterflies and bees – which are rare these days – and I’m hoping they’ll continue to visit.”

Across the gallery is its dark textural nemesis: Vortex by Anish Kapoor (b. 1954). Silky smooth and super high-tech, Vortex is a wall piece—but it’s impossible to tell how far into the wall it descends. Like Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Vortex is a highly sophisticated fun-house mirror—or a view into a black hole, playing havoc with notions of space and gravity.

Seeing Gerhardt Richter’s work displayed through three galleries in the new SFMOMA, a viewer can be forgiven for thinking this is a group show featuring a dozen different artists, each at the top of their form. Because Richter (German, b. 1932) is one of those rare artists who is equally comfortable with minimalism, impressionism, abstraction and serene photorealism. From his recent works on glass (created with squeegees) to this elegiac painting of a twilight seascape, Richter is a master of color and emotion. Along with Seascape, his 1994 portrait of his pregnant wife reading—titled Lesende—is a masterpiece of realism, echoing Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

The Great Depression was a time of dead-ends—but not the road west to California. Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) took this photo in 1938, well before Sal Paradise crossed the U.S. in On the Road. Few images sum up the hopeful loneliness of the long-haul traveler more evocatively than this stretch of old U.S. 54 in southern New Mexico. It calls to mind astronaut Buzz Aldrin’s words as he stepped onto the lunar surface: “Magnificent desolation.” Lange’s searing portraits of bread lines and migratory farm workers, taken while she was a photographer with the Farm Security Administration, are as much a part of this country’s history as the snapshots from the moon.