A sponsored story from SFMOMA
San Francisco has always been a haven for cultural refugees. From the Disability Rights Movement to the Free Speech Movement to the LGBTQ movement to the punks and the Beatniks, the Bay Area changed and was changed by wave after wave of artists and activists.
Artistic powerhouse Bruce Conner shaped the countercultural movements originating in the Bay Area, but he did so via an outsider’s lens, seeing and reflecting on the culture of the time (for instance, documenting the punk movement though he was never a punk himself, or moving down to Mexico because he was fearful of the possibility of nuclear war). Bruce Conner: It’s All True, a comprehensive retrospective of Conner’s work on display at SFMOMA that opened on October 29, is your chance to experience 50 years of the Bay Area’s social and artistic movements through the eyes of a uniquely multidisciplinary artist.
Anticipating today’s experience of living through many evolving media formats, Bruce Conner’s medium also shifted with the times. He was a filmmaker, printmaker, collagist, photographer, performance artist and photogrammer; when the felt-tip pen was invented in the 1960s, Conner was curious about and experimented with this new tool. His films — starting with his 1958 short film titled, simply, A MOVIE — often consisted of collaged or found footage and inspired a generation of music-video directors. The “countdown leader” you often see at the beginning of films was something he inaugurated. Over five decades, his art explored the San Francisco Beats of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Bay Area punk scene of the 1970s and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
SFMOMA’s retrospective of Conner’s work — the first of its kind — tracks Conner’s metamorphosis along with the history of the latter half of the 20th century. Much of his work in the show is either rare or rarely exhibited, including much of his art from the 2000s, the last decade of his life.
From now until January 22, 2017, SFMOMA’s fourth-floor special exhibition galleries will be devoted to Conner’s fascinating, prescient, impossible-to-categorize oeuvre. To read more about Bruce Conner: It’s All True or to buy tickets, click here.
