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San Francisco is home to some of the finest artistic and cultural institutions in the United States.It’s also a city where innovation and technology are as much a part of the landscape as Victorian houses and cable cars. When San Francisco’s museums and performing arts organizations temporarily closed to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, their drive to share and inspire kicked into high gear. The result is a broad and colorful spectrum of ways to experience the enrichment of San Francisco while sheltering in place.
The de Young and Legion of Honor museums,SFMOMA, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and Alcatraz Island are featured on Google Arts & Culture.This highly interactive platform practically gives you a private tourof the world’s greatest museums.
SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, the Walt Disney Family Museum and the Chinese Historical Society of Americaare also participating in the Instagram #Museumfromhome phenomenon, which delivers artwork right to followers’ smartphonesand other digital devices.The Contemporary Jewish Museum will also participate in #Museumfromhome, as well as #jewseumfromhome via @jewseum on Instagram and Twitter.The Asian Art Museum also participates in #MuseumMomentofZen. Here are highlights of arts and cultural experiences available remotely from major San Francisco institutions:
San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT)
In light of the COVID-19 closures, the San Francisco Symphony is making available nine one-hour documentary episodes of “Keeping Score” with Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). The program traces the lives of eight influential composers from around the world. MTT, now completing his 25th and final season as Music Director of the SFS, explores the motivations and influences behind major classical works by Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Copland, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Ives, Shostakovich, and Mahler. Each episode is accompanied by a one-hour concert program by the San Francisco Symphony.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) “Artist Interviews” series offers nearly 300 artist interviews with some of the most forward-thinking artists of our time, in their own words, as they share their stories, creative processes and how they bring their visions to life in our artist interview series. Artists interviewed include Dawoud Bey, Judy Chicago, Olafur Eliasson, JR, Ellsworth Kelly and Kara Walker, among others.
SFMOMA’s award-winning arts and culture “Raw Material” podcast features a different “podcaster-in-residence” each season to explore modern and contemporary art through a new lens. The series is currently in season six.
SFMOMA’s digital publications (including the Rauschenberg Research Project, Focus on Japanese Photography and Soundtracks) document and provide context for exhibitions and the museum’s collection, showcase the scholarship of our curators and aim to reach a wide range of readers.
SFMOMA’s online and live interdisciplinary commissioning platform is anchored in the Bay Area but casts a wide net, commissioning and supporting critical + experimental + poetic ruminations by artists, writers and thinkers from all over the world.
SFMOMA also offers an array of educational resources for teachers, including discussion questions for artworks, lesson plans, graphic organizers and worksheets, artist interviews, animations and more. Finally, SFMOMA offers a series of essays.Read what curators, artists and others have to say about the art they make, study, collect and restore.
MoAD (Museum of the African Diaspora)
MoAD, a Smithsonian affiliate, invites readers to register for the Virtual African Book Club. April’s book selection is “Small Country” by Gaël Faye. Already an international sensation and prize-winning bestseller in France, an evocative coming-of-age story of a young boy, a lost childhood and a shattered homeland.
Contemporary Jewish Museum
The Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) is sharing their exhibition, “Levi Strauss: A History of American Style” exhibition (at the museum through Aug. 9, 2020) with a virtual tour. In 1873, at the end of the California Gold Rush, Levi Strauss & Co., named for a Bavarian Jewish dry goods merchant in San Francisco, obtained a U.S. patent with tailor Jacob Davis on the process of putting metal rivets in men’s denim work pants to increase their durability. It was the birth of the blue jean.
