SFMOMA Artist Gallery {Wondrous Strange}

Please Join us as we present at the request of SFMOMA:

The Giant Iron Snail car the Golden Mean

One night only July 22nd 2010

Wondrous Strange: A Twenty-first Century Cabinet of Curiosities

July 22 – August 28, 2010

Web: http://www.sfmoma.org/artistsgallery

Building A, Fort Mason Center

San Francisco, CA 94123

Opening reception
Thursday, July 22, 2010
5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Closing event in honor of Goethe’s birthday
August 28, 2010
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The sixteenth century’s cabinets of curiosities, precursors to today’s museums, were encyclopedic collections of specimens from the natural world, as well as man-made artifacts. These cabinets served as educational resources for artists and natural philosophers of the early modern period in western Europe.

Featuring works by more than a dozen Bay Area artists and including photography, sculpture, and painting, the exhibition explores themes such as evolutionary biology and history, progress and decadence, and the carnal and the intellectual. These contemporary artists adopt a range of styles that pre-date twentieth-century modernism and mine the early modern period — that age of discovery for sources of wonder.