Quick Talk: With SFMOMA’s Neal Benezra

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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

When I was in San Francisco recently to see the Olafur Eliasson show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) I sat down for a conversation with SFMOMA’s Director Neal Benezra. We talked about museum expansion, acquisitions, deaccessioning and how it feels to have one of your own board members decide he’s going to take his collection and put it in a museum all his own.

I’ll post this interview in a few pieces over the course of the week.

LACAYO: Practically every major museum in the U.S. has expanded in recent years, or is about to. Your’s hasn’t.

BENEZRA: I just did a chart for my board of trustees showing how we’re falling behind in square footage. We have 52,000 square feet of gallery space and we are rapidly falling behind. When they designed this building in ’93 or ’94 our permanent collection was not what it is now, qualitatively or quantitatively. When we moved into this building we were doing mostly special exhibitions, but now the collection has grown enormously.

When I came out here one of the first things I did was ask our director of exhibitions to tell me what percentage of the building was used for special exhibitions and what percentage for the collection. And it was something like 70% for exhibitions and 30% collections, which is wonderful if you’re a kunsthalle, but not if you’re a museum.

So yes, we need more space, because we need to show more of the collection. And because there is so much art in so many homes in this community. Outside of New York there is more great art in homes in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the country.

LACAYO: Charles Schwab, of the investment firm, just became chairman of your board. Are you planning to start a capital campaign?

BENEZRA: That’s something we’re talking about and thinking about.

LACAYO: You have a beautiful building here by Mario Botta that it would be hard to add on to, especially since there are no empty lots adjacent. Would you consider what the Whitney is planning to do in New York and build a second SFMOMA at another location?

BENEZRA: I think it’s better if you can stay centralized. Remote locations don’t usually do too well. And we do have some real estate here. The entire site was not built. There’s some possibilities for us in this neighborhood.

LACAYO: What’s the creative part of your job? You have the last word of course on whether the museum does or does not do a show. What else?

BENEZRA: I don’t get too involved on the acquisitions side, except for the major acquisitions. Where I get very involved, because we don’t have a chief curator, is with curating the exhibition schedule. I have to make sure that we’re running a balanced ship in the sense that most of our curatorial people are contemporary people and we cannot be strictly a contemporary program. So we also do a Matisse sculpture show. We did the Picasso and American Art show, shows that are more historical. I’m here to make sure that’s there’s balance chronologically and aesthetically, because our curators are so contemporary in outlook.