“The body goes through multiple states during the day… but when we’re asleep, we’re the most soft and most open.” Not only is Jason Moran a musician, songwriter and visual artist, he conveys powerful perceptible thoughts with words, echoing the message of Soft Power, to listen and be receptive. Currently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 20 international artists are featured in a show that demonstrates how symbol, gesture, and partnership can open minds and effect change. Taking somewhat ironic inspiration from Reagan-era diplomacy policy that soft power prioritizes international relations and diplomacy over brute force, SFMOMA sought and commissioned artists from all over the world to wield their strength with paint, ink, film, music, words and more.
Pratchaya Phinthong, A whole from a different half, 2018. (installation view) Adrastus Collection, courtesy the artist and gb agency, Paris. Image: Glen Cheriton
Traversing the natural border of the United States and Mexico, Minerva Cuevas walked the Rio Grande, marking her own safe passage on the river rocks. The photographs could be on either side of that fraught border, where water follows nature’s law of the land, not a “big beautiful wall.” A forest of deep greens infuses The Discovery of Invisible Nature, a huge mural where Smokey the Bear either haunts or helps a world increasingly scorched by fire and climate change. Tavares Strachan’s Encyclopedia of Invisibility is 2500 pages, mounted on PVC and encased in acrylic, recording the people and things that don’t make the top ten most Googled stories. In A Whole Different Path, Pratchaya Phinthong makes a sacred statement by returning rare earth metals to a land clouded by burning coal. Jason Moran does more than compose melodies when he affixes rolls of Japanese Gampi paper to piano keys, coats his fingers with pigment and makes music. When Shea Cobb and her daughter Zion need to escape the poisonous water of Flint, Michigan, she remembers a childhood walking the country roads with her father in Mississippi, where he said “you can drink that right out of the ground.” LaToya Ruby Frazier documents Cobb’s journey back, after he beckons, “This water isn’t gonna kill you. Come home.”
Arranged on the 4th and 7th floor of SFMOMA, Curator of Contemporary Arts Eungie Joo counts the ways art can tell history, show change and offer redemption in a show of predominantly new works, many commissioned just for this exhibit. As Hassan Khan relates with The Infinite Hip Hop Song, “Some songs are about what we want. Some songs are about what we lost. And some… we can only imagine.” –Gwynned Vitello
Soft Power shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 17, 2020.