Floor 4: 4th Floor Landing (exiting Murray)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are at the 4th Floor Landing.
You’ve entered the landing in the middle of the back wall, facing the elevators and the 4th floor tactile map on your right. On the back wall on your left is a painting by Roy Lichtenstein.
To get to the QR code for the 4th Floor City Gallery, turn right. You’ll pass the tactile map on your right and then turn right. Immediately on your right is a staircase that goes down to the 3rd Floor, past the staircase on the right wall is the QR code for the 4th Floor City Gallery, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
This floor offers an introduction to fourteen prominent artists in the Fisher Collection who largely emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Some worked primarily in painting or sculpture, while others challenged these traditional mediums or expanded them in new ways—for example by incorporating photography or industrial materials. Several took a highly expressive approach to creating marks and gestures; others aimed to remove any visual evidence of their touch, making works of machine-like anonymity. Ranging from the gestural and spontaneous to the geometric and preplanned, the works here demonstrate the numerous ways in which the possibilities of art broadened during this period. Rather than organizing the artists by movement, style, or nationality, this floor focuses on the artists as individuals, whose work was often shaped by their life experience and social context.
A parallel presentation in the City Gallery tells the story of Doris and Donald Fisher, how they formed their collection, and the relationships they developed with several of the artists showcased here.
Gamynne Guillotte
Chief Education and Public Engagement Officer
Ted Mann
Project Assistant Curator, Fisher Collection
Visionary support for Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10 is provided by Fisher Art Foundation.
Lead support is provided by Penny S. and James G. Coulter, Mimi and Peter Haas Fund, and Diana Nelson and John Atwater.
Presenting support is provided by Dana and Bob Emery. Major support is provided by Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen.
Significant support is provided by Concepción S. and Irwin Federman, Alexandria and Kevin Marchetti, and Deborah and Kenneth Novack.
Meaningful support is provided by Alka and Ravin Agrawal, Sabrina Buell and Yves Béhar, Nancy and Alan Schatzberg, and Susan Swig.
Label
This exhibition was designed to welcome the widest possible audience, and this screen-reader friendly website was built specifically with our low-vision and blind visitors in mind. Please enjoy the following features to help you navigate and engage with the exhibition:
- Each floor has a welcome panel that contains a Braille introduction and tactile map of the floor.
- All videos have open captions.
- Throughout the exhibition spaces, there are tactile floor strips that extend perpendicular from the wall, between galleries and at specific touch points. When you encounter a floor strip, that means there is a tactile QR code on the wall within arm’s length. Scanning this QR code on your personal device takes you to a screen reader friendly website that contains all exhibition text, visual descriptions for all artworks and galleries, guided tactile descriptions for touch objects accompanying select artworks, guided tactile descriptions for tactile maps located to the right of each introductory panel, and transcripts for all videos.
Helpful Links:
- Are you curious about what this website is and other accessibility considerations we've built into this reinstallation? Check out this FAQ to learn more.
- Certain galleries and artwork might have audio stops associated with them, which will be indicated by a 3-digit audio callout number on the wall. You can navigate to our Audio Guide Search, also located at the top of this navigation bar, to look up the stop number and listen on your personal device.
Label
Floor 4
- KAWS: FAMILY
- Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists
- Rose B. Simpson: Behold
- New Work: Sheila Hicks
- White Box
Tactile Description
Map Overview
This tactile map shows Floor 4 of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It has two primary regions. On your left is the legend oriented vertically and surrounded by a rough-dotted rectangular outline. On your right is the map of the museum, outlined in thin, smooth, double lines.
Legend
Start in the bottom left corner and find the dashed rectangle outline. Inside, at the top left, is the Braille word “Legend.”
- The solid five-pointed star means “You Are Here”
- Two stacked triangles pointing up and down mean elevators
- A zigzag line means stairs
- Two Braille r’s in a dashed line box mean the restrooms
- A water droplet means a water fountain
- Grid of small dots means “Floor Below”
How to Read the Map
The map to your right is made up of two main irregularly shaped rectangular spaces joined together. The space on the left is longer and narrower, with its left wall slightly jutting outward. The space on your right is shorter and wider.
Double lines identify the building’s exterior walls, and single lines identify interior walls. When a wall stops and starts again, it marks an entrance or exit.
Each main room has a Braille label inside.
The areas labeled “Galleries” consist of many galleries that occasionally change depending on the current exhibition. The internal walls for the galleries are not depicted tactiley or visually on this map.
Map
This map shows the White Box, three gallery areas, the Sculpture Terrace, elevators, staircases, restrooms, and water fountains.
Let’s find the five-pointed star, which signifies, “You Are Here.” Find the bottom edge of the legend and go to your right, past the arrow pointing north, until you reach the double lines of the building’s exterior walls. Moving into the building, you’ll be in the room labeled “White Box.” With your finger at the end of the word “White,” move up the map until you find the five-pointed star. You will use this as your starting point to explore the map.
Starting at the star, the elevators are directly below it and slightly to your right. The White Box is below the elevators.
Let’s go back to the star. Directly above it is the staircase down to Floor Three. Above that and to your left, along the exterior wall of the museum, is the staircase up to Floor 5.
From the star, moving to your right and up past the staircase that leads down to Floor 3 on your left, is one of the three main gallery areas. Moving up into the gallery area, find the label, “Galleries.” From here, move to your right until you reach the exterior wall. Follow this wall up until you reach a part of the wall that juts out to your right. Inside that space is a water fountain.
Now let’s explore the right side of the museum. Starting from the water fountain, follow the same exterior wall back down until the wall changes to a single line marking and an interior wall. Follow that interior wall down until it ends. You are now back in the general area where you started. The five-pointed star is to your left, and the rest of the museum is to your right.
Move down until you reach a horizontal interior wall. Below this wall are two restrooms, a men’s restroom, and an all-gender restroom with a water fountain in between. Straight up the map are an all-gender restroom and a water fountain. Moving to your right from in between the restrooms is a round staircase up to Floor 5. In the center of the staircase is an opening with the “Floor Below” texture.
Continuing to your right is the Sculpture Terrace. Above and below this area are the other two gallery areas.
Objects
1 object in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1978
Magna and oil on canvas
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1979
In a series of paintings from the mid- to late 1970s, Lichtenstein explored the styles of various early twentieth-century art movements. Here he references the melting forms, irrational pairings, and dreamlike spaces of Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí. Rather than simply copy the source material, Lichtenstein fully transformed it into his signature comic-book-inspired bold outlines, flat planes of primary color, and imitation of the benday dots of commercial printing. Such quotations question traditional ideas of originality and point to how all art forms rely on shared visual languages.
This was the first major painting that Doris and Donald Fisher acquired (in 1979), and it effectively signaled the beginning of their collection.
Visual Description
A large, vertically oriented painting—higher than a tall adult, but only half as wide as their outstretched arms—shows several isolated fragments of a woman's head rendered in flat, high-contrast color and thick black contour lines.
Centered near the top, there is an oversized eye turned on its side. The iris is blue with dotted blue-and-white patterning, and the eyelid and lash area are thick, graphic black. Flowing, bright yellow hair curves out of the left side of the eye and down toward the bottom of the piece, eventually curving back up in an elongated C-shape. Centered below the eye, full red lips outlined in black sit above an exaggerated, curling form that loops downward and back up; this form is filled with dense red halftone dots over a pale pink field.
Along the very top edge runs a band of diagonal blue-and-white stripes, while the bottom portion contains a broad yellow shape; at the lower right, a rounded black form sits just above this yellow area. The painting contains minimal shading, bold color blocks, and patterned dots.