Floor 5: 5th Floor Landing (exiting Calder)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are at the 5th Floor Landing.
This floor has 10 galleries organized in a long rectangular layout. You are currently in the back left corner. Immediately to your right on the back wall is a video about Alexander Calder. At the middle of the right wall is the entrance to the main galleries, followed by the exhibition title and graphic and the 5th floor tactile map. Past the tactile map on the right is the entrance to the 5th Floor City Gallery. Across from the map on the left wall is a sculpture by Sol LeWitt and the elevators.
If you've already explored the other galleries on the 5th Floor, this completes all of the content on this floor. You can take the elevators, which are on your left, to the 4th or 6th Floor, where you can find additional tactile maps.
Label
"How can art be realized?
Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe . . .
Spaces, volumes . . . juxtaposed, pierced by vectors, crossed by speeds.
Nothing at all of this is fixed.
Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe."
—Alexander Calder, 1932
"Sculpture has become . . . an aerial act," wrote an enthusiastic critic in 1929 about the work of Alexander Calder (born 1898, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1976, New York). Although this observation was prompted by Calder's early, figurative wire sculptures, it could just as well describe the hanging "mobiles" the artist began creating in the early 1930s. In these extraordinary constructions, carefully counterbalanced elements move with passing air currents. Sculpture had traditionally meant solid, unmoving forms, but through these and other works, Calder transformed the medium into an art of lightness, space, motion, and time.
The works on view in this gallery span from the late 1920s, when Calder was a young artist in Paris, to 1976, the year of his death, and include a variety of mobiles alongside other standing and wall-mounted works that testify to his restless invention.
Calder's work combines a lasting interest in the physical forms of the natural world with a talent for experimentation. Using mostly simple tools (shears and pliers) and modest materials (wire, painted sheet metal, paint, wood), Calder produced dynamic and energetic compositions of color, shape, movement, and sometimes even sound.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Alexander Calder in the studio with his son.
Excerpt from Works of Calder (1950).
Produced by New World Film Productions for the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Directed and cinematography by Herbert Matter; produced and narrated by Burgess Meredith; music by John Cage.
Digitized 16mm color film, with sound, 3:18 min.
Transcript
Narrator:
Today, this boy went to the beach. It was a sunny, windy day, and he was alone; he wandered about and investigated, and the wind made everything move.
He found some jellyfish, and under the water they were moving, too. So was the water, and the milkweed, and the sun.
Then he walked and came to a place with big glass windows. There was a lot of noise going on inside. When he looked in, he saw a house full of things that moved.
There was a man in there, very busy. He was making the noise—hammering and banging, and scraping and bending things into shape.
The boy asked the man why he was doing that. The man said he enjoyed doing so. He explained that the things he made were called “mobiles” because they move by themselves.
“The mobiles were made out of everything,” he said: tin, wood, steel, and wire. He made them by himself. He worked hard, as though in a factory, but the things came out different.
Sometimes they moved all around him, and he enjoyed that. It was like having his own private sky.
The boy watched them so long he got rather dreamy. And the things he saw in the house, and the things he had seen outside, got mixed up together in his head. The man said that was what they were supposed to do.
He said everybody saw something different, after all, depending on the way they looked at the mobiles. Only the mobiles were exactly what they were and nothing else. He hammered and bent, and cut them and fixed them, so that they would move.
Label
Alexander Calder grew up in a family of artists who let him make art his own way. They even built him his own art studio! He made his first sculptures when he was 11 years old: a tiny metal duck and dog that he gave to his parents for Christmas. For the rest of his life, Calder created art about animals, nature, the circus, and many more subjects. Many of his best-known sculptures are mobiles that spin, float, and balance in the air... Almost like they are alive!
Objects
2 objects in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
1989
Painted wood
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1990
Visual Description
A painted-wood structure hangs from the ceiling as a white, open lattice form that narrows dramatically as it descends. From the ceiling to its bottom edge, the work is eleven feet tall—nearly spanning the full height of the room itself. The structure is built from many small, repeating, open-cube modules with thin, square-edge bars uniformly painted matte white. The units are stacked and offset so the overall mass starts as a four-by-seven-cube rectangular volume at the top—a section affixed to the ceiling—and steps inward in an irregular, cascading taper until it reaches a single cube at the bottom.
Throughout the sculpture's length, small sections protrude outward like short, cantilevered ledges as the form resumes its downward contraction. The repeated squares create dense interior layers of crisscrossing lines, giving the top a heavier, more complex visual density that becomes less layered and more skeletal toward the bottom. There is a white rectangular museum platform on the floor underneath the structure.
Guided Tactile Description
Map Overview
This tactile map shows Floor 5 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.”
This legend has five symbols and one pattern. Each symbol marks a point of interest. Each pattern marks an area.
- 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 near the bottom. The space on your left is shorter and narrower. The space on your right is longer and wider, with its left wall slightly jutting outward and an extension in the lower area on your right.
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 two gallery areas, elevators, staircases, restrooms, water fountains, two Sculpture Terraces, and a restaurant.
Let’s find the five-pointed star, which signifies, “You Are Here.”
In the legend, find the pattern of small dots pattern meaning “Floor Below”. Move to the right, past the arrow pointing north and past the Sculpture Terrace, until you reach the grid of small dots pattern. From there, move up the map, past a short flight of stairs on your left, until you find the five-pointed star. 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. Moving up from the elevators, you will find a break in a horizontal interior wall marking the entrance to an area with galleries. Find the label, “Galleries,” then move to your right until you reach the exterior wall. Follow this wall up until you reach a section that juts out to your right. Inside that space is a water fountain.
From the water fountain, move left across the gallery area until you reach a vertical interior wall. This wall runs vertically along the length of the gallery space and has multiple breaks. Continue left until you reach the exterior wall. Follow it down until you reach a staircase icon that leads up to Floor 6. Continue down the map until you reach a second staircase icon that leads down to Floor 4.
Continue down from the staircase until you reach a horizontal wall. You are now back in the general area where you started. The five-pointed star is to your right. Move to your right, past the star, until you reach a vertical interior wall. Beyond that is another area with galleries. Up the map from the galleries is a women’s restroom and a water fountain. Down the map from the galleries is a men’s restroom and a water fountain. Continuing to your right past the gallery area is a round staircase down to Floor 4.
Let’s explore the rest of the museum to your left. Moving to your left, retrace your path back to the star. From the star, move down and slightly to your left over the short flight of stairs to the lower level of Floor 5. After the stairs, move to your left through a narrow hallway until you reach the Restaurant. Up and down the map from the restaurant are the two Sculpture Terraces. Moving to your left, through the restaurant, is a women’s restroom. Above that is a water fountain and a men’s restroom.
Artwork Label Text
Floor 5
- Calder, Kelly, Lewitt: Fundamentals of Form
- Olafur Eliasson: One-Way Color Tunnel
- Co-Lab: Hands-on Activity Space
- Cafe 5 + Sculpture Garden
- Bay Area Walls: David Huffman