De Young Museum

The de Young Museum, formally the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, is a

The museum received 797,444 visitors in 2022, up 102 percent from 2021. In 2022 it ranked sixteenth in the List of most-visited museums in the United States,^[2] and was 68th in the List of most-visited art museums in the world.^[3]

History

The museum opened in 1895 in one of the buildings originally constructed for the

By 1949, the elaborate cast concrete ornamentation of the original de Young was determined to be a hazard and removed because the salt air from the Pacific had rusted the supporting steel.

As part of the agreement that created the

The de Young showcases

The American art collection consists of over 5,000 objects including 1,000 paintings,[6] 800 sculptures, and 3,000 decorative arts objects.^[7] It includes works ranging from 1670 to the present day.

In 1978, the American art collections were transformed by the decision of John D. Rockefeller III and Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller to donate their renowned collection of 110 paintings, 29 drawings, and 2 sculptures to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The de Young's chronological survey of American art includes galleries devoted to art in the following areas:

Although the permanent collection is national in scope, art made in California from the

The permanent collection galleries integrate decorative arts objects with paintings and sculptures, emphasizing the artistic, social, and political context for the works on display. While essentially chronological, the installation also juxtaposes works from different cultures and time periods to emphasize the historical connections between works in the collection. Painters with paintings in this art museum include; Mary Cassatt, John Singleton Copley, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole (Prometheus Bound), Thomas Hill, Thomas Wood (Newspaper Vendor), Samuel Brookes, John Peto, Childe Hassam, Edmund C. Tarbell (The Blue Veil), George Hitchcock, Louise Nevelson, Maynard Dixon, Otis Oldfield, Georgia O'Keeffe, Granville Redmond, Elizabeth Catlett Thomas Hart Benton (Susannah and the Elders), Pat Steir, David Park, Betye Saar, Kiki Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, Mel Ramos, Beth Lipman, Wayne Thiebaud, and Mary Lovelace O'Neal.

In January 2017, the institution announced a significant new addition to its collection of American Art through the acquisition of 62 works by 22 contemporary African American Arts, including Thornton Dial's Blood And Meat: Survival For the World (1992) and Lost Cows (2000-1), Joe Light's Dawn (1988), Jessie T. Pettway's Bars and String-Pierced Columns (1950s), Lonnie Holley's Him and Her Hold the Root (1994) and Joe Minter's Camel at the Watering Hole (1995) The works were first exhibited in Revelations: Art from the African American South in 2018^[12]. and subsequently in the museum's permanent collection galleries dedicated to Modern and Contemporary American Art.

In July 2023, the Fine Arts Museums announced the promised gift by Bernard and Barbro Osher of 61 works of American Art to the museums’ collection. ARTnews reported that the gift included works by well-known American artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Charles Sheeler, and Alexander Calder. They figure alongside lesser-known ones like Boston School painter William McGregor Paxton, the influential artist-teacher Frank Vincent DuMond, and the American Impressionists Edward Henry Potthast, Frederick Carl Frieseke, and Richard Edward Miller.^[8]

The de Young Open In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, director CEO Thomas Campbell announced that the de Young Museum would host an open-call exhibition for “all Bay Area artists.” Alta magazine called it “an exhibition of immense scale, inherent complexity, and straightforward generosity.”[22] The response to The de Young Open went well beyond the few hundred submissions curators expected. Instead, some 6,000 artists sent in 11,500 works. 877 works were selected and although the museum did not act as an intermediary, all of the works were available for sale.[23] In 2023, the de Young announced that the de Young Open would become a triennial. “The works included in the exhibition will be selected by an anonymous jury of Bay Area artists and curators. Jurors review submissions exclusively from digital files without any identifying information about the artist. Inclusion in the exhibition is decided on merit alone…Artworks chosen for this year’s de Young Open will be displayed from floor-to-ceiling, “salon-style,” in the museum's Herbst Exhibition Galleries from Sept. 30, 2023, to Jan. 21, 2024.”^[9]

Archives of American Art

Since 1991, the American Art Department has housed a set of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art microfilm collection. In conjunction with the Bothin Library and department research files, the American Art Study Center is the most important research center for American art on the West Coast.

International contemporary

In 1988, the Fine Arts Museums made a commitment to collect international contemporary art. In addition to works in traditional media, this commitment has expanded the museums’ holdings of works in new or multiple media––including installation and conceptual works, video and other time-based media, and photography and other lens-based media––to more accurately reflect contemporary art practice.

Contemporary acquisitions include Wall of Light Horizon (2005), by Sean Scully and signature sculptures by Zhan Wang and Cornelia Parker. The strength of the collection lies in artists associated with California, including

With a $1 million grant from the Svane Family Foundation, in 2023 the Fine Arts Museums acquired works by 30 Bay Area artists, including Wesaam Al-Badry, Rupy C. Tut, Woody D. Othello, and Chelsea Ryoko Wong.^[10] The exhibition Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, on view at the de Young museum in 2023, displays works from the gift, “captures the local moment, as reported by KQED”^[11]

The de Young also organized the first-ever retrospective of Feminist Art pioneer Judy Chicago in 2020, forty years after her landmark installation The Dinner Party (1974–79) made its debut in San Francisco.^[12]

Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI organized at the de Young in 2021 was the “first major exhibition to unpack this question through a lens of contemporary art and propose new ways of thinking about intelligence, nature, and artifice.”^[13] FRIEZE magazine named it one of the top 10 exhibitions of the year.^[14]

In 2021, the de Young organized artist Hung Liu's solo show, Golden Gate (金門), an exhibition that centered on the immigrant and migrant experience in California.^[15]

Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence, which was first seen at the 2022 Venice Biennale, opened in February 2023 at the de Young. The US debut of the exhibition was notable for its inclusive, sensitive interpretative approach, spearheaded by FAMSF's Director of Interpretation Jackson Abrams.^[16] A particularly notable aspect was the creation of a “respite room” where visitors could pause after visiting the exhibition.^[17] The presentation also included special programming with community partners, such as workshops on grief.^[18]

Textiles and costumes

The Fine Arts Museums’ textiles collection^[19] boasts more than 13,000 textiles and costumes from around the world. It is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of its type in the United States. It comprises costume and costume accessories; loom-woven textiles; non-woven fabrics; and objects whose primary decoration is produced through techniques such as beading and embroidery.

The de Young has exhibited fashion since the 1930s, with pieces by

In August 2017 The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock & Roll marked another highlight at the de Young. The exhibition celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love^[20] and featured fashion from the late sixties from the museum's permanent collection and on loan from Bay Area independent designers. The exhibit hosted 270,000 visitors.^[21]

In the fall of 2018, the de Young organized Contemporary Muslim Fashions. The exhibition explored Muslim female dress codes from multiple communities, cultures and religious interpretations, starting at the turn of the millennium.^[22] It was the first large scale exploration of the topic at an art institution,^[23] and included emerging and established designers and artists from Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia and the US.^[24] The exhibition will travel to Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt in the spring of 2019.^[25]

Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

More than 1,400 stellar examples from the eastern Sudan, the Guinea coast, west and central Africa, eastern and southern Africa, and elsewhere on the continent are included in the Fine Arts Museums’ African art collection^[26] at the de Young. The African art collection is presented thematically rather than geographically, emphasizing the aesthetic and expressive qualities of the art.

The Oceanic collections

The Art of the Americas collections[28] are of national significance to art history, anthropology, and world history, and they have helped establish the de Young as a primary source for cultural research and study. The extensive collection of ancient American and Native American art comprises nearly 2,000 works of art from Meso-America, Central and South America, and the West Coast of North America. Art from cultures indigenous to the American continents was a defining feature of the museum's charter collection and continues to be an area of significant growth. Special galleries are devoted to ancient objects from Mexico, including an outstanding grouping of Teotihuacan murals.

Selected collection highlights

• 
  Frederic Edwin Church
• 
  George Henry Durrie
• 
  William Hahn

Architecture

The current building was completed by architects

• List of largest art museums
• List of most-visited art museums
• List of most-visited museums in the United States
• Bouquets to Art, annual floral exhibition based on collections in the museum

Notes

References

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (July 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

• Ashmore, Lisa. “San Francisco's New de Young.” Architecture Week Archived 2019-08-09 at the Wayback Machine
• Guthrie, Julian. “De Young's Rebirth.” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 October 2005.
• King, John. “Into The Modern Age.” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 October 2005.
• Sardar, Zahid. “Painting A New Landscape.” San Francisco Chronicle, 9 October 2005, retrieved 22 September 2006.

External links

• Official De Young Museum website
• Critiquethis.us: Photographs of the Herzog & de Meuro building
• Aplust.net: Architectural review by A+T architecture publishers
• Virtual tour of the De Young Museum provided by Google Arts & Culture
• Media related to De Young Museum at Wikimedia Commons
• de Young Museum staff deny life saving device