Category: writing

My name is Benjamin De Kosnik, an art lover who lives in SF. I have been a “mostly/sometimes” member of SFMOMA since the late 1990s. Thank you for this meeting. This is a response to one of Neal’s provocative questions, which I will slightly restate as:

SFMOMA is perceived as a great museum, but not deeply engaged in our community. How can we be a better civic actor?

In the next three minutes (I took two), I will detail ten ways SFMOMA can make to be a better civic actor.

1. Have free admission every day
2. Have free admission every week
3. Have a free day once a month
4. Give SF residents free admission on the weekend, look at the de Young Museum for leadership here
5. Have free night hours once a week
6. Have late night hours (until midnight) once a month
7. Have free 24 hour open-access all-levels once a year in combination with external sites and community events, look at Paris Nuit Blanche here
8. Have 10% at-large or in-public or from-public members on the board
9. Is this the first of the 2020 required sunlight meetings? When is the next one? Next meeting is November 19, 2020. Please publish the dates and connection information for the next Sunlight meeting on SFMOMA’s usual public communication channels, including but not limited to the website, Twitter feed, IG streams, etc.
10. Have something special with Open Space: please double or triple down on this platform and make it even more of a community resource. Open Space is the only W.A.G.E certified art web publishing platform in the United States. Give the community a space/place on the Open Space platform and increase public commissions to do so.
11. Please address the Taylor Brandon IG controversy from earlier this year (and the continuing instances documented on the IG account ‘change the museum’) directly and commit to an ongoing discussion with the public in 30 days that allows comment and dissent.

☀️