SFMOMA Acquires Its First NFT – ARTnews.com

Courtesy of Altman Seigal

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired its first NFT, a work titled Final Transformation #2 (2022) by artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.

One of the two existing editions of the work was donated to SFMOMA by the Altman Siegel Gallery and Hershman Leeson to be auctioned in the museum’s 2022 Art Bash Auction, an annual live auction that raises money for the institution’s education and community programming. According to a report from City and country, the piece was purchased by an unnamed winning bidder for $9,000. The second edition was recently given to the museum by Leeson, an SFMOMA representative confirmed ART news via e-mail.

Final Transformation #2 is an NFT of a clip from Leeson’s 1997 film Uncaptured Ada, which stars Tilda Swinton as Victorian mathematician Ada Lovelace. The title is derived from Swinton’s last line in the film.

“This visionary film about the legacy of Ada Lovelace, a mathematician who wrote the very first computer program in the nineteenth century, was made almost thirty years ago, but resonates today with the idea of ​​NFTs,” said Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts at SFMOMA, in a statement leading up to last year’s Art Bash. “Each generation recreates itself with the technological means of its time. Today we are witnessing a revolution based on artificial intelligence, NFTs and DNA that is becoming the driving force of a new language of storage and communication.”

Hershman Leeson, a Bay Area-based artist who has been creating art about humans’ relationship with machines since the 1960s, has received renewed attention in recent years as 2021’s NFT boom shines a spotlight on new media artists. SFMOMA already has some of Hershman Leeson’s photographs in their collection as well Room #8 (2006–18), a multimedia work containing a vial of synthetic DNA.

The NFT was acquired along with 62 other works, including pieces by Wayne Thiebaud, Sky Hopinka and Cindy Sherman. Eighteen of the new acquisitions come from artists who had not previously been represented at the museum, among them Yolanda Andrade, Emi Anrakuj and New Red Order.

“These recent acquisitions represent an incredible array of artistic visions and capture SFMOMA’s commitment to collecting works by artists from the region and around the world,” Christopher Bedford, director of SFMOMA, said in a press release. “I am grateful to SFMOMA’s curatorial team for their vision and ongoing dedication to expanding the voices and narratives represented in our collection.”