San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, United States
Fall 2027
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced a major retrospective of Yoshitomo Nara, opening fall 2027. Occupying the museum’s Floor 7 galleries, the exhibition brings together approximately 100 works including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound and photography—the first comprehensive survey of Nara’s work in Northern California.
“SFMOMA is proud to bring this sweeping celebration of Yoshitomo Nara’s work to the Bay Area,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “This exhibition promises to intrigue and inspire visitors of all ages and backgrounds—deeply aligning with SFMOMA’s vision to engage a wide and diverse audience, as well as our goal to expand local and global dialogues around art and art history.”
Nara’s multidisciplinary practice often features a recurring figure who is quietly vulnerable yet resolute, embodying isolation, emotional self-reliance and inward resistance. His solitary protagonists, set against spare backdrops, meet viewers with a fragile intensity that invites empathy without offering easy reassurance. Drawing on folk music, punk subculture and postwar visual culture, Nara’s work privileges psychological freedom and personal authenticity. Nara’s humanitarian engagement—through travel photography documenting marginalized communities from Indigenous to colonized cultures—extends into anti-nuclear and anti-war commitments, where he uses image and text as forms of intimate solidarity rather than didactic protest. His installations transform this introspection into collective experience, fostering shared reflection across cultural boundaries.
At the exhibition’s center is the first international presentation of Voyage of the Moon (Resting Moon), 2006, a fairy-tale cottage of the artist’s drawing studio, crowned by a painted moon head keeping watch from its roof—an image rooted in Nara’s childhood fascination with the night sky. Since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster, the introspective quality of his work has intensified, with paintings featuring layered surfaces, diffused brushwork and subjects with searching gazes. Nara’s recent hand-formed sculptures resist modernist formalities, retaining traces of touch and imperfection. Together, these works offer a quiet meditation on how art endures and how interior life persists in the current moment.
This Yoshitomo Nara exhibition is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). It is curated by Mika Yoshitake, guest curator, with Nancy Lim, SFMOMA associate curator of painting and sculpture.
Learn more at SFMOMA.
Learn more about Yoshitomo Nara.
