Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future

Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others. The artists bring a broad range of approaches to the work featured in the volume. For example, Frazier's work is known for its searing photographic depictions of African American family and communal history, as well as addressing the effects of gentrification and urban displacement. Xaviera Simmons' photos and video work address memory -- especially notions of landscape-- from the perspective of a Black woman who descended from slaves and European colonizers. This expansive catalogue includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and features a wide range of work, including video, photography, painting, sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collectivehistories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES A MAJOR EXHIBITION, THE LARGEST EVER MOUNTED AT SFMOMA: This major exhibition will be staged on every floor of the museum, the first time a group exhibition has ever commanded that amount of space in the museum's history. NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORK: SFMOMA is commissioning new work for the exhibition from several artists, which will be prominently featured in the book INTERNATIONAL FOCUS: Probably one of the most truly international large-scale exhibitions to be mounted of late, this catalogue will feature approximately twenty artists, from cities ranging from Cairo to Goa, India, to Bangkok, Thailand. Soft Power: A Conversation for the Future accompanies an exhibition of recent work and new commissions by twenty artists from around the world organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. These artists understand themselves as social actors, question their responsibility as citizens, and are active in their role as public intellectuals and provocateurs. Artists featured include Nairy Baghramian, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Carlos Motta, and Xaviera Simmons, among many others. The artists bring a broad range of approaches to the work featured in the volume. For example, Frazier's work is known for its searing photographic depictions of African American family and communal history, as well as addressing the effects of gentrification and urban displacement. Xaviera Simmons' photos and video work address memory -- especially notions of landscape-- from the perspective of a Black woman who descended from slaves and European colonizers. This expansive catalogue includes six long-form essays by curators, artists, and other writers, as well as brief texts and interviews introducing the exhibition artists, and features a wide range of work, including video, photography, painting, sculpture, architectural interventions, and performance. Each work of art in its own way considers the collectivehistories and construction of ideologies and other underlying power structures that influence our world. THE BOOK ACCOMPANIES A MAJOR EXHIBITION, THE LARGEST EVER MOUNTED AT SFMOMA: This major exhibition will be staged on every floor of the museum, the first time a group exhibition has ever commanded that amount of space in the museum's history. NEWLY COMMISSIONED WORK: SFMOMA is commissioning new work for the exhibition from several artists, which will be prominently featured in the book INTERNATIONAL FOCUS: Probably one of the most truly international

Eungie Joo is curator of contemporary art at SFMOMA. Manthia Diawara is professor of comparative literature and cinema and head of the Institute of African American Affairs and of the Africana Studies Program at New York University. Adrienne Edwards is curator of performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Yasmine El Rashidi, a Cairo-based New York Times contributing opinion writer, covers Egypt and the Arab world, urban life, and the arts.