Christopher Bedford: How SFMOMA Centers the Audience

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Welcome to the FoST Podcast.

Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Christopher Bedford, the Helen and Charles Schwab Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. With nearly two decades of experience in the museum world, Chris brings a bold and forward-thinking vision to the SFMOMA, which is one of the largest institutions of modern and contemporary art in the United States. Chris is transforming the museum into a dynamic, audience-centered space. Under his leadership, SFMOMA is becoming a cultural center that reflects the unique identity of San Francisco, a city that is a global hub for innovation and technology, as well as an epicenter of social movements.

In our conversation, Chris shares how SFMOMA is adapting to a post-pandemic world—where local attendance now outweighs tourism, and where museums must compete for attention in an increasingly saturated media landscape. From blockbuster exhibitions that reflect the soul of San Francisco to multi-sensory experiences that break the mold of traditional “do not touch” art framed on the wall, Chris is reimagining the experience and role of a modern art museum for today. Please join me in welcoming Christopher Bedford to the FoST Podcast.

Chris, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling podcast. So nice to have you here.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Thank you very much. Very excited.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So tell me, when you first came to SFMOMA, what was the biggest challenge that you faced?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I mean, I think the challenge that I faced, which continues to be the challenge, which is also the making of the magic, is that we are a highly attendance contingent business model. So SFMOMA is only as successful as the number of people who come through the door, which I think is a really fabulous thing for the purposes of our mission, which is to engage the maximum number of people through the programming that we produce. So unlike a lot of museums, as a consequence of that business model, we’re under tremendous pressure to meet people where they are — advance programming, both exhibitions, acquisitions, public programming that is deeply meaningful to the broadest audience. So there is this really interesting relationship between business imperative and meeting mission. They’re essentially the same thing. And so we are hopeful that incredible pressure, which exists annually, is the way that we make our own personal diamonds. That’s the concept.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So that is different than certain institutions that can rely on very large endowments, and they in a way, are almost immune from how the consumer responds to them. But you are right there on the edge of how people feel about the institution because you survive or live and die by the ticket sales.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Yeah, I mean, I think that’s — actually you put it in a really fascinating way. So if an institution is fully and completely endowed, it gives you extraordinary creative liberty and latitude. It truly doesn’t matter whether anybody comes through the door because you are supported by something that is independent of audience appetite. Similarly, I think if you live and operate an institution within a tourist mecca, those tourists are programmatically completely indifferent. So if you look at San Francisco, we have a really robust endowment, of course, but it actually isn’t big enough to support the entirety of the operation, independent of visitors. And while San Francisco used to be a tourist mecca, in the aftermath of COVID, it isn’t. While it would be nice to be completely unshackled and to be able to do whatever, whenever I actually think that this institution in this city with all of those pressures leads you to reconceive, whether modern contemporary museum can mean and do for its audience, but it’s a massive amount of annual pressure on everybody to generate a program that generates interest.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

How much of the programming that you create is informed by the city you live in?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I mean, I think that the things that we do here are not the things that I would do anywhere else. If you look at the mix of exhibitions we’re doing, there is certainly what I would call the sort of classical with a twist. The origin of, say, the French avant-garde as embodied by our great painting, Matisse’s Femme au chapeau, telling the story of that radical moment, reanimating it for our audience in the present, and then dragging its legacy all the way into the present with people like McLean Thomas who are working in the aftermath of that painting’s influence. So that’s one thing. We’re also really heavily indexing towards Asian and Asian American artists because this is a 39% Asian city. We’re working with artists with disabilities because this is absolutely the home of the disability arts movement. The craft movement — it lives and breathes here. It has an origin here. It’s a story that’s untold— big parts of our program— and then maybe most saliently, the rise of technology and artificial intelligence and its relationship to the future of art production. So to me, that is a local obligation that happens that’s the biggest story in the world. It’s also hyperlocal to San Francisco.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I was going to ask you specifically about being the birthplace of social media, of the mobile phone, of so much of the technology revolution. How has that impacted your programming in the way, and not just in terms of it curatorially, but also formally?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

You could say that the creation of the future is this area’s history. I mean, it’s such a remarkable proposition. So if you are historicizing the Bay Area, what you’re really doing is narrating a series of firsts or a series of futures that have now become the defining inventions of our era. From the computer to the cell phone to social media is just wild. And particularly if you think about the effect of Apple, the sort of inventor of our mobile experience is also going to be the inventor, I believe, of our hardware AI experience. We’re hyper aware of the fact that audiences, particularly younger audiences, have a completely different set of expectations around object art interaction. So we — we’re actually trying to make every experience very high touch, which sounds completely anathema to the museum experience. I want to depart from all the conventions and try to meet people where they are in a different way and re-familiarize modern contemporary art for a bigger audience and try not to make people feel stupid.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So you see an important role as storytellers, as curators. Can you talk about how you employ that yourself at SFMOMA?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

We try to select exhibitions that are conducive to the act of storytelling through context and humanization of the maker. But then we also try to pair the curator with education and interpretation at a very nascent stage to make sure that design and interpretation is riven into the DNA of the exhibition. Storytelling and interpretation aren’t done on the backside. They’re very much at the origin for the show. So a really good example of that would be the Ruth Asawa retrospective that just closed here, that’s going to New York MoMA. And so we did use very different methods of marketing that involved humanizing and embodying the maker, making sure that her creativity and her life as an artist, as a mother, as a wife, as a public artist was really foregrounded. So even though the work itself is modernist and abstract, we went out of our way to tell the story of her along with telling the story of the formal evolution of the work, and it resulted in the highest attendance we’ve seen in six years at the museum. And the previous high point was an Andy Warhol show that was done six years ago. So Ruth Asawa’s performance in terms of attendance, which is a great register of mainstream audience interest, exceeded Andy Warhol. I think that’s where we feel properly pressurized to create stories, narratives that speak to preexisting interest on some level and then also twist and turn that preexisting interest to produce the unfamiliar as well.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And this not only provides a valuable additional economic resource, but it also provides that opportunity for repeat visitation, right.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

And the encouragement to membership because it begins to make economic sense. If we are good enough to entice you as a Bay Area resident to come to our institution twice a year because those two shows are unmissable, then it immediately makes sense to buy a membership and commit to become a part of the community. But we’re only as good as the creative program is enchanting. The economics of that can only make sense if the creativity is irresistible. We want to generate blockbuster exhibitions that speak to something that’s at the creative, the molecular core of San Francisco, and then make them globally relevant by touring them. And that really does work because San Francisco is such a global city. Amy Sherald  is another good example. So I think Amy Sherald is our most important living. So we did her mid-career survey, it debuted here, went to the Whitney, it’s now going to the Baltimore Museum of Art, and there’s an additional venue that will soon be announced. It had a really deep resonance to the core of our program, and it did have a really resonant relationship with this city, but has an equally resonant one with the four other cities that will play hosts to it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You just have to have two blockbusters every and just have to create that. That’s all.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

And then I think a really interesting consequence of the post-pandemic period in the Bay Area is that we were stripped of all of our tourist audience. People are coming back as tourists to San Francisco, but slowly and apparently reluctantly, despite the extraordinary natural beauty of the place, we had to really bear down on our local audience. That has to do with geopolitics in the city and its reputation and et cetera and so forth. So we control what we can control, but I’m very, very certain if we make the best conceivable program for this city, it’ll be the best conceivable program period.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So to make an extraordinary shift like that, you really had to invest in community building. Tell us a little bit about how you did that.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

And I would say community building, but also trust building. So the reason that we’re seeing such an uptick in membership, I don’t think is only the quality of the program, the creative program. I think it’s the consistent quality of the program, meaning it’s an enticement to invest in the repeat experience. With tourists, I don’t think that repetition is particularly important. If you look at major museums in tourist centers, they have something like an 80% tourist audience and 77, 75% of those visitors are one time only. That is a completely content and different proposition. I think the remarkable thing about the pressure created by tourist absence is that you have to renew and refresh your program of events every single time. I don’t think it’s simply about community building, not simply about storytelling, not simply about the quality of a creative address in a particular moment. It’s about doing it over and over and over and over and marketing that effort over and over and over until we become a habit. And I guess that’s what I’m after, is that this is a cultural anchor and SFMOMA is a cultural habit for everybody who’s art-interested in the Bay Area. That would be kind of a remarkable achievement.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

To me, that’s a way of saying that you provide ongoing value. That there’s a reason to have a membership instead of a one-off ticket, and that people want to come back.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

And to share in and be part of a dialogue that defines the most important subjects of our time through art. A really big idea for me, is that particularly in the world of modern contemporary art, there is a tendency to see that history is a series of formal innovations. There’s the Abex period, which is followed by color field, which is followed by minimalism, which is followed by post minimalism, which is followed by blah, blah, blah. I’m not as interested in that as I am in following the timeline of social events that structured and produced those innovations. And to wrap the formal in the social to produce a social history of the modern contemporary period. And that is an idea very much stolen from encyclopedic museums. What I’m after is a kind of social art history wrapped in wonder and magic. That, to me, is a really enticing proposition.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

What are you hoping someone experiences from the second they enter the museum? What is that journey that you’re designing?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Oh, I mean, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I think we’re making steps and increments towards that totalizing multi-sensory experience of excitement. But what I want is for them to cross the threshold into the museum and feel immediately transformed by the creativity that’s swelling in the atmosphere. So God forbid I would invoke an idea like this, but like the Apple store or Disney — I mean, I think they pay a tremendous amount of attention to the first moment. And then certainly the story, the feeling, the experience unfurls in an additive kind of cascading way beyond that first moment. But I don’t like the idea of entering a museum and having it feel like TSA. I just think that that is not enchanting, and the first thing you see is a security officer and a metal detector, that’s a no for me. That does not say you are home or you’re in the space of culture for everyone. So part of what we’re doing is making our way through the entire institution, transforming every experience such that eventually you have this trail of wonder. So as opposed to just moments of it dotted here and there, there should be a kind of consistency of your breath being taken away, but it should be different in every register.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I have to say, having really enjoyed my last two visits to SFMOMA that I feel like you’re very close to that. You really are.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

That’s generous. I feel like we’re at 60%.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I can’t wait to see your 90 or a hundred. Do you find yourself attracted to this new wave of interactive immersive art? Things like Meow Wolf, TeamLab, even going to the culture spaces, the projection mapped immersive Van Gogh? I mean, I know these are very different experiences that I’ve just described, some not that immersive or just physically immersive, but not interactive. I’m just curious as a great curator, your take on all of that.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I think it’s unbelievably important for traditionally trained curators and directors to have those experiences, to have them with open eyes and open minds, and to take from those experiences tricks that would substantially benefit our field. TeamLab, for example, it’s — immersive is an understatement. It’s responsive, it’s immersive. It takes over your body in every sense of the word, engaging, every sense and embodied experience, which is unfamiliar, completely unfamiliar. It feels like the world has been transformed, turned upside down inside out, but just for you. What they are interested in is transforming the way you think and feel through a physical experience that you then have and take with you and unpack continually in the aftermath. So the principle there can be applied to any kind of experience making. So in the case of the Amy Sherald show, for instance, that was just a painting show. She’s just a portrait painter. But she elected hang every one of those paintings at a very, very unusually low height, meaning that they felt, when you walked into those galleries, it felt like you were standing in and among people who were standing right alongside you. It was a wild sort of phenomenological emotional effect that was produced simply by lowering the hanging height by 8, 10 inches. So I think that that is as viewer centric, experience centric as everything TeamLab does in enveloping you with the moving image. So there’s a great principle to be taken from that, which is that we shouldn’t be passive or rest on our laurels around audience experience. We need to go out of our way to create drama and tell stories through experiences that are crafted and careful.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

What are the restrictions that you deal with as a director of a contemporary art museum?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I mean, there are so many as relate to the social experience of art. So, so many can’t dos, ranging from the most self-evident, which is you can’t touch the objects and in order not to touch the objects, you have to have security officers and you have to make sure that people keep a reasonable distance from the objects so that they’re not endangered. And the second you unfortunately relax those standards, bad things do begin to happen. You do want to dignify the interests of the people entering your museum right here, right now on this day in history, while also balancing that imperative with the obligation we all take on, which is to steward those masterpieces forever. That’s a tough balancing act. So it’s sort of “don’t touch” as a principle, but also how can we bring you closer to the object, pushing the envelope in reasonable ways that bring those activities into proximity with the active viewing art, I’m extremely interested in. So in our Botta atrium, for instance, if we had some wild AI installation and there were an interface that allowed you to manipulate it, and you were able to buy a cocktail and a pastry from Jane next door and you could sit down and be in that lobby with a work of art that can’t be damaged by your hand or by being splattered by food or beverage, I think that there is great social value in that.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Today’s “can’t” is tomorrow’s common practice, right?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Yeah. For sure.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I mean, I was amazed. One of the cant’s that we grew up with was you can’t mix media. The painting goes there, the photography goes there, the film is over here. Those galleries didn’t play together. Now you can.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Or if somebody had said that the most significant work of art of the two thousands was going to be a video and the video would be called The Clock and it was going to be made by an artist named Christian Marclay and it was 24 hours long, truly, I think the response would’ve been, “That’s not art. You’re insane. Art is painting.” Now, there is absolutely no question. So I think you’re absolutely correct. Whatever makes you uncomfortable is probably what’s coming.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So I would challenge you to think about the exhibit that is based on all the cans that you consider off limits today and design for those.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

One of the reasons we’re so interested in telling the story of the origin of the French avant-garde and rooting that in the early years of the 20th century through that painting by Matisse is to restore its radicality. That’s what we’re interested in, is saying this was unbelievably disruptive. People absolutely hated it, and we need to remember how much people hated it, and we’re going to restore that sense to you through the creation of context. And I think it will make it easier. It should make it easier for people to see those uncomfortable things in the museum now because we’re just doing what has always been done since the avant-garde attached itself to the act of creation.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You raised one of the big challenges or tensions in what you do, which is you have to honor the traditions, the great masters, the important works in a particular way, certain height, certain lighting do not touch protect it. How are you thinking about reinventing our relationship to some of those masters and do you have some things coming up that might be interesting that relate to that?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Well, I would say a really good example of doing it differently was the Get in the Game exhibition. It was extremely new for this institution for a variety of reasons. The exhibition simply analyzed the relationship between art, sport and the creation of cultural meaning through some great works of art made from roughly 1970s to the present that brought the spectacle and the ideas surrounding sport into conversation with the minds and the worlds of artists to bait and switch our audience. You think this is about sport and it is about sport because sport is culturally incredibly interesting, but it’s also about gender, race, power, economics, and sexuality. We went out of our way to bring the imagery of sport into the gallery through images of athletes, through material culture drawn from the world of sports, so the jerseys and balls. There was a Gabriel Orozco ping pong table with a pond in the middle. The only way you could actually play the game was by not attempting to beat your opponent by partnering as a group of four to keep the ball endlessly moving. That to me was a really fascinating experiment in opening up a history to people and allowing them to physically participate in it. That is going to be our approach to permanent collection presentation at the museum. So there should be humanization, there should be storytelling, there should be tactility, there should be accessibility affordances for everyone that should be comfortable seating the moving image, sounds, smells the whole thing.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You’re singing my song.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

Well, we’ll see if it works. And part of it — and our Director of Education and Public Engagement, Gamynne Guillotte will always remind me that the problem we’re dealing with here is fundamentally one of aesthetics. It’s not like anyone would disagree with what I just said because it sounds really seductive and appealing and new and fun. The issue is how it looks when you actually do it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

In having this kind of reinvention of the classic contemporary art museum, what kind of team do you need to be able to execute on that?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I think you need people who are willing to understand the museum — and this may sound sacrilegious — there are some museums that think of themselves as artist centric or artist centered. That is not us. We are an audience-centered museum of modern contemporary art that wants to treat our community as customers to be dignified within an experience of value. And if you have that as your core principle, you can’t only listen to the voice of curators in the creation of the experience we offer in our public galleries. So you have to take seriously the idea that the entire executive team of the museum is invested in this outcome. Everybody plays a role in its materialization and everybody has a perspective that’s pretty informed, actually. So that means having, in our case, a Chief Operating Officer who has a background in audience development and marketing — massively important. And she runs the operation of the museum for sure, so from food and beverage to security. A General Counsel who’s trained as an artist — that’s unusual mix, very productive for us. So when we think about our creative program, I think what differentiates us is that those big marquee exhibitions, they are evaluated from 360 degrees by an executive team that isn’t just creative and bent. It is multidimensional, and they all understand the audience outcomes. That to me, feels incredibly different. It makes the museum feel incredibly different, and it definitely creates creative friction because there has been a tendency in museums historically to valorize the curator and the curator only, and that is not our method.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I think a lot of museums are actually in a place right now where they’re feeling very challenged, very threatened. I mean, literally some of them are having funding pulled, others are dealing with the politicalization of art and museums. And yet I feel like by being so customer-centric, you are finding that method for a path forward for a successful, thriving institution in light of all the challenges out there in the world. Would you agree? Do you have other advice in a way to your colleagues in the museum world?

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

We are only as relevant as the people who come in our doors. I don’t think that we can be complacent or passive from a relationship to audience appetites. I don’t think that we can afford that. We need to be in service to audience, visitors, customers, however you want to phrase it. But we are in service, and we are supposed to be enriching, educational, challenging, welcoming, all of those things. So if you are making exhibitions that are designed to speak to the shared interests of 10 other people in your subdiscipline, that is not, to me, that’s not the remit of a big public institution. I think we are supposed to be the sort of secular churches of the present, those gathering places for all. And we talk endlessly about opening as many doors as possible to as many people irrespective of stripe, background, expertise, so that we build a diverse community that’s reflective of our city and it’s together and it’s aspirational and it’s positive. It all begins with the creative program. We know that if people feel heard and represented, they come. So if you have a global city, you have to sort of hear and represent the totality of that globe. And that’s, to me, that’s a massively exciting challenge.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And I have to say, you provide a vision and a place that’s a wonderful counterpoint to us spending too much time in front of our devices to the thing that’s made San Francisco thrive and so successful, but now has people looking for those analog in real life, social, enriching, immersive experiences that you are building and that you provide through your institution. A wonderful balance and counterpoint in fact, and fulfilling of a certain need that your city is hungry for, I think.

CHRISTOPHER BEDFORD:

I like to challenge the idea that immersion and experience are all necessarily tethered to innovation, which spells technology. Sometimes that’s absolutely the case, but there are thousands of ways to be engaging and immersive that doesn’t involve being on the edge of innovation, technologically. Being innovative can, I think, assume various different guises. And sometimes it’s just being bold enough to put a messy making space within the gallery, flanked by Sol Lewitt and Ellsworth Kelly, and inviting families to come look, see, think along with those great masters.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, here’s to that, Chris, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, and I can’t wait to join you back in San Francisco for whatever next you put and create in that wonderful building.

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. My thanks again to Chris Bedford for joining me today. His work at SF MOMA reminds us that museums aren’t just places to view art—they are powerful storytelling platforms that can engage, inform, and connect.

For those of you who haven’t heard, I have a new book coming out this fall called The Future of Storytelling, How Immersive Experiences are Transforming our World. It will be released from Artisan Books on November 4th, but it’s available now for pre-order. If you enjoy this show, I think you’ll really appreciate the book. To learn more about it, you can visit our website at fost.org.

The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.