SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art launches Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc, the largest installation of the multimedia artist’s career, with a public celebration on August 20, 2026. Mixing nearly 75,000 hand-built kites made of bamboo and Japanese paper suspended together into a cloud canopy, the site-specific exhibition will cover the museum’s ground floor admission-free Roberts Family Gallery from floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
“Our mission at SFMOMA is radical hospitality for all—these efforts include filling over 45,000 square feet of free public space with irresistible contemporary art,” said Christopher Bedford, Helen and Charles Schwab Director of SFMOMA. “Jacob Hashimoto’s enveloping and breathtaking commission in our free-to-visit Roberts Family Gallery promises to welcome visitors of all ages, imbuing all who experience it with a sense of wonder and awe.”
“This giant arc of kites, color and pattern will be at once chaotic and meditative, playful and considered—a generous artwork that invites viewers to spend time in the gallery. It will be an enticing, intriguing overture to the museum itself,” said Hashimoto about the project. “The gravity of Giant Arc is its universality . . . This essential nature allows people to find what they might need in the work—mysteries if people want them, stories if people desire them, narratives to spin and twist, experimental maps and aerial geographies to explore.”
Hashimoto has built large-scale installations using kites for sites around the globe for the past 30 years, including the recent exhibitions Path to the Sky at the Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy, 2025; Not After a Million Years at the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skrhamn, Sweden, 2024; and The Fractured Giant at the Boise Art Museum, Boise, Idaho, 2022, as well as permanent projects for Stanford University Graduate School of Education in Palo Alto, CA; Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, PA; the US Embassy, Windhoek, Namibia; the BNA Nashville International Airport in Nashville, TN; and Tokiwabashi Tower in Tokyo, Japan, among many others. Giant Arc at SFMOMA builds on these previous projects to form an increasingly complex and undulating canopy that will span the entirety of the Roberts Family Gallery.
In addition to incorporating elements seen in previous works, Hashimoto will utilize tens of thousands of new elements built specifically for this installation some of which incorporate patterns and designs inspired by the flora and fauna of Northern California. Complementing hundreds of existing patterns, these new motifs include subtle graphic references to the dahlia, San Francisco’s official flower, the checker lily, a plant native to the Bay Area and the Sonoran blue butterfly, which is found along California’s coast.
Visible through two-story windows facing Howard Street, Giant Arc will engage museum visitors and passersby alike. Visitors to the Roberts Family Gallery will have the opportunity to walk, sit or lie under the canopy to experience the immersive, multifaceted installation.
Jacob Hashimoto (b. 1973 in Greeley, CO) studied at Carleton College and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996. He lives and works in Ossining, NY.
Using sculpture, painting and installation, Hashimoto creates complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even astroturf-covered blocks. His accretive, layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments and cosmology, while also remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions, notably landscape-based abstraction, Modernism and handcraft.
Hashimoto has presented solo exhibitions and installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA; Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID; Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Governors Island, New York, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome, Italy; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Ronchini, London, England; Studio La Citt, Verona, Italy; Makasiini Contemporary, Turku Finland; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; Galerie Forsblom, Helsinki, Finland; Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY; and the Win Aaltonen Museum of Art, Turku, Finland, among others.
Hashimoto’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at numerous institutions internationally such as the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, United Kingdom; Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Palma de Mallorca, Spain; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna di Roma, Rome, Italy; International Print Center, New York, NY; Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN; Kunsthallen Brandts, Odense, Denmark; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Science Museum Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, OK; and The Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom.
His work can also be found in the permanent collections of institutions around the globe including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Art in Embassies, US Department of State; Capital One, McLean, VA; Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France; Cornell Tech Art Collection, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; McDonald’s Corporation, Chicago, IL; Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA; Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park, IL; Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, WA; The California Endowment, Los Angeles, CA; and the Tokiwabashi Tower Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan, and elsewhere.
