Image: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will celebrate the debut of Jacob Hashimoto’s monumental installation ‘Giant Arc’ with a public evening of conversation and live sound on Thursday, August 20, 2026. The event, scheduled from 6 to 8 p.m., will take place across the museum’s Phyllis Wattis Theater and Roberts Family Gallery in San Francisco.
Hashimoto will join Joseph Becker, SFMOMA’s Curator of Architecture and Design, for a conversation at 6 p.m. The discussion will address Hashimoto’s artistic practice, the physicality and meditative aspects of his craft, and his transformation of the kite into a sculptural medium capable of operating at an architectural scale. Seating for the talk will be first come, first served.
At 7 p.m., the program will move to the Roberts Family Gallery, where ‘Giant Arc’ will be presented with a live sound performance by Nico Georis. The California-based keyboard player, experimental composer, songwriter and producer makes music from a studio at Granny’s Dancehall, described by SFMOMA as a ghost town near Death Valley. His work combines ambient music, Impressionism and trance-like passages.
The related exhibition, ‘Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc’, opens to the public on August 22 in SFMOMA’s Roberts Family Gallery on Floor 1. Admission to the installation is free, and general museum admission is not required. The opening celebration itself is also free and open to the public.
‘Giant Arc’ comprises nearly 75,000 hand-built kites made from bamboo and Japanese paper. Suspended together, the components form an immersive cloud canopy extending from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. SFMOMA describes the project as Hashimoto’s largest work to date and as a site-specific installation that blends sculpture, design and environment.
Hashimoto’s installations are built through repetition and composition, using modular elements that have included bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats and blocks covered in astroturf. His layered environments draw on video games, virtual environments and cosmology while remaining connected to landscape-based abstraction, Modernism and handcraft. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions and installations at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, Boise Art Museum, Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas and Governors Island in New York. His work is also held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
SFMOMA is located at 151 Third Street in San Francisco. The August 20 program begins with Hashimoto and Becker in the Phyllis Wattis Theater before concluding with Georis’s performance alongside ‘Giant Arc’ in the Roberts Family Gallery.
