GIANT ARC, 2026
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) 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, Skärhamn, 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.Learn about Hashimoto’s artistic process and the origin of kites in his work in Crafting the Cosmos, an interview between him and Architecture and Design Curator Joseph Becker.
ON VIEW: August 22, 2026 - June, 2028
WHERE: SFMOMA
OPENING EVENT: Thursday, August 20, 2026
Celebrate the debut of Giant Arc, Jacob Hashimoto’s largest work to date. Comprising nearly 75,000 hand-built kites of bamboo and Japanese paper, this monumental site-specific installation transforms SFMOMA’s Roberts Family Gallery into an immersive cloud canopy that stretches floor to ceiling and wall to wall.
At 6 p.m. join artist Jacob Hashimoto and SFMOMA Curator of Architecture and Design Joseph Becker for an in-depth conversation exploring Hashimoto’s practice, the aspects of physicality and meditation in his craft, and how he transforms kites into a medium of extraordinary scale and wonder.
Then, at 7 p.m. experience Giant Arc paired with a live sound performance by keyboard player, experimental composer, songwriter, and producer Nico Georis.
EVENT SCHEDULE
6 p.m. — Jacob Hashimoto in conversation with Joseph Becker
Phyllis Wattis Theater
Please note: seating for the talk is first come, first served.
7 p.m. — Sound performance by Nico Georis
Roberts Family Gallery