Bay Area-Based Artist Ranu Mukherjee to Create Curtain Drop for Cool Britannia Program, Running February 13–19, 2025

Talks and Performances throughout 24/25 Season to Celebrate
Legion of Honor’s 100th anniversary

SAN FRANCISCO, December 16, 2024 — San Francisco Ballet (SF Ballet) and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) today revealed new details on their annual partnership, which includes the annual commission of a large-scale curtain drop for the War Memorial Opera House stage. For the 24/25 season, the two San Francisco organizations have invited Bay Area artist Ranu Mukherjee to create the curtain drop for SF Ballet’s Cool Britannia program debuting in February 2025. Additionally, throughout 2025, SF Ballet will also partner with FAMSF on a series of talks and performances in celebration of the Legion of Honor 100. 

The cross-disciplinary partnership between SF Ballet, a trailblazing commissioner, collaborator, and presenter in dance, and FAMSF, an institution that holds an outstanding collection of set designs for theater and dance and stewards a renowned Contemporary Art program, forges new collaborations across San Francisco’s cultural sector and furthers the Ballet’s mission of infusing fresh perspectives into ballet while uplifting local creativity. 

The collaboration is spearheaded by SF Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo; Claudia Schmuckli, Chief Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; Furio Rinaldi, Curator in Charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; and Maria Egoavil, Public Programs Manager at FAMSF. Conceived in 2023, the partnership began when Rojo participated in “Botticelli to Balanchine: A Conversation on the Renaissance of Dance,” a public talk at the Legion of Honor. The partnership further developed in 2024 when Schmuckli recommended Oakland artist Maria A. Guzmán Capron for the inaugural curtain commission for SF Ballet’s Dos Mujeres program and FAMSF acquired Guzmán Capron’s preparatory maquette. 

“Theater and dance are core to the DNA of the Legion of Honor, which holds a prominent collection of historic and modern designs related to opera and ballet—a collection that has grown significantly over the past century, since Alma de Bretteville Spreckels’ foundational gift,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of FAMSF. “With highlights from this extensive collection currently on view in our Legion of Honor exhibition Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design, it is both apt and exciting to see our focus on dance continue through this partnership with our esteemed colleagues at SF Ballet and dynamic multi-media artist Ranu Mukherjee.”

“I am delighted to expand upon this meaningful collaboration with the Fine Arts Museums team to uncover new ways that our organizations can collectively uplift the rich artistry here in the Bay Area,” said Tamara Rojo. “Cool Britannia features three essential choreographic innovators in ballet who are unafraid to break with and reimagine artistic traditions and push them forward. We see this fearlessness to innovate in FAMSF, as the largest public arts institution in the city, and artist Ranu Mukherjee. This new work of art speaks directly to Cool Britannia’s themes while supporting the Ballet’s vision of bringing new, multi-disciplinary artistry work to the War Memorial Opera House and to our San Francisco community.”

Cool Britannia Curtain Commission

Mukherjee’s commission integrates painting, digital media, textiles, and depictions of plant matter, and draws on her extensive experience collaborating with dancers and dance companies. The work takes inspiration from each of the three ballets that make up Cool Britannia’s mixed bill, evoking the angular choreography of Sir Wayne McGregor’s Chroma; attention to light in Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour; and depiction of World War I in Akram Kahn’s Dust, incorporating plants that were used for medicinal properties at that time. Initially created as a painting, the piece will be scaled up to a large curtain drop by SF Ballet’s scenic design team in advance of February’s premiere. 

Legion of Honor 100 Public Programming

For the 24/25 season, SF Ballet and FAMSF are further partnering on programming in celebration of the Legion of Honor 100. Beginning with performances by the SF Ballet School Trainee Program during The Legion of Honor 100 Centennial weekend, the programming will extend into 2025 with a rich array of events:

• Pre-Performance Conversation Series: Held at the War Memorial Opera House, these discussions will feature FAMSF curators and artists speaking prior to select SF Ballet performances of Manon (January 24-February 1), Cool Britannia (February 13-10), and Van Manen: Dutch Grandmaster (April 5-19);
• Chamber Music Series: Chamber music performances by members of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra at the Legion of Honor’s Gunn Theater on select dates of FAMSF's "A Closer Look" art history lecture series by FAMSF curators;
• Dance-Along Series: SF Ballet will bring their popular, interactive Dance-Along workshop series to the Legion of Honor, including Family Dance-Alongs for young children ages 3-7 and Sensory Friendly Dance-Alongs for all ages and abilities; and
• Panel Discussion on Krazy Kat: Hosted at the Legion of Honor in conjunction with the special exhibition ‘Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art,’ this discussion will center on SF Ballet’s 1990 production of Krazy Kat.

Further details will be announced at sfballet.org/explore and famsf.org/whats-on.

About Ranu Mukherjee

Ranu Mukherjee (b. 1966, Boston) makes hybrid work in painting, moving image, and installation. Her work is marked by a deliberate use of saturated color, the collision of tempos, and sensual materiality. The numerous and often imperceptible layers she employs evoke questions of visibility, legibility and abstraction. Her recent artwork is guided by the forces of ecology and non-human agency, diaspora and migration, motherhood and transnational feminisms.

Mukherjee has deep connections to the Bay Area, having resided in San Francisco and been a professor at California College for the Arts for the past 20 years before beginning her tenure as Dean of the School of Film/Video at CalArts this past fall. In 2017, Schmuckli invited Mukherjee to create a monumental installation for the de Young museum in 2018: A Bright Stage, which combined painting, printed fabric, and video animation in a dynamic environment reflecting on the cultural and spatial perspectives of the museum and its atrium as a freely accessible space for public voice and interaction. Having lived in London during the artistic renaissance of the 90s and early 2000s, which forged the careers of the choreographers represented in the program, Mukherjee is also deeply attuned to the artistic climate that inspired the Cool Britannia program.

Mukherjee's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the 18th Street Arts Center, Los Angeles (2022-2023) de Young Museum, San Francisco (2018-2019); the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design (2017); the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (2016); the Tarble Art Center, Charleston, IL (2016) and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA (2012) among others. Her immersive video installations have been presented in Natasha, Singapore Biennale 2022-2023, Karachi Biennial (2019) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2016) as well as numerous group exhibitions internationally. Mukherjee has been the recipient of the 16th annual San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards (2023); a Pollock Krasner Grant (2020); a Lucas Visual Arts Fellowship at Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA (2019-2024); an 18th Street Arts Center Residency, Los Angeles(2022); Facebook AIR (2020);  de Young Museum Artist Studio Program (2017); the Space 118 Residency, Mumbai (2014); and a Kala Fellowship Award and Residency, Berkeley (2009). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; De Young Museum, San Francisco; the JP Morgan Chase Collection, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco and Paris; the Oakland Museum of California; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the San Francisco International Airport, among others.

Mukherjee co-created Orphan Drift, a London-based cyber-feminist collective and avatar making combined media works since 1994. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally including in London, Oslo, Berlin, Oberhausen, Glasgow, Istanbul, Vancouver, Santiago, Capetown, and the Bay Area.

Mukherjee received her B.F.A. in Painting, from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA in 1988, and her MFA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, UK in 1993. She lives and works in San Francisco, and is the Dean of the School of Film/Video at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). 

About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco oversee the de Young museum, located in Golden Gate Park, and the Legion of Honor, in Lincoln Park. It is the largest public arts institution in San Francisco, and one of the most visited arts institutions in the United States.

The Legion of Honor, modeled after the neoclassical Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2024. The collections on view include ancient art from the Mediterranean basin; European painting, sculpture, and decorative arts; and the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the largest collection of works on paper in the American West, including costume and set designs by celebrated artists from Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst, to avant-garde painters Natalia Goncharova, Pablo Picasso, and Marie Laurencin, to contemporary artist Marcel Dzama. Highlights from this special collection are currently on view at the Legion in the exhibition “The Dress Rehearsal: The Art of Theatrical Design”, open through May 11, 2025.

The FAMSF Department of Contemporary Art and Programming (CAP) presents an innovative and dynamic program of Contemporary Art commissions, exhibitions, and interventions that incite dialogues, embrace a multiplicity of perspectives, and shed new light on both the past and the present. Recent programs and acquisitions include works by Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, Pierre Huyghe, Hito Steyerl, Carrie Mae Weems, and 30 Bay Area artists through the transformative Svane Gift among many others.

About San Francisco Ballet

San Francisco Ballet is a leading ballet company and trailblazer in dance locally, nationally, and internationally. Performing, commissioning, and collaborating with exceptional artists in dance and across disciplines, SF Ballet balances an innovative focus on new and contemporary choreography with a deeply held dedication to the classics. SF Ballet is a catalyst for the future of ballet by cultivating creativity, bringing dance of the highest caliber to a wide audience, and providing exceptional training opportunities for the next generation of professional dancers in its world-renowned School.

Since its founding in 1933 as the first professional ballet company in the United States, San Francisco Ballet has been an innovator in the art form and an originator of beloved cultural traditions, from staging the first American production of Swan Lake to bringing an annual holiday Nutcracker to U.S. audiences.