SFMOMA, Part 9: Behold.
Step out of the fourth-floor galleries and the city drops away for a second — then it comes back, all of it, because you are standing on the outdoor terrace and there is a twenty-four-foot bronze in front of you and behind it the whole downtown skyline. Honey-colored bronze, SFMOMA's own word for it, and it is exact: not the dark green-black of old civic statues, not the cold mirror of new ones, but something warm, almost amber, catching the afternoon light the way skin catches it. You can see it from Yerba Buena Gardens across the street — people down there on the lawn are looking up at it right now, whether they know what it is or not. Two figures. A parent and a child, attached at the hip, the child growing out of the parent's side the way a branch grows out of a trunk. Beaded necklaces strung from their shoulders. Between their heads, a bending ladder arcs like a drawn bow, ornamental and strange, connecting them skull to skull. Both of them are looking outward — not at each other, not at you, but past you, over the city. They have been standing here since January, and they will be standing here for a long time.
This is Rose B. Simpson's Behold, 2026. It is bronze, over twenty-four feet tall, commissioned by SFMOMA for the Floor 4 terrace, and it has been on view since January 17, 2026. It is visible from all over the neighborhood — the gardens, the surrounding streets, the galleries themselves. Entry is included with general admission: you walk out of the fourth floor and there it is.
Here is the thesis, and I will not bury it: this is what a monument looks like when the people who were erased get to build it. San Francisco is a city of statues that commemorate conquest — the missionaries, the gold rush, the generals — and almost none of them look like the people who were here first. Behold is twenty-four feet tall and it does not commemorate anyone. It honors, in SFMOMA's words, "relationships, intergenerational connection, and spiritual witnessing." A mother and a child. Not a hero on a horse: a parent with a kid growing out of her hip, both of them looking at the city like they intend to stay. It is a counter-monument in the most literal sense — same scale as the old ones, opposite meaning. And it is cast in bronze, the most permanent material public sculpture has, by an artist whose whole lineage works in clay, the most fragile and ancient one. That contradiction is the whole piece.
1983 — : Santa Clara Pueblo
Rose B. Simpson was born in 1983 in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico — Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh in Tewa — and she still lives there. She is an enrolled member of the Pueblo, and she works, in SFMOMA's phrase, "in a matrilineal tradition that bridges past, present and future." That word, matrilineal, is doing heavy lifting, so let me unpack it, because it is not a metaphor.
Simpson is the daughter of a line of ceramicists and potters that the Norton Museum, surveying a decade of her work, described as spanning nearly seventy generations. Her great-grandmother, Rose Naranjo — the Rose she was named for — was a famed Pueblo ceramicist. Her grandmother, Rina Swentzell (1939–2015), was an architect, scholar, and activist with a doctorate in American Studies. Her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, is one of the most respected living Pueblo potters, among the first generation to push the centuries-old art form toward contemporary figurative sculpture; in the 1980s she co-founded the Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, which teaches sustainable living. Her father, Patrick Simpson, who is white, is an artist working in metal and wood. So: clay from the mother, metal from the father, and behind the mother, seventy generations of women who knew what the earth could be made to hold.
Santa Clara is famous for blackware and redware pottery — the black-on-black designs of Maria Martinez at neighboring San Ildefonso are the most famous Pueblo ceramics in the world — and Simpson grew up inside that visual language the way other kids grow up inside a religion. The geometric Pueblo patterns, the coil-built vessels, the firing pits: this was not "heritage" as an abstraction. It was the kitchen table. When she makes a twenty-four-foot bronze now, the clay is still in it — not literally, but structurally. Everything she knows about building a form that stands up, she learned from women who built forms out of mud.
2007–2018: The long education
Simpson's training reads like someone who kept refusing to choose. She spent three years at the University of New Mexico, then earned her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 2007. Then the MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 — the most establishment credential an American sculptor can get. Then she came home to New Mexico and enrolled in the automotive program at Northern New Mexico College, because she wanted to rebuild a 1985 Chevy El Camino as a tribute to Tewa pottery and lowrider culture. The result, Maria's Other Hood (2014) — black-on-black designs inspired by Maria Martinez, sprayed across a car — is the single best summary of her project: the ancestral and the mechanical, the sacred and the street, in one object.
In 2018 she went back to IAIA for a second MFA, this time in creative writing. She has said, in so many words, that she is a hard worker with a lot of projects — metal, clay, automotive design, fashion, poetry, performance — and that she parents a daughter and participates in Pueblo community life on top of it. The throughline is not a medium. It is a question: what does it mean to carry a seventy-generation lineage forward instead of just preserving it? Preservation puts things in cases. Carrying means they get heavy, and you build the muscle.
The art world caught up in stages: the Whitney Biennial; LIT at the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe (2019); Legacies at the ICA Boston (August 2022–January 2023), a show the press release framed as extending "a multigenerational, matrilineal lineage of artists working with clay"; Journeys of Clay at the Norton Museum (2024), a full survey of the previous decade. Her work is now in the Met, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, and SFMOMA. In 2025 RISD gave her an honorary doctorate; in 2026 Santa Fe gave her its Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. None of this is the point, but all of it is the receipt: the lineage is not a story she tells about herself. It is an institutionally verified fact.
2022–2024: Learning to be colossal
Before Behold, Simpson had already been practicing monumentality — and practicing, specifically, how to make bigness feel like care instead of domination. In 2022 she installed Counterculture at Field Farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts: figurative sculptures coated in dry concrete spray, wearing necklaces of thousands of clay beads, anchored by steel stanchions set in cement. The beads matter — they are the direct ancestor of the beaded necklaces strung across the shoulders in Behold. She was already working out the grammar: the figure, the adornment, the engineering required to hold it all upright.
Then, in 2024, Seed at Madison Square Park in New York: seven sentinel-like figures cut from ten-by-four-foot steel sheets, punctured with ovals and angular openings, wearing turquoise bronze masks, surrounded by native plantings — columbine, wood mint, wild strawberry — that were meant to grow up around them until the figures seemed to sink. Two more figures went to Inwood Park. Simpson said something at the unveiling that I keep coming back to: "Sometimes the most powerful things can be incredibly intimate." Standing under the sentinels with skyscrapers overhead, she felt her massive figures were "actually quite delicate and small" — that in that context, monumentality was "an intimate scale."
That is the key to Behold. The old theory of public sculpture is that scale equals power: make it big enough and people will feel small in the right way — awed, obedient, impressed. Simpson's theory is the inverse. Make it big enough to be seen from across the street, from the gardens, from the freeway of daily life — and then make it about tenderness. The figures are colossal, but what they are doing is intimate: a parent and child, joined at the hip, connected by beads and a ladder, looking outward together. Bigness as an act of witness, not an act of conquest. Nobody had to teach her this. She learned it from watching her mother make figures out of clay at the kitchen table — the most intimate scale there is — and then she scaled it up until the whole city had to look at it.
2026: The terrace
Now the site, because the site is half the work. The Floor 4 terrace is part of the Snøhetta expansion — the rippling white façade, the living wall, the whole civic-landscape apparatus — and it looks out over the Yerba Buena neighborhood, toward the gardens across the street. SFMOMA is explicit about what the parental figure is gazing at: "the urbanized landscape that remains a place marked by the colonial violence of the California Mission system and the displacement of Native peoples."
Read that sentence again. This is a museum, in a wall text, saying the quiet part: the ground under the terrace is Ohlone land; the city around it was built by a mission system that enslaved and killed the people who lived here; the stories were, in Simpson's words, "bulldozed over." The sculpture is "a counter-monument — a refusal to forget. It reclaims space and time, asserting Indigenous presence in a city built on Native erasure."
This is why the outward gaze matters. The figures are not looking at the museum. They are not looking at the viewer, either, not exactly — their gaze goes past you, over the rail, toward the city. They are witnessing it. And because the bronze is honey-colored and warm instead of dark and martial, because the ladder between their heads is ornamental instead of structural, because the beads are beads and not chains, the whole thing reads as the opposite of a warning. It reads as an invitation. "There are still people here," Simpson says, "who are learning how to value tenderness again, to witness themselves enough to reach out and connect with another. We can change this narrative through wonder, witness, and a solid foundation in the soft warmth of our humanity."
Behold. The title is an imperative — look — and also an old word, a biblical word, the kind of word monuments used to use. Behold this man. Behold the city. Simpson takes the word back and points it at a mother and a child. Behold them. Behold each other. The ladder arcs between their heads like a thought passing from one mind to another, and the thought is: we are still here, we were always here, and tenderness is a foundation you can build on.
I stood on the terrace for a long time. People came out, took their photos, went back inside. A kid pressed her face to the glass from the gallery. Down in the gardens, tiny figures on the lawn, looking up. Twenty-four feet of bronze, honey-colored in the afternoon, a parent and a child attached at the hip, gazing over a city that tried to forget them. It is the most hopeful thing in the museum right now, and it is hopeful the hard way — not by ignoring the bulldozed stories, but by standing on top of them, at full height, and refusing to look away. 🌁
Timeline — Rose B. Simpson
1983 — born in Santa Clara Pueblo (Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh), New Mexico, into a matrilineal line of Pueblo ceramicists
2007 — BFA, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe
2011 — MFA in Ceramics, Rhode Island School of Design
2014 — Maria's Other Hood: the customized 1985 El Camino honoring Tewa pottery and lowrider culture
2018 — MFA in Creative Writing, Institute of American Indian Arts
2019 — LIT: The Work of Rose B. Simpson, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe; included in the Whitney Biennial
2022 — Counterculture at Field Farm, Williamstown; Legacies at the ICA Boston (Aug 2022–Jan 2023)
2023 — appointed by President Biden to the IAIA Board of Trustees
2024 — Seed: seven steel sentinels at Madison Square Park (plus two at Inwood Park), New York; Journeys of Clay survey at the Norton Museum; Heights I dedicated at IAIA
2025 — honorary doctorate, Rhode Island School of Design
2026 — Behold commissioned by SFMOMA; opens January 17 on the Floor 4 terrace; Santa Fe Mayor's Award for Excellence in the Arts