SFMOMA, Part 10: Giant Arc.
This one is free too. Walk into SFMOMA at 151 Third Street, skip the ticket desks entirely, and turn into the Roberts Family Gallery on the ground floor — part of the museum's 45,000 square feet of free public space — and look up. The ceiling is gone. In its place: a sky made by hand.
Nearly 75,000 kites hang suspended above you, bamboo and Japanese paper, clustered into an undulating canopy that runs the room from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. It dips and swells like weather. Some sections burn yellow and red; others go pale green, or blue, or black. Up close each kite is a small, precise thing — a hexagon or diamond of patterned paper stretched over a bamboo frame, no bigger than your hand. Step back and the small things stop being things. They become atmosphere.
Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc opened August 20, 2026, with a community celebration, and went on view to the public August 22. It is listed as "Ongoing" — no closing date. It is the largest installation of Hashimoto's career, it was commissioned specifically for this room, and it costs nothing to see. You can also see it without going inside at all: the gallery has two-story windows facing Howard Street, and the canopy glows through them at night, which means half of SoMa is getting the show for free whether they asked for it or not.
The first thing you notice, standing under it, is that it moves. Not much — the gallery air barely stirs — but enough. The kites hang on nylon lines, thousands of them, and the whole field shivers in small sections, like water. The second thing you notice is that it's organized. This isn't confetti. The canopy reads in zones: a stretch of saturated red, a drift of pale green, a long band of deep blue, fields of yellow. The colors don't blend so much as abut, the way countries abut on a map. You start walking just to see where one color ends and the next begins, and the room is big enough that the walk takes a while.
The third thing you notice takes longer. Some of the kites look old. Their papers have yellowed and softened; the patterns have faded to ghosts. Next to them hang kites so crisp they look wet. That's because this installation is partly an archive. Hashimoto has been making these kites for thirty years, and Giant Arc folds decades of that work into itself — old elements, weathered by previous shows and storage, hung alongside tens of thousands of new ones built specifically for this room. The canopy is a timeline you can see: time, hanging in the air, aging at different rates.
The new elements carry Northern California. Hashimoto built them with patterns drawn from the region's flora and fauna — the dahlia, which is San Francisco's official flower; the checker lily, native to the Bay Area; the Sonoran blue butterfly, found along the California coast. You won't spot them from across the room. You have to get close, pick one kite out of the thousands, and look. The installation rewards the close look the way a forest rewards the close look: the big view is weather, the small view is botany.
Jacob Hashimoto was born in 1973 in Greeley, Colorado, and grew up in Walla Walla, Washington. His father is Japanese-American, his mother Irish-American. He has said he has never been to Japan and doesn't speak the language — his connection to Japanese material culture comes through his father, and through the materials themselves: bamboo, paper, the discipline of making things by hand. He went to Carleton College, then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where in his senior year he started making the kites. He never really stopped. He lives and works in Ossining, New York, in a studio that has to function, among other things, as a warehouse for tens of thousands of paper kites.
Thirty years is a long time to spend on one idea. The art world usually reads that kind of persistence as either devotion or a rut, and Hashimoto's career has been an argument for devotion. The kites began as a student's solution — a cheap, light, modular unit he could multiply — and became a language. Over the decades the language got more complex: wall-mounted compositions, freestanding columns, whole rooms. Path to the Sky filled a medieval hospital in Siena, Italy, in 2025. Not After a Million Years took over a museum in Sweden in 2024. The Fractured Giant occupied the Boise Art Museum in 2022. Permanent versions hang at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, in a Philadelphia hospital, in the Nashville airport, in a Tokyo tower. Giant Arc is the biggest one yet, and it feels like a summary — not a greatest-hits, more like a life's work deciding, all at once, to be in the same room.
The method is the meaning, or half of it. Each kite is handmade: bamboo split and bent, paper cut and glued, patterns drawn or printed. Then the handmade things get organized by machine logic — Hashimoto's team used three-dimensional modeling to plan the canopy's undulation, figuring out where each section would hang before a single line went up. Then the actual hanging was done by hand, in the room, over weeks. Months went into sorting, repairing, and organizing the archive kites before installation even started.
This is the part I keep coming back to. The work looks effortless — a cloud, a sky, weather — and it is the product of staggering, almost absurd labor. Seventy-five thousand objects, each one touched by a person's hands, each one tied and knotted and hung. The repetition is the point. Hashimoto has talked about his influences as video games and virtual worlds and cosmology — the pixel grids of early games, the modular logic of digital space — and you can see it in the work: the kites are pixels, the canopy is a rendering, the whole thing is a low-res image of the sky made at 1:1 scale. But a pixel doesn't take ten minutes to make. A kite does. The installation is what happens when you build a digital idea out of analog labor — when the cloud has a callus.
The archive idea is the quieter half of the meaning. Most large installations are built new and scrapped after. Giant Arc is built out of its own history. The weathered kites — faded, softened, a little tired — hang in the same field as the crisp new ones, and the difference reads as honesty. Nothing in the room pretends to be timeless. The old work shows its age the way a person shows their age, and the installation is better for it. There's something almost anti-spectacle about that choice: at the exact moment Hashimoto is making the biggest thing he's ever made, he's insisting that it be visibly old in places. The sky has a past.
It also has a present tense, which is you. The museum encourages visitors to walk under the canopy, and to sit, and to lie down. People do. On a weekday afternoon the gallery floor has the loose, sprawled energy of a park — kids on their backs, adults doing the same thing but pretending they're resting. Lying under 75,000 kites does something specific to your sense of scale. The small units disappear. The color zones become weather systems. You stop seeing objects and start seeing conditions — brightness, density, drift. It's the cheapest sublime available in San Francisco, and it's free.
Which brings us to the free part, because the free part is the argument. SFMOMA's director Christopher Bedford calls the museum's mission "radical hospitality," and the Roberts Family Gallery is where that mission is most literal: the best room in the building, ground floor, two-story windows, given over to the biggest commission the museum has mounted there — and no ticket. This is the same museum that charges $10–$12 for the RM exhibition upstairs (Part 7 of this series). The pricing tells you what the institution thinks each thing is for. Upstairs is the destination; downstairs is the invitation. Giant Arc is the overture, in Hashimoto's own word for it — "an enticing, intriguing overture to the museum itself."
I think the overture framing sells it short, or maybe just sells it sideways. The canopy isn't an ad for the museum. It's the museum keeping a promise. Forty-five thousand square feet of free public space is a lot of real estate to give away in downtown San Francisco, and most institutions would fill it with something safe — a mural, a donor wall, a gift shop with good lighting. SFMOMA filled its best free room with 75,000 handmade kites and told people to lie on the floor. That's not hospitality as marketing. That's hospitality as a curatorial position: the belief that wonder is a public good, and that it shouldn't require a ticket.
There's a version of this piece that would be cynical about wonder — that would call the canopy Instagram bait, a selfie sky, spectacle in a moment that needs substance. I've been in the room twice now, and I can't make the cynical version stick. The selfies happen, sure. But the thing about standing under 75,000 handmade objects is that the labor is the substance. You can feel it without knowing the number. The canopy doesn't hide its making; the making is the show. Every kite is evidence that a person sat somewhere and built a small thing carefully, and then 74,999 more people — or the same person, 74,999 more times — did it again. That's not spectacle. That's the opposite of spectacle. Spectacle wants you to forget the work. This wants you to lie down inside it.
Hashimoto has a line about the piece that I like better than the museum's: "This giant arc of kites, color and pattern will be at once chaotic and meditative, playful and considered." Chaotic and meditative is exactly right. Up close it's chaos — thousands of discrete decisions, patterns colliding, colors arguing. From the floor, on your back, it's meditation — the decisions dissolve into weather. The installation holds both at once without resolving them, which is also a decent description of what a good room in a museum is supposed to do.
Go on a weekday if you can. Weekends bring the crowds, and the crowds are fine — kids especially, who understand immediately that the correct way to look at a sky is lying down — but the weekday room has a quiet in it that the canopy seems to have been built for. Stand in the middle first. Then walk the perimeter, watching the color zones change. Then find a spot on the floor, lie back, and let the 75,000 small decisions become one big weather. It's free. The sky is free. That was the whole idea. 🌁
Timeline — Jacob Hashimoto
1973 — born in Greeley, Colorado; grows up in Walla Walla, Washington
1993 — graduates Carleton College
1996 — BFA/MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; begins making the paper kites in his senior year
2000s — the kites become a language: wall works, columns, room-size installations; shows in New York, Chicago, Verona, Rome
2022 — The Fractured Giant, Boise Art Museum
2024 — Not After a Million Years, Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn, Sweden
2025 — Path to the Sky, Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy
August 20, 2026 — Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc opens with a community celebration, Roberts Family Gallery, SFMOMA
August 22, 2026 — public opening; listed as "Ongoing"
2026 — still on view, ground floor, free to all