August 15, 2018 - November 10, 2019
Specters of Disruption is the result of an inquiry into the shared encyclopedic collections of the de Young and Legion of Honor museums, performed with an eye toward patterns that might suggest a storyline within a collective institutional subconscious. The narratives of disruption that emerged from this process speak to the museums’ deep grounding in their origins and geographies. Drawing from their historic holdings and re-contextualizing them with modern and contemporary art, Specters of Disruption connects the museums’ colonial and geological underpinnings to the current conditions of the Bay Area and the evolving trajectories of American art histories. Unfolding through several galleries, this presentation is conceived in five chapters that revolve around different manifestations of disruption within nature, history and myth, culture and technology.
