SFMOMA Opens Graciela Iturbide Photography Retrospective July 11
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opens Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds on Saturday, July 11, a retrospective of more than 150 black-and-white photographs spanning five decades of work by the Mexican photographer. The show runs through November 29, 2026.
Organized by Fundación Mapfre with SFMOMA, the exhibition returns Iturbide to the museum that gave her a first solo show in the United States in 1990. It gathers pictures made from the 1960s to the 2010s, drawn largely from her work in Mexico.
What’s on view
The photographs move from markets and streets in Mexico City to regional festivals that blend Catholic and Indigenous traditions. A group of images from the late 1970s and early 1980s documents Iturbide’s years living with the Seri people of the Sonoran Desert and the Zapotec community of Juchitán, Oaxaca. One section pairs her prints with those of her mentor, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, using SFMOMA’s own vintage holdings of both photographers.
A focused selection shows Frida Kahlo’s bathroom at the Casa Azul, which Iturbide photographed in 2008. At Diego Rivera’s request, the room had stayed sealed for about 50 years after Kahlo’s death in 1954, and Iturbide was among the first to document its contents.
About the photographer
Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico City in 1942 and lives in Coyoacán. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award, and the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. Her prints are held by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among other collections.
If you go
SFMOMA is at 151 Third Street in SoMa, near the Montgomery Street BART and Muni Metro station. The museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. most days, Thursday noon to 8 p.m., and closed Wednesday. Admission and any timed tickets are listed on the museum’s website. For other low-cost museum options this month, see our guide to free museum days in San Francisco for July 2026, or our overview of the city’s major museum collections.
Exhibition dates and details are confirmed through the museum’s press announcement. Additional July museum programming is listed by Mission Local.
Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
