SFMOMA Fills Its Free Ground-Floor Gallery With 75,000 Kites Starting August 22

SFMOMA opens Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc on August 22, 2026, in the Roberts Family Gallery on Floor 1. The installation uses more than 75,000 hand-built kites, and the museum says it will be the largest work of Hashimoto’s career. The gallery is free and unticketed, so you can see it without paying museum admission.

What The Work Is

Hashimoto builds his installations out of thousands of small kites made from bamboo and Japanese paper, strung together and suspended so the assemblage hangs in the air. Some kites are blank, some are a single solid color, and some carry collaged paper graphics. At SFMOMA the kites will form what the museum describes as a cloud canopy covering the Roberts Family Gallery floor to ceiling and wall to wall.

The number is the part worth pausing on. More than 75,000 individual elements in one room is a step up from Hashimoto’s previous installations, and SFMOMA is billing it as the biggest thing he has made.

The Free Gallery On Floor 1

The Roberts Family Gallery is the ground-floor room at SFMOMA that the public can walk into without a ticket. It is the same space that held Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity from June 2021 until the mural went back to City College of San Francisco in January 2024. Parts of the gallery are visible from the sidewalk on Third Street.

That matters for planning a visit. The Roberts Family Gallery is reachable from the street without going through admissions, which puts a large-scale installation in front of people who are not buying a ticket that day.

How It Fits The Rest Of The Museum

If you do buy admission, two other shows overlap with the opening. Graciela Iturbide: Between Two Worlds runs through November 29, 2026. O. Smith: Artivist, drawings by Orlando Smith, opened July 25 on Floor 2 and runs to June 20, 2027. Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal and Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists are also on view.

SFMOMA lists Randi and Bob Fisher as the lead supporters of Giant Arc, with major support from Eurie Kim and Jason Cheng.

Practical Info

Opens: August 22, 2026. SFMOMA has not published a closing date.

Where: Roberts Family Gallery, Floor 1, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street.

Cost: Free. No ticket required for the Roberts Family Gallery.

Hours: Monday and Tuesday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed Wednesday, Thursday noon to 8 p.m., Friday through Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Getting there: Montgomery Street BART and Muni Metro is about three blocks north. The Third Street entrance is a short walk from the Yerba Buena Gardens block.

Exhibition details are on SFMOMA’s page for Giant Arc.

Photo: Stevensaylor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The image shows the Roberts Family Gallery during the 2021 installation of Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity.