SFMOMA to Suspend 75,000 Kites in Jacob Hashimoto’s Giant Arc

Beginning on August 22, anyone wandering into the lobby of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will find themselves beneath a monumental canopy composed primarily of bamboo and Japanese paper. The installation is “Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc” and it is the largest of the artist’s career to date. While the kites might not fly, they do reference the Sonoran blue butterfly, incorporating other Northern California flora and fauna including the dahlia and the checker lily. Giant Arc will be visible from Howard Street as well.

“This giant arc of kites, color and pattern will be at once chaotic and meditative, playful and considered—a generous artwork that invites viewers to spend time in the gallery. It will be an enticing, intriguing overture to the museum itself,” said Hashimoto, adding, “The gravity of Giant Arc is its universality . . . This essential nature allows people to find what they might need in the work—mysteries if people want them, stories if people desire them, narratives to spin and twist, experimental maps and aerial geographies to explore.”

Despite its immense scale, Giant Arc rewards close looking, allowing visitors beneath the canopy to watch its overwhelming profusion resolve into individual pieces of paper, bamboo, pattern, and line. The work builds on a visual language Hashimoto has refined for some three decades, layering thousands of delicate, hand-crafted elements until they begin to resemble clouds, maps, pixels, or fragments of some imagined universe.

An opening celebration on August 20 will commence with an in-depth talk by Hashimoto and SFMOMA Curator of Architecture and Design Joseph Becker on subjects such as the aspects of physicality and meditation in the artist’s craft and how he transforms kites into a medium of scale and wonder. Later, there will be a live performance by keyboardist/experimental composer/producer Nico Georis.

“Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc” opens August 22, 2026 at SFMOMA.