Join SFMOMA for a conversation marking the opening of Rose B. Simpson’s newly commissioned monumental work, Behold. Conceived for its site overlooking the Yerba Buena neighborhood, Behold reflects on Indigenous presence, the erasure of community histories, and the ongoing work of relearning tenderness in contemporary life. The work invites viewers to wonder, witness, and reconnect, while honoring relationships as the foundation of a more humane narrative. Simpson will join Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, language activist, and educator Natalie Diaz for an in-depth discussion of these themes, exploring the multifold ways relationships can be made and reframed as well as exploring the way their work parallels and diverges.

Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist working in ceramic, bronze, performance, and art cars. Her practice centers around the figure as a proxy to address the emotional and existential impacts of global humanity. From Santa Clara Pueblo, the sophistication of her work results from the accomplishments of many generations of a tribe famous for the ceramics its women have made since the sixth century AD.

Natalie Diaz was born at Fort Mojave in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and enrolled at Gila River Indian Community (Akimel O’odham). Diaz authored Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012), won an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow. Diaz is Professor and Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She splits time between her homelands in Arizona and California, and along the waterways of Manahatta in New York. She was awarded a 2024 Margaret Casey Foundation Freedom Fellow and is a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy.