Works on Paper Book Club: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard @ SFMOMA

Join for the November meeting of SFMOMA’s Works on Paper Book Club with this month’s moderator, América Castillo, curatorial project manager and co-curator of RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me exhibition, who has selected The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.

Castillo will open with a short talk on the book and its connections to RM x SFMOMA — currently on view on Floor 7 — before leading the group through a discussion guided by her own questions.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m for informal discussion amongst book club members.

SFMOMA encourages everyone to read as much of the book as they can, but don’t let an unfinished last chapter stop you from joining us! Come ready to discuss — just know that all plot points are fair game.

Please note that space is limited and advance registration is required. RSVP here.

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is available for purchase in the Museum Store or for checkout at your local library.

Works on Paper Book Club

Read and discuss books chosen by SFMOMA curators, staff, or exhibiting artists at our monthly book club, Works on Paper. Selections are personal: books that inspired work, shaped thinking, or connect to ideas alive in the galleries right now. From fiction and biography to art criticism, poetry, and more, the common thread is that the book opens something up for the reader. At each session, participants sit down and explore the book of the month together with the person who selected it.

Art asks us to slow down — to stand before something and truly look. Works on Paper is a book club built on that same instinct.

About the Book

Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”