“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. (Photo: Don Ross)
A vast canopy of nearly 75,000 handmade kites transforms the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) into a shifting, otherworldly landscape. Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc fills the museum’s Roberts Family Gallery from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. The site-specific work brings together sculpture, design, craft, and the environment in one of the largest installations of Hashimoto’s career.
Hashimoto has spent more than three decades developing installations from small bamboo-and-paper kites. Suspended together, thousands of these delicate forms become complex fields of color, pattern, and movement. Some appear as solid blocks of color, while others feature intricate collages and graphic motifs. From a distance, the clusters can resemble clouds, waves, or landscapes; up close, their handmade construction becomes visible.
For Giant Arc, Hashimoto developed patterns inspired by endemic plants and flowers, including species that once populated the Bay Area and are now found primarily in nearby Santa Cruz. The city’s dahlia also appears within the work.
The title refers to a recently identified astronomical structure known as the Giant Arc, a vast arrangement of galaxies that challenges the idea of the universe as evenly distributed. Hashimoto translates that concept into a physical environment. His installation gathers thousands of individual objects into dense formations, creating an expansive composition that shifts between order and apparent chaos.
The work also embodies an unusual relationship with time. Hashimoto incorporates kites made across decades, including pieces dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their papers have aged at different rates, so older elements can appear weathered beside newer, crisp colors.
Constructing Giant Arc required extensive planning. Hashimoto and his team spent months sorting, repairing, and organizing decades of kites before assembling the installation. Three-dimensional modeling helped determine the placement of individual sections, while large portions were ultimately installed by hand within SFMOMA’s soaring gallery.
The result is both meticulously engineered and visually fluid. Visitors encounter an environment that seems suspended between sculpture and atmosphere, where thousands of fragile objects become something immense.
Jacob Hashimoto fills SFMOMA’s Roberts Family Gallery with thousands of handmade kites, creating a vast canopy of color, pattern, and movement.
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. (Photo: Don Ross)
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. (Photo: Don Ross)
Jacob Hashimoto: Giant Arc transforms individual bamboo-and-paper kites into an expansive environment inspired by the cosmos, connecting craft, sculpture, nature, and space.
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. (Photo: Don Ross)
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. (Photo: Don Ross)
Drawing on decades of practice, Hashimoto incorporates imagery inspired by San Francisco’s native plants and flowers alongside older works from his archive.
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. Photo: Don Ross
“Giant Arc,” Jacob Hashimoto, installation view, SFMOMA, 2026. Photo: Don Ross
Jacob Hashimoto; photo: Derek Zeitel
