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Manitoba Museum of Finds Art
A little bit about the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art from the SFMOMA blog: "If you had visited the waiting area of the directors’ offices at SFMOMA between 1975 and 1978, you would have encountered an exhibition not advertised on the museum’s official schedule: one of the 23 shows organized by Alberta Mayo under the auspices of the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art (MMOFA). Mayo, then assistant to Director Henry Hopkins and Deputy Director Michael McCone, directed her own museum within “the other museum,” turning her administrative space into the venue for a range of solo and group exhibitions by artists who — with a few exceptions, like Sol LeWitt — were largely under SFMOMA’s programming radar.

The “Finds Art” in MMOFA’s name nods to “Dudley Finds,” aka artist Lowell Darling, who since 1969 has been giving out thousands of free MFAs — Masters of Finds Art. Greeted in San Francisco by “Manitoba” Mayo and Fanny Footstar (Eugenie Candau) holding up a large sign emblazoned with “Lelcome Wowell,” Darling officiated a 1974 graduation ceremony at SFMOMA in which he bestowed MFAs on the staff, while Hopkins and McCone were (not coincidentally) busy with off-site appointments. Darling’s letter-writing campaign asking Neil Armstrong for his shoe would be the subject of his 1975 MMOFA show Artists & Astronauts.

...Mayo eventually left SFMOMA, but not MMOFA, transporting the collection of found items, gifts, and correspondence art to her new post at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979. Membership in this museum-without-walls continued, with potluck picnics at Port View Park and MMOFA calendars commemorating various members’ birthdays."

This is a book documenting the MMOFA!

$30