SFMOMA’s Sept. 10 Paalen-and-Rahon talk is the kind of precise Thursday museum night worth reserving now: 6 p.m. in the Wattis Theater, with ticket options from free to $30.

Put this one on the September calendar while the link is still easy: SFMOMA has a Paalen-and-Rahon conversation (external source, opens in a new tab) scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m. in the Phyllis Wattis Theater on Floor 1. The museum is at 151 Third St., San Francisco. Tickets are listed in four tiers: free, $10, $20 and $30. As of Thursday, Aug. 20, the ticketing link was live and SFMOMA had not posted a sold-out notice.

This is not the museum-night equivalent of fireworks. That is the point. The useful hook is that SFMOMA is making a compact evening out of two Surrealist figures with local museum history: Alice Rahon received a solo SFMOMA show in 1945, and Wolfgang Paalen’s Dynaton movement was the subject of the museum’s 1951 Dynaton exhibition. SFMOMA says this talk lands on that exhibition’s 75th anniversary, which gives the night a cleaner reason to exist than another broad “come learn about Surrealism” program.

The people onstage make it worth the hour on a Thursday. SFMOMA lists Nemerov and Kincaid as the speakers (external source, opens in a new tab), with assistant curator Marin Sarvé-Tarr opening the program. Stanford’s profile of Nemerov (external source, opens in a new tab) places him in the university’s Art & Art History department and notes his long record writing about American art and culture. Kincaid’s SFMOMA bio puts her at Cooper Union and says her current book work centers on Rahon and former Surrealists in wartime Mexico City. That is a specific enough pairing to justify choosing this over a looser museum lecture.

For the commute, use Montgomery Street BART if that works for you. SFMOMA’s visitor guide (external source, opens in a new tab) says the Third Street entrance is a few blocks from the station, and the museum garage is next door for anyone who has to drive. The museum is open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays, but the event page itself lists the program start as 6 p.m.; no age restriction is posted. Accessibility requests for ASL interpretation or assisted listening devices go to publicengagement@sfmoma.org at least 10 business days ahead, according to SFMOMA.

My move: reserve the free ticket, show up for the talk, and do not turn it into homework. If I only had two hours, I’d get there with enough cushion to find the Wattis Theater, maybe take one quick pass through Floor 1, and leave the full SFMOMA lap for another day.