This month, with the exhibition Picasso and American Art, SFMOMA reshuffles the deck of name-brand, crowd-drawing artists obligatory in major museums. More than a hundred works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and other famous artists will be on view, played off more than 20 Picasso masterpieces. But for those of us who also care to know what artists are doing now, the museum’s exhibition of SECA Art Award winners is the show to see.

Every two years, in consultation with the museum’s Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art, SFMOMA’s curators honor four or five emerging Bay Area artists with the prestigious SECA prize. The group show that follows often quickens careers, as in the case of Barry McGee (1996), Gay Outlaw (1998), and John Bankston (2002). More important, this exhibition delivers the curatorial equivalent of a state-of-the-union address. Working in paint and assemblage, video and installation and performance, this year’s laureates appear to have little in common. Fundamentally, though, Leslie Shows, Amy Franceschini, Mitzi Pederson, Sarah Cain, and Kota Ezawa have the same preoccupation, reflecting a central concern of the museum: how to express something meaningfully in our media-saturated society. From making news to opting out entirely, these artists present an impressive range of possibilities.

Leslie Shows, the most formidable of the lesser-known artists, takes the most direct approach. Her motivations are unequivocally political, the stuff of op-ed columns channeled through the spectacle of art. In large, mixed-media paintings, she explores our impact on the environment by envisioning the wreckage. She constructs garbage dumps from magazine scraps and turns slicks of acrylic paint into unpopulated landscapes. The total absence of humans in her paintings suggests an extinction of the species. We witness the destruction from afar, unable to question, let alone intervene, as if we were an unborn generation consoled by visions of the ruined world we’ll never have to endure.

Shows’s paintings are not didactic. They’re too strange, and exquisite, to serve as mere illustrations in an antipollution campaign. They are not a Ten Commandments but a Book of Revelation.

For Old Testament certainty, see Amy Franceschini, who makes art in the interest of sustainable living. Unabashedly dogmatic, her work runs a gamut from installation to performance, frequently bleeding into activism. Recently, she has been working to bring indigenous life back to areas of Silicon Valley destroyed by the toxins associated with making computer chips. Part Johnny Appleseed, part Maria Montessori, she strives to green the valley and convey technology’s impact by having others garden with her.

Laudable goals, of course, but they aren’t enhanced by labeling the project Gardening Superfund Sites and calling it art. Franceschini has argued that “art remains more open than activism” and “allows for more mobility without constraints of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’” Yet she seldom exploits this opportunity, except in the sculptural works that embellish her more ambitious projects. In her SECA exhibit, she shows a pogo stick with a shovel at the base. The sculpture is associated with Victory Garden, an environmentally worthy yet artistically flaccid project in which she teaches people to plant crops in the wasted spaces around their homes. The pogo shovel succeeds, in spite of the work’s broader failure, because it provokes questions instead of merely providing instructions.

While Franceschini intermittently creates fanciful artifacts, Mitzi Pederson builds fantasy worlds. Using such commonplace stuff as aluminum tape, colored cellophane, and cinder blocks, she invites us into a full-fledged game of pretend, responding to our overstimulated everyday existence by providing a respite from it. In Untitled (ten years later or maybe just one), the cinder blocks are broken and the fragments stacked up to evoke a ruined fortress. Where the blocks are fractured, Pederson has painted silver glitter, as if the walls themselves were the treasure. Making the most of the least promising of materials, she traffics in the imaginary magic of childhood. Only when she scales up her sculpture, making pieces that are more self-consciously complex, does the work falter. Then, as awkward as adolescence, her precarious constructions of cinder block, plywood, and cellophane amount to little more than clutter on the museum floor.

If Pederson is an architectural fabulist, Sarah Cain is a visual poet, who, in the tradition of Emily Dickinson, declines to engage contemporary society at all. Her large-scale mixed-media abstractions, sometimes applied directly to the wall, are layered accretions of modest materials such as latex paint and watercolor embellished with bells and feathers. Thin drawn lines break up solid blocks of opaque pigment. Bold strokes of dark ink disrupt subtle modulations in colored wash. The idiosyncratic combinations amount to a personal vocabulary rich in expressive range, yet her pictures are ultimately hermetic: we admire the visual effects and wonder in passing what they might mean to her. In contrast to radiant Emily Dickinson, who made a new language for everyone, Cain is willfully obscure.

Those interested in understanding the consequences of media saturation, not avoiding it, will draw more from the sophisticated work of video artist Kota Ezawa. Five years ago, Ezawa gained international recognition by casting the final three minutes of the O.J. Simpson trial as a cartoon. His work contains no commentary; the intent is not ironic. Made by tracing the original video frame by frame in Adobe Illustrator, his three-minute video loop shows us the faces of Simpson and his lawyers as the verdict is read. The figures are as stark and flat as paper cutouts. What we observe in those tense few moments are the telling gestures.

Ezawa has since applied this method to other famous footage, such as the Kennedy assassination. He has astutely adapted the technique to still photography as well, reenvisioning some of the most familiar pictures by photographers including Ansel Adams and Diane Arbus—stripping the work of all texture and detail, reducing it to light and shadow. Presented as transparencies on large, wall-mounted light boxes, the images in The History of Photography Remix turn icons of photography into strange new images while distilling them to their pictorial essence. As is the case with the Simpson video, we are liberated from blinding familiarity. In Ezawa’s masterful work, we can reflect on what we ordinarily overlook.

SECA Art award winners Jan. 27–Apr. 22 Picasso and american art Feb. 23–May 28 SFMOMA, 151 Third St., S.F., 415-357-4000