Christiane Lyons, Leonora: Arrangement in Radiant Magenta and Cadmium Red Light, 2021

Superficial Matters: Artists from the Svane Gift and Beyond

Now showing15 August 2026 – 4 June 2027$25

Bay Area artists working in ceramics, photography and painting treat the surfaces of bodies and objects as sites of identity, especially womanhood.

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On now All of October 2026

Ruby Neri's Breaking Out is a large ceramic woman doing a backflip while, in the Examiner's words, "seemingly birthing another, smaller figure." Neri told the paper she uses clay because it's hollow: the inside is "a private, sensitive space" behind a hard shell.

It's 11 works by eight artists with Bay Area ties in Gallery 16, the third of four shows drawn from the Svane Family Foundation's 2022 gift of 42 works by 30 local artists. You walk in among silk, patchwork and magenta, and each pretty surface turns out to be arguing about how women are looked at. Wesaam Al-Badry's women peer out from niqabs cut from Hermès and Valentino scarves. Lorna Simpson's Wigs portfolio runs to 21 lithographs.

Max Blue, who reviewed it for the Examiner, called it "a solid entry into the series" in his newsletter. It's a single gallery. General admission covers it: $25, free for 17 and under.

Look for

Ruby Neri, Breaking Out (2021)
Look for the large, cartoonish ceramic woman caught mid-backflip, with a smaller figure emerging from her body.
Christiane Lyons, Leonora (2021)
Two women stacked into one body, one in a kimono and one in magenta, against flowers and a pale blue sky seen through a window.
Wesaam Al-Badry, Al-Kouture (2018)
Photographs of women looking out through niqabs made from luxury silk scarves, brand logos and all.
Sunny A. Smith, Tilt-top Table (Scattergood)
A Victorian cherry wood table with its top tipped up at an easel angle and dressed in a patchwork cover.
Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Me Contuve (2022)
A wall-hung soft sculpture sewn from secondhand clothing, two figures with extra limbs and heads twisted around each other.