December 2026
Alaïa's dresses fill the Legion of Honor and Cairo's gold fills the de Young, both through winter. December is also the last call for Dorothea Lange's 1942 photographs, reworked at the Oakland Museum, and Ruth Asawa's family picks in Dogpatch. Sunset comes before five, and the Asian Art Museum's Thursdays run until 8pm, with Angkor's bronze Vishnu.
Legion of HonorUntil 11 April
The Carla, a black bustier dress outlined in silver pins, cost Italian Elle's editor her job when she shot it for a cover that never ran. Eighty garments stand on transparent mannequins molded on Naomi Campbell, some among the Rodins.
de Young MuseumUntil 31 January
The three gold flies on the Necklace of Ahhotep were an award for bravery. They hang among 130 loans from Cairo and Luxor, including an 11-pound gold collar, ending on finds from the Golden City making their US debut.
Asian Art MuseumUntil 25 January
For decades only the West Mebon Vishnu's head and torso were shown. Conservators have rejoined the bronze fragments found with them at Angkor: the remains of a reclining god once nearly 20 feet long.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)Until 7 February
A mural of BTS member RM's handwritten notes greets you, and the labels are written in his first person. Eight rooms hold 142 works from his collection beside 36 of SFMOMA's, and one is set up as a living room.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)Until 31 January
Nearly 20 models pressed their bodies onto paper for Life/Death/America, a wall-sized graphite canvas Mission Local compared to "crime-scene chalk outlines after a mass-casualty event". On some days, a veteran in fatigues guards a flag with a rifle.
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)Closes 27 December
Dorothea Lange's 1942 photograph of a girl with an ID tag on her lapel fills the wall; up close, the photographer and officials are reflected in her eyes. Outside, iPads restage a 1942 departure for the Tanforan camp.
Minnesota Street ProjectCloses 16 December
Twenty members of Ruth Asawa's family appear as life-cast masks of their own faces, each beside the work they chose and a note on why: a surfboard, sketchbooks, wire sculptures. Expect family stories more than a survey.
African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO)Closes 31 December
The Black Panther Party's own newspaper, in original issues from 1967 to 1971: the trials, the patrols, the Free Breakfast Program and the Ten Point Program, as the Party reported them. Read them in Oakland, where it was founded.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
Emerging artist Dorian Reid tells the story of her Black Cat Revolution through ceramics, protest signs, flags and performance, linking Black Panther history and animal welfare.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Naeem Mohaiemen, Prajakta Potnis, TJ Shin and Tiffany Sia use photography, video and installation to read today's media through the Cold War.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Twenty life-cast masks of Ruth Asawa's family, each beside the Asawa work that person chose and their own words on why, from wire sculptures to a surfboard.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Installation at Slash linking ecological upheaval and disability: videos of floods and wounds set in mahogany sculptures or prison TVs, with copper and relief-print wall maps.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Paintings, collages and prints from 1960 to the early 2000s by artist, curator and scholar David C. Driskell, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)
Artist Masaki Fujihata uses enlarged 1942 photographs and augmented reality to look closely at the moments just before Japanese American incarceration.
African American Museum and Library at Oakland (AAMLO)Free
Original Black Panther Party newspapers from 1967-1971, covering the trials, the Free Breakfast Program, the Ten Point Program, health education and housing.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
The artist's first US institutional solo show: recent surrealist paintings of private moments, uncanny still lifes and seaside scenes exploring fantasy, sexuality and mortality.
Asian Art Museum
Prize-winning Japanese bamboo art from the 2026 Next Generation awards, led by Coffland Grand Prize winner Ōki Toshie; all three major awards went to women.
Asian Art Museum
Balinese sculptures and paintings tell the epic of Garuda, the bird-warrior who became the national symbol of Indonesia.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)Free
Free off-site projection of cascading wedding flowers on the Humboldt Bank Building, 785 Market St, nightly twilight–10pm (paused 4–13 Dec).
Fort Mason Center for Arts & CultureFree
Video, painting and archives turn the historic Guardhouse into a fortress for a fictional 'Attentive Realignment Center'. Visible at all times, free.
Exploratorium
The winter light show returns: 91 moving infinity mirrors, spinning sculptures, an LED dungeon-crawler game, a beacon of eyeglass lenses and a Glow Cinema.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Collection works on the legacies of nuclear testing and colonization and their links to the climate crisis, part of the campus-wide Kõmij Mour Ijin series.
Asian Art Museum
The nearly 20-foot West Mebon Reclining Vishnu, Southeast Asia's largest ancient bronze, on loan from Cambodia; its only West Coast stop before it returns home.
Asian Art Museum
First North American museum survey of Korean abstract pioneer Ha Chong-Hyun: six decades of paintings pressed, burned and pushed through hemp cloth, some eight feet tall.
Asian Art Museum
Sopheap Pich and Leang Seckon, key figures of Cambodia's post-Khmer Rouge art revival, turn bamboo, rattan, textiles and found materials into works on memory and loss.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
Mid-career survey of the Oakland design studio, from the Teeter-Totter Wall on the US-Mexico border to 3D-printed earth architecture, including Sanctuary, printed onsite from soil.
de Young Museum
130 royal treasures and antiquities spanning 3,000 years, lent by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Luxor Museum, including the US debut of finds from the Golden City.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
Work interrogating American patriotism, with two new commissions: a durational performance of an armed guard at a US flag and a monumental canvas of community-made body prints.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
The first exhibition of artworks from the personal collection of RM of BTS, on Floor 7. Timed tickets; member previews 1–3 October.
de Young MuseumFree
Two custom cars by Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose B. Simpson, painted with Pueblo pottery designs, fill Wilsey Court against a vast geometric backdrop.
de Young Museum
Photographs, prints and drawings exclusively by women artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner and Yayoi Kusama, from a promised local gift.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Elena Gross curates Alexa Burrell, Sienna Freeman, Barbara Hammer and Daviel Shy at Slash: sculpture, collage, photography and video on lesbian ways of looking.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
From packed nightclubs to choreographed stage performance, photographs from the collection that capture the energy of dance.
Asian Art Museum
First solo museum show for self-taught Korean woodturner Kim Minwook, whose sculptures let the cracks, knots and grain of weathered wood shape the finished form.
Legion of Honor
Nearly 50 photographs from the Achenbach collection, many never shown, from Baldus to Atget and Brassaï, tracing how the camera built the myth of modern Paris.
Exploratorium
Four short films in the Osher Gallery 1 Microcinema, including Leonard Cohen's Plato and Jessica Yu's Sour Death Balls, reflect playfully on what it is to be human. 32 minutes.
Legion of Honor
The first major US retrospective of the Tunisian-born Paris couturier: 80 garments, including designs worn by Tina Turner, Grace Jones and Rihanna.
The Walt Disney Family Museum
Around 200 works by Eyvind Earle, the color stylist behind Sleeping Beauty's jewel-toned look, from his Disney years to his fine art, with newly acquired pieces.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Paul Klee and the modern fascination with masks, linking ancient ritual, psychology, theatre and caricature, alongside Man Ray and Claude Cahun.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
A design show on how objects shape the way we eat, and how dining becomes a communal and cultural experience.
de Young Museum
Boldly coloured paintings by Mathias Kauage and his family, charting Papua New Guinea's changes before and after independence in 1975.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
PJ Anderson, Jacqueline Bishop and Sharon Norwood explore how Jamaican identity is carried and remade through ornament and ceramics across the diaspora.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
First major museum retrospective of Bay Area artist Dewey Crumpler, pairing five decades of paintings with new kinetic installations across all three floors.
de Young Museum
Art, ceremony and land among the Karuk, Yurok, Hupa, Tolowa, Tsnungwe and Wiyot peoples of northwestern California, with new commissions by contemporary artists.
de Young Museum
Bay Area artists working in ceramics, photography and painting treat the surfaces of bodies and objects as sites of identity, especially womanhood.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Los Angeles painter Sarah Cain, a UC Berkeley MFA, improvises a site-specific painted installation across the museum's atrium.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Posters Gvido Augusts designed for Godard's first Berkeley visit in 1968, commissioned by the Pacific Film Archive's Tom Luddy.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Pencil-on-paper drawings by self-described artivist Orlando Smith, chronicling the criminal legal system and abuses of power.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Shepard Fairey's outdoor Frida Kahlo mural, made alongside his Toyroom Gallery show Fractured, on Indiana Street at 1231 25th St.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
Oakland artist Marcel Pardo Ariza's site-specific Art Wall installation pays homage to the art handlers who care for museum collections.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
A yearlong collection show on utopia, drawing on works from many periods and places to imagine spiritual, social and political possibilities.
Legion of Honor
A focused look at À toute épreuve (1958), the Miró and Paul Éluard book for which Miró cut more than 230 woodblocks, the high point of his work as an illustrator.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
A new commission by Pulitzer-winning composer Raven Chacon reimagining the landscapes of Navajo Nation as a speculative future.
Fort Mason Center for Arts & CultureFree
Mural across 18 painted loading docks between Buildings B and C, shifting from sunrise to sunset and sky to sea. Fort Mason's 50th-anniversary commission.
de Young Museum
Nigerian painter Nengi Omuku's first US solo museum show: dreamlike scenes painted on handwoven Yoruba sanyan cloth, alongside works from the arts of Africa collection.
de Young Museum
The biggest reinstallation of the Indigenous American collection in 20 years: four galleries on 'Relationship to Place', developed with Native scholars and communities.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
