Exhibitions in San Francisco

Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)

Oakland artist Stephanie Syjuco's first major hometown show: photographs, collages and installations that cut, crumple and rephotograph US archive images.

CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary ArtsFree

Rayyane Tabet sets his own postcard collection beside the late Jay DeFeo's in an immersive installation of shared images and uncanny cross-generational echoes.

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.

Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)

Emerging artist Tahirah Rasheed uses glass, print and photography to explore survival, care and illumination within Black womanhood.

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.