October 2026
On 23 October the Asian Art Museum brings the nearly 20-foot West Mebon Reclining Vishnu from Cambodia, and the Walt Disney Family Museum opens Eyvind Earle, who styled Sleeping Beauty, a week before Halloween's Aurora costumes. SFMOMA shows RM of BTS's personal collection from the 3rd; Mildred Howard's survey at the Oakland Museum of California closes on the 18th.
Asian Art MuseumOpens 23 October
Southeast Asia's largest ancient bronze, the nearly 20-foot West Mebon Reclining Vishnu, on loan from Cambodia, at its only West Coast stop before it goes home. Few San Francisco apartments have room to lie down that long.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)Opens 3 October
The first exhibition drawn from the personal art collection of RM of BTS, on Floor 7. Entry is by timed ticket.
de Young MuseumUntil 31 January
130 royal treasures and antiquities spanning 3,000 years, lent by Cairo's Egyptian Museum and the Luxor Museum, including the first US showing of finds from the Golden City, which has travelled a long way to reach Golden Gate Park.
The Walt Disney Family MuseumOpens 23 October
Around 200 works by Eyvind Earle, the color stylist who gave Sleeping Beauty its jewel-toned look, following him from his Disney years into his fine art.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)Until 30 May
The first major museum retrospective of Bay Area painter Dewey Crumpler fills all three floors, pairing five decades of paintings with new kinetic installations.
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)Closes 18 October
The first major museum survey of Bay Area artist Mildred Howard: five decades of collage, sculpture and installation on memory and African American identity.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)Until 29 November
Visitors twist and tie pages of The New York Times into Wrenching News, a piece that keeps growing while the show is up. Around it, five decades of Hassinger's sculpture in wire rope, branches and found trash.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)Until 31 January
A uniformed guard stands watch over a US flag in Defending the Flag, a new durational performance. Dread Scott, whose flag-on-the-floor piece drew a rebuke from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, returns to the flag, alongside community-made body prints.
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary ArtsUntil 21 November
Part of RedSkyFalls, Alexandre Estrela's work for Portugal's pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, wired to live seismic data from around the world. San Francisco is one of a handful of earthquake-prone cities hosting it. Free.
Legion of HonorUntil 4 April
A small print from about 1900 shows the Eiffel Tower with a giant Ferris wheel beside it. Nearly 50 photographs from the Legion's own collection, Baldus to Atget and Brassaï, hung inside a building copied from a Paris palace.
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.
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.
Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast
Solo exhibition by San Francisco-based artist Felicia Chiao at Harman Projects (Hashimoto Contemporary).
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Solo exhibition of Martin Malvar's work at Bass & Reiner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast
How a Death Valley desert plant, first sculpted in wire in 1962, became a 35-year motif for Ruth Asawa across wire, paper, plaster, foil, tin and fabric.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)Past
Last chance: walk through Eliasson's arched tunnel of prismatic colour on Floor 5 before it closes on 4 October.
Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast
Abstract and landscape paintings cued to the fading Western sky over Los Angeles by Alex Weinstein, at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.
Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)Past
The first major museum survey of Bay Area artist Mildred Howard: five decades of collage, sculpture and installation exploring memory and African American identity.
Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast
Art of Contemporary Africa shows painters Papytsho Mafolo, Hussein Salim, Pascal Konan and Aza Mansongi, part of Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week.
Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast
Chandler Gallery group show of 17 artists on the natural world, from natural-history precision to abstraction, incl. Squeak Carnwath and Tiffany Bozic.
Asian Art MuseumPast
Chinese landscape paintings of rivers and mountains that invite a quiet, spiritual encounter with nature.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Themes + Projects and Gallery 16 survey Bay Area artist Rex Ray's collages, resin panels and pigment prints from 2000 to 2014.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Eleanor Harwood Gallery marks 20 years with 22 of its artists, including Kira Dominguez Hultgren, Bryson Gill, Carmen McNall and Paul Wackers.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Debut solo show at re.riddle: Isadora Gullov-Singh's acrylic-and-pastel paintings on memory, drawn from childhood in Italy with her father.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Blaise Rosenthal's large multi-canvas Monoliths and small Overpaintings, abstractions shaped by Northern California landscape, at Municipal Bonds.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Six video installations by Sophia Al-Maria, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Beatrice Gibson and Martine Syms, each artist on screen in shifting guises; with KADIST.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Copper-plate etchings of floating ice from Megan Broughton's sailboat residency between Greenland and Iceland, at The San Francisco Arts Education Project.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Atrium retrospective of alumni of Black (Space) Residency, the MSP Studios program for Black Bay Area creatives, curated by Erica Deeman and Trina Michelle Robinson.
Asian Art Museum
A tea-stained watercolour project linking the museum's galleries to overlooked beauty in the cracks, stains and markings of city streets.
Asian Art MuseumFree
Kayan Cheung-Miaw's outdoor mural on the Hyde Street Art Wall sees San Francisco's Chinatown through a child's eyes: noodles, bees, bus drivers and the sound of a gao hu.
Fort Mason Center for Arts & CultureFree
Eight Native American artists in painting, drawing, sculpture, film and photography, centring Indigenous futurity at the U.S. 250th. Building C, Tue–Sat.
Letterform Archive
Reading Room pop-up of 50+ images by designer Martin Venezky, 1990 to now: taped collage assemblages and photographic experiments behind his ornate typographic work.
Minnesota Street ProjectFree
Raymond Meeks photographs provisional sculptures he built from relics in ruined welding and wood shops near Kingston, NY, shot over 18 months, at Casemore Gallery.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
First US retrospective of Chilean feminist artist Lotty Rosenfeld, whose prints, video and interventions contested militarized public space.
Letterform Archive
Main Gallery show marking ten years of the Archive's Type West program: 260+ pieces of student work, from sketches and proofs to finished typefaces from 31 countries.
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary ArtsFree
Justin Caguiat and Rafael Delacruz's first West Coast institutional show: a new film, installation, paintings and prints riffing on Chaplin's Tramp in Oakland.
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary ArtsFree
A multi-part video installation that reacts to live seismic data: animated creatures freeze whenever an earthquake or tremor strikes somewhere on Earth.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
A sweeping survey of the Mexico City photographer's black-and-white images of uncanny scenes, ritual and dreamlike traditions.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
The most significant retrospective of Maren Hassinger, spanning sculpture, performance, video and installation from the early 1970s to today.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
