Exhibitions in San Francisco

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.

Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast

Abstract and landscape paintings cued to the fading Western sky over Los Angeles by Alex Weinstein, at Nancy Toomey Fine Art.

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

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 ProjectFreePast

Chandler Gallery group show of 17 artists on the natural world, from natural-history precision to abstraction, incl. Squeak Carnwath and Tiffany Bozic.

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

Copper-plate etchings of floating ice from Megan Broughton's sailboat residency between Greenland and Iceland, at The San Francisco Arts Education Project.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Asian Art Museum

Balinese sculptures and paintings tell the epic of Garuda, the bird-warrior who became the national symbol of Indonesia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast

Atrium group show with Chris Duncan, Todd Hido, Bessma Kahlaf, Terri Loewenthal, Chris McCaw and Andrew Owen.

Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast

Signs Lindsey White painted, printed or otherwise made in the past year for her exhibitions and gatherings, at Casemore Gallery.

Minnesota Street ProjectPast

di Rosa SF celebrates The Dome, the live-work community Peter Voulkos founded in 1976 in a former dome-shaped factory, with works by founding members and today's artists.

The Walt Disney Family MuseumPast

Disneyland at 70: concept art, designs, costume sketches, hand-drawn maps and rare photos trace how Walt's first park came to be. Curated by Disney Legend Don Hahn.

ExploratoriumPast

Could you survive in space? Playful science, art and hands-on exhibits on space suits, space food, zero gravity and the hunt for alien life, including Suzanne Anker's Astroculture.

Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast

Avatar-artist LaTurbo Avedon curates seven artists, including Arvida Byström and Signe Pierce, on the simulated body, identity and intimacy online since 2009.

Minnesota Street ProjectFreePast

Violist and artist Angie Zheng turns four sound- and print-based projects into a multi-channel listening installation that unsettles composer, performer and audience roles.

Legion of HonorPast

The first major US Etruscans show in two decades: 150+ bronzes, terracottas and gold jewelry, including the Liver of Piacenza, shown outside Italy for the first time.

Letterform ArchivePast

Reading Room pop-up by Radical Characters: 50 international designers and 100+ publications on typography, language and Hanzi in East Asian visual culture. Now by appointment only.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)Past

The story of how Matisse's 1905 portrait of his wife, SFMOMA's own icon, scandalised Paris and ignited the Fauvist colour revolution.

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.

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.

Asian Art MuseumPast

Chinese landscape paintings of rivers and mountains that invite a quiet, spiritual encounter with nature.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.