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Decade-Old Tenderloin Portraits Glow With Multidimensional Light
A decade ago, South African photographer Pieter Hugo came to the Bay Area for a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. He’d been to the city once before, as a teenager, when he had the formative...
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The Bay Area’s First-Ever Black Art Week Is Coming
San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora has had a streak of stellar programming this year that’s included dinners with culinary luminaries, fashion-forward films and a strong solo show from one...
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East Palo Alto’s Hidden Beauty
KQED’s Silicon Valley Unseen is a series of photo essays, original reporting and underreported histories that survey the tech capital’s overlooked communities and subcultures from a local perspective....
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Asian Art Museum Opens a Korean Pop-Culture Bonanza for Fans and Newbies Alike
South Korea’s influence on American popular culture has been evident for a while: Parasite became the first foreign film to win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars; the Biden administration welcomed BTS to...
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Revisit Halloween in 1970s San Francisco With This Photo Book
For over 40 years, a slim book titled Halloween: A Fantasy in Three Acts has been legendary in both art book and photography circles. Initially published in 1981 in an edition of 1,500, the volume of...
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For Mildred Howard, There’s No Time Like the Present
Mildred Howard is up to something. The legendary Bay Area artist, who was born in San Francisco in 1945, has organized three concurrent exhibitions of her work on both sides of the Bay under the title...
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‘Prodigal Daughter’ Beautifully Illuminates One Woman’s Road Less Traveled
“Painting is a ritual to confront the past and heal what is broken,” Mabel Valdiviezo says in the first moments of her film, Prodigal Daughter. “It reveals layers that the camera cannot capture and...
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Patti Smith and Lynn Goldsmith Discuss New Book in Newly Reopened Theater
Without question, Robert Mappelthorpe is the photographer with which poet, writer and musician Patti Smith will always most closely be associated. As his working partner, lover and lifetime confidant,...
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A Palestinian San Francisco Photographer Reflects on a Year of War
A self-portrait by Najib Joe Hakim exploring conflicting symbols of “Palestinian-ness.” (Najib Joe Hakim) The ancient drum beats of Palestinian folk music blared at the California Academy of Sciences...
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Two Artists Answer the ‘Call of the Void’ with Lime-Hued Paintings
It felt appropriate to visit a show titled Call of the Void during an unrelenting heat wave. A deep, dark, cool nothingness was all my reptile brain desired as I walked down an unshaded stretch of...
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A Gazan Photographer Embraces Her Refugee Lens in San Francisco
When she thinks back to her childhood in Gaza in the late ’90s, Lara Aburamadan recalls spending her days hanging out and enjoying food with her family on sandy beaches, swimming in the Mediterranean...
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The Emotional Power of Mary Cassatt’s Magnificent Women and Bored Girls
A world-famous artist in her era, and widely known as both an artistic and a social revolutionary, the American impressionist Mary Cassatt is too often absented from exhibitions in favor of...
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Barry McGee Enters a New Era: ‘It’s a Rebirth, of Some Sort’
Inside Berggruen Gallery, at the opening of his first solo show in San Francisco since 2015, Barry McGee stood against the front wall, surrounded by a crush of 20 people. The gallery’s lights dimmed...
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Workers Unionize at NIAD, Richmond’s Progressive Art Studio
The employees of NIAD Art Center, a Richmond studio serving artists with disabilities, announced Tuesday morning that they will form a union. NIAD Unidad will be affiliated with the American Federation...
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Reintroducing Tamara de Lempicka, the High Priestess of Art Deco
One of the great joys of visiting museum exhibitions, especially retrospectives, is the possibility of discovering something new about an artist you think you know well. (An uncharacteristic plexiglass...
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Artists Pull Human Stories Out of the Archives in Affecting San José Show
In Allegedly the worst is behind us, a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, the 12 included artists, many of them living and working in the Bay Area, use their art as an archive of...
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In Oakland, ‘Artists Against Apartheid’ Build Solidarity With Palestinians
On Tuesday night in Oakland, about 70 artists — mostly in their 20s and 30s, with some as old as 80 — filed into a small storefront near Fruitvale BART. In attendance were Stanford students who had...
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SFMOMA Goes All in For Sports
It’s difficult to suppress a dazed smile as the elevators open on the seventh floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The sensory bombardment is immediate: speakers play the sounds of a...
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Headlands Center for the Arts Announces New Executive Director
In a surprise announcement, Headlands Center for the Arts has named Louisa Gloger as the next executive director of the 42-year-old Marin artist-in-residence program. Gloger, who is currently executive...
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‘Makeshift Memorials’ Solemnly Chronicles Art of the Pandemic Era
Looking back at the past four years is not necessarily something I’m ready to do, and yet it’s exactly what the latest exhibition at Kadist demands. For Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, curators...
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