Since 1966, each fall, families have been cozying up on the couch to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, the classic animated television special with a heartwarming story of hope for a spooky season miracle. So it’s only fitting that Santa Rosa’s Schulz Museum, dedicated to Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, would get a great pumpkin of its own.

On the museum’s upcoming free admission day on Sunday, Oct. 27, visitors can check out the museum’s new, massive 2,301-pound pumpkin, on display in its courtyard, before heading in to see the exhibition Peanuts Evolution: The 1960s, which features several original Great Pumpkin comic strips. (The real-life pumpkin outside recently placed second at the National Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Wheatland, California.)

On Sunday, the Great Pumpkin television special will also screen every half hour in the museum’s theater. Peanuts fans looking to watch it at home can stream it on Apple TV+.

The Schulz Museum has several other exhibitions on view, including Here Come the Beagle Scouts and Bravo, Snoopy! Peanuts and Pawpet Theater, about the Peanuts crew’s outdoor and artistic adventures. On Oct. 28, Halloween programming continues with stories, crafts, trick-or-treating and activities for kids ages 1–5 and their caregivers.

Nearly two dozen artists showed up at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday in matching shirts and sailor hats, determined to make a splash to save their creative home at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. Crying SOS — Save Our Studios — the artists from what was once the largest creative community in the country have a simple request: to fix the roofs over their heads.

Even though the Superfund site has been grappling with the downstream effects of radioactive contamination for decades, the artist collective recently celebrated their 40-year anniversary at the shipyard. More than 200 working artists maintain studios at the nearly 500-acre site, and thousands of visitors pour through the area during the shipyard’s open studios, taking in the fresh air, glittering views and a gantry crane taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Up for vote was an amendment to push out the construction and financing timeline of the Bayview-Hunters Point Redevelopment Plan by 30 years. Also proposed was the transfer of more than 2 million square feet of office and research space from the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard to Candlestick Point, given the ongoing delays associated with the toxic cleanup of the shipyard.

While there are separate plans for the shipyard and Candlestick Point, the two are considered one project under the purview of the developer FivePoint — even as the areas of land, and the communities invested in them, face very different realities.

‘An extremely complicated situation’

Key to the maintenance conundrum for the artists is the complex tangle of associations tied to the shipyard: the U.S. Navy owns the land but leases it to the City of San Francisco, which in turn subleases it to FivePoint (tasked with rehabilitating the property) — who rents the buildings to a group of artist master tenants.

The Commission on Community Investment and Infrastructure (OCII), a successor agency to the city’s controversial Redevelopment Agency, also has oversight over the area’s development.

“It’s an extremely complicated situation,” said Barbara Ockel, the president of the nonprofit Shipyard Trust for the Arts (STAR) that represents the artist collective. “And it leads to a lot of finger pointing.”

The contract with FivePoint contains language stating the master tenants are responsible for maintenance of their buildings, but with rents still at their 1980s rates, there’s not enough funds for major repairs.

“And so the debate starts, where does maintenance end and where does capital improvement begin?” Ockel said. “Everybody would agree that if you have to pay a million dollars for a new roof, that’s not maintenance — that’s an investment.”

Master tenant Julian Billotte could be found on a recent Thursday re-gilding pre-1906 mirrors from the Flood Mansion for their new home at the San Mateo Historical Society. Without the space and low rents of the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, his and many other artists’ work could not continue. He oversees the maintenance of Building 116 on Parcel B but said the rents have only allowed him to make small patches to the roofs when much more substantial repairs are required.

“Nobody’s ever had the rent raised no matter how long they’ve been here,” Billotte said. “Over 25 years, we’ve got people paying what they paid when they got here and we’re committed to maintaining that.” For now, he uses plastic bins along the roofs’ seams to catch water and encourages artists to use tarps to protect their work.

While Billotte said Tuesday during public comment that OCII has made a verbal promise to repair the roof, the artists want an assurance in writing. OCII did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

The artists are seeking more than a weathertight workspace — they want the guarantee they can remain on Parcel B in perpetuity. “We need stability,” Kollmeyer said. “And the assurance we can stay out here.” Kollmeyer and other artists are lobbying for an update to the 25-year-old development plan to include a provision ensuring the parcel remains an ongoing campus for the arts.

Frustrating delays for Bayview residents

Additional changes to the redevelopment plan could derail much-needed and community-supported construction on Candlestick Point (also under FivePoint’s jurisdiction and connected to the future of the shipyard). A written protest of the current plan sent to the Board of Supervisors — not by the shipyard artists — delayed a vote on Tuesday. A final decision on amending the timeline and allocation was pushed to the next full Board of Supervisors meeting on Oct. 29.

While the artists want to preserve the buildings on Parcel B of the shipyard, Bayview residents surrounding Candlestick Park are aching for development after decades of delays. “When it comes to the African American community, it never happens,” said Rev. Arelious Walker during public comment. Another speaker, urging forward progress, invoked the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Pastors, parents, laborers and small-business owners from the Bayview community mostly spoke out in support of the Candlestick Point development, which will employ local contractors, create thousands of jobs and build over 7,200 new homes.

“I’m excited and sad at the same time,” said one speaker, her voice thick with tears. “There’s only 2 or 3% of us left in the city,” she continued, referring to the Black community that has historically been on the losing end of redevelopment. “And we’ve accepted broken promises again and again.”

The artists have also been issued promises, only to watch their creative home stymied by the discovery of radioactive contamination, alleged criminal fraud by engineering firm Tetra Tech and a failed effort to construct a new building of studios on Parcel A. The artists remain on month-to-month rental agreements with the constant fear their spaces may be demolished or repurposed.

“They are talking about erasing us,” said artist Leila Mansur. “Stop breaking our hearts, San Francisco.”

“It will be hard to use this land for other things, so why not protect the artists?” Kollmeyer said. “It could be such a win-win for everyone.”

Richmond artist Marlon Mullen’s colorful, stylized paintings have caught the eye of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which recently announced it will host his first solo museum show. Projects: Marlon Mullen will premiere on Dec. 14, 2024 and remain on view in the museum’s free, street-level Projects gallery through April 20, 2025.

Born in Richmond in 1963, Mullen is self-taught and has worked at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center since 1985. The studio supports artists with developmental disabilities, and shares a mission with sister studios Creative Growth in Oakland and Creativity Explored in San Francisco. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art selected Mullen as a prestigious SECA awardee in 2019; SFMOMA has also acquired several of Mullen’s works for its collection.

Much of Mullen’s recent paintings take inspiration from the art magazines in NIAD’s library. Riffing on their covers, his art about art invites a sense of curiosity and play with its bright colors, surprising details and freehand lettering.

“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said NIAD Executive Director Amanda Eicher in an interview with Artnet. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.”

Mullen’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Atlanta Contemporary, among many other galleries and museums. His MoMA solo show will feature the debut of a new work based on the museum’s 2008 publication, Van Gogh: The Starry Night.

For many San Franciscans, myself included, Marin is a mysterious, majestic place with hidden pockets of culture and community, all nestled in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais. But there’s a rich history of accomplished artists in the area — and a generation on the rise. The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, with a new exhibition space in San Rafael, is aiming to bring North Bay art front and center.

MarinMOCA San Rafael is a satellite location of the Novato museum, which has programmed exhibitions and housed artists’ studios at the former military base of Hamilton Field for nearly two decades, mostly with volunteer labor. The San Rafael space is, for now, just a gallery, on the ground floor of an office building the museum quickly designated as an unmissable art space by painting the façade bright pink. If all goes to plan, San Rafael’s burgeoning Downtown Arts District will likely become MarinMOCA’s full-time home.

“[The museum] has made many attempts to renegotiate its lease with the city of Novato, but at this point we’re realizing that, in terms of our public facing mission, another location is probably better,” says recently appointed MarinMOCA Director Jodi Roberts.

Programming will continue in both locations through at least the end of this year. The museum’s lease in the San Rafael location is good through October 2025, at which point Roberts hopes to have found a larger, permanent home. The museum will remain free and continue its artist membership program after the move. While Roberts’s sights are set on increasing MarinMOCA’s cultural impact, local artists are the key to doing so.

“There are so many artists who have had meaningful, productive periods in the North Bay,” Roberts says. “We want to put those stories out there and develop the history of how the North Bay has been a real touchstone for artists throughout the Bay Area.”

MarinMOCA San Rafael’s inaugural exhibition, Opening the Mountain circles a lineage of North Bay artists. Marin’s history of affordability, its natural spaces and proximity to San Francisco, have inspired multiple generations of artists to make their home there. This range of ages and backgrounds is reflected in the exhibition, from the artists included to the curators behind it. Veteran curator Natasha Boas and recent college graduate Asha McGee selected a refreshing mix of 23 decorated and rising artists for the show, including Adeline Kent, Chris Johanson, Saif Azzuz and Daisy Sheff, all with some connection to Marin.

“Both know this place well enough that they are able to pinpoint a historical moment and understand how that resonates,” Roberts says of the curators.

Many of the young artists come from McGee’s social circle.

“I’ve seen their art grow over the years,” she says. “I grew up seeing my dad [the artist Barry McGee] do shows and always bringing in his community and friends, which influenced me a lot. The idea of bringing everybody up with you and also paying homage to how much your community has affected your work or your life.”

For Boas, the show expands beyond geographical location to encompass that sense of art historical genealogy.

“I really don’t see this as a Marin show,” she says. “All the artists in the show have much larger audiences and geography is not the focal point — it is, rather, the jumping off point. It’s really about a certain kind of art-making, exhibition-making and kind of representation and practice that is tied to a generative community.”

The theme of intergenerational relationships is present throughout.

Anabel de Vries’s suite of black-and-white photographs of maternal care hang opposite Stella Kudritzki pictures of a group of young girls playing and posing for the camera. Alice Shaw’s riffs on Chinese brush painting — photographic prints of flowers on gold leaf — hang beside her mother Martha Shaw’s diffuse landscape paintings. Another direct mother-daughter relationship is present in the inclusion of stylized landscape paintings by McGee’s late mother, Margaret Kilgallen.

Still, the landscape shines as a strong inspiration throughout the show. A pair of Adaline Kent drawings, showing charcoal infinity symbols cascading into waterfalls, flank a Untitled (Mountain Meadow) (all 1944), uniquely colorful and figurative for Kent’s typical drawing style. The artist, who was a mainstay of the interwar San Francisco art scene, spent most of her spare time in the nature of the North Bay. She also had generational ties — the city of Kentfield is named after her family.

Nick Gorham and July Guzman’s more recent oil paintings offer abstract, deeply felt interpretations of the land, evoking a recognizable feeling of the sublime in West Marin’s natural environment. And Ashwini Bhat’s abstract ceramic sculpture, a twisted vessel form, Self Portrait as California Landscape says it all: the landscape is as much a place we inhabit as something that inhabits us.

The exhibition shares its title with a book about a Zen ritual walk around Mount Tamalpais undertaken by Beat Generation poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen in 1965. The show feels like a similar ambulation of the region; it’s a roving survey of all the vantages and vistas the place had to offer, and an opportunity for introspection on that legacy.

For McGee, both the sense of community, and of place, relate to the future as much as to the past and present.

“I think the Bay Area is ripe for the taking right now,” McGee says. “We’re at a point that feels very pivotal. Are we going to pick this community up and say, ‘We’re all together in this and we’re going to restore the Bay Area to what it used to be?’”

Opening the Mountain answers McGee’s question with a resounding yes. At least from the Marin artists. But will the rest of the Bay Area take note of the rumblings from beneath the mountain?

“It’s time for Marin to take its place as a cultural hotspot,” Roberts says. “It’s been that historically, it just hasn’t been recognized — and that’s the role that a cultural institution can play.”

‘Opening the Mountain’ is on view at MarinMOCA San Rafael (1210 Fifth Ave., San Rafael), through Dec. 21, 2024.

There are only a handful of punk logos that have stood the test of time, and they’re almost universally recognized: Black Flag’s bars, Misfits’ Crimson Ghost and Crass’ anti-authority cross.

The last was designed by David King, a British experimental artist, graphic designer and musician. He moved from England to New York City in 1977, before relocating to San Francisco three years later. Here, he made art and zines, performed in bands (including Brain Rust) and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. King died in 2019 at the age of 71, but left a wealth of subversive, era-defining work behind him.

A selection of that work is currently on display at the San Francisco Center for the Book. David King Publications 1977-2019 focuses on the artist’s zine work and, to a lesser degree, his show flyers. King’s work, as curated by Luca Antonucci and Matt Borruso, is consistently imposing, provocative and caustically humorous. Many of his designs also clearly reflect the moment each piece was made. His 1980s work, in particular, makes a mockery of the leaders of the day, including Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Queen Elizabeth II. (One doctored image of the Queen kicking a baby into a manhole is as funny as it is jarring.)

There is, of course, a Crass component within the exhibit. Original stencils hang starkly in frames. One comic book-style panel has the band logo projected into the night sky, like the Bat Signal. Sitting tantalizingly in a display case is even a copy of Christ’s Reality Asylum, the 1977 pamphlet written by Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud that inspired the very first use of the now-legendary anti-authority symbol.

Other ephemera from King’s life includes home photos (of himself, Crass singer Steve Ignorant and a series of masked figures) and book covers designed by the artist, including the sci-fi paperback Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. There are a couple of curious collages too — one now-ironic piece titled 21st Century Lower Manhattan, depicts the New York skyline awash with World Trade Center towers. (A demonstration that even the sharpest social critics can’t predict everything.)

King was prolific to a point that only the hugest of exhibitions could ever capture the breadth of what he created in his lifetime. David King Publications 1977-2019 can only act as a sort of tasting menu — but oh, what a delicious introduction it is.

‘David King Publications 1977-2019’ is on display now through Dec. 22, 2024 at San Francisco Center for the Book (375 Rhode Island Street). The exhibition’s opening party is on Oct. 25, 2024 at 6 p.m.

An accompanying book, ‘David King Publications 1977–2019’ will be available in November via Colpa Press and San Francisco Center for the Book.

Every morning, when Léonie Guyer enters her studio, she tries to trick herself.

“Before I cross the threshold,” she says excitedly, her face animated by the thought, “I try to trick myself into thinking that I’ve never been there before. So, when I first see the work inside, I don’t think of it as my work. It’s just the work, and every time I’m seeing it, it’s the first time.”

Guyer’s paintings require tremendous sensitivity before they can come into existence. The shapes that she captures in her works feel preexistent, more like forms she’s been patiently waiting to encounter than representations or expressions of inner thoughts.

Three and Three and One, Guyer’s show at House of Seiko, is made up of three watercolors, three paintings on marble and a modest wall drawing painted on-site. The last feels the most alive, perhaps because its simple ovular shape is rendered in dappled shades of crimson. The gentle painting, semi-opaque against the gallery’s wall, seems to pull texture up into its body, drawing out the qualities of wood still preserved beneath the white paint.

Material histories

There is a bravery to the simplicity of Guyer’s paintings. Each appears to use only a single color; the strokes she makes on her chosen “canvases” are humble in size. The three watercolors on display, gray with oscillating warm and cold tones, enclose diluted expanses of color in tenuous outlines. Their boundaries are both discrete and gentle, vaguely reminiscent of a shark sack, the semi-translucent rectangular capsule that provides a shell for a shark’s embryo. In one watercolor, the form comes to a sharp horn on the side.

Her compositions are intimately bound with the material on which she paints. The paper for the watercolors, for example, lived in her studio for 21 years before she felt ready to mark it. During those years, the material wasn’t forgotten, but acted as an ever-present companion, occupying its place in the room as a silent collaborator. As if speaking about an old friend, Guyer happily recounts first encountering the double weight Indian jute paper at the art store New York Central in the early 2000s. With admiration, she describes the traditional process of shaping and drying it.

Histories like these are nestled into Guyer’s practice. And San Francisco, Guyer’s home of nearly 50 years, is foundational to her deceptively minimalist pieces. Since moving from Long Island to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Guyer has been a stalwart Bay Area community member.

‘Lines like writing’

While she adamantly identifies as a painter, poetry plays a central role for the artist. She’s often provided a visual counterpart to the work poets do with words: freeing the image from the burden of narrative. In 2011, she collaborated with Bill Berkson, matching drawings to his monograph Not An Exit, put out by Jungle Garden Press.

At House of Seiko, the works on marble, monochromatic paintings crisp against the stone’s mottled grays, can be understood in relation to another community close to Guyer’s heart. Though made in 2024, the marble pieces remind me of Gift, a 2006 site-based exhibition in which Guyer painted her signature forms on the top floor of a Shaker building, the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop in New Lebanon, New York.

Guyer first encountered Shaker gift drawings at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, during a sweeping group show they’d hung salon-style. The gift drawing was high, high on the wall and semi-obscured by its position. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalls, “the lines look like writing. I could hardly tell what it looked like, but I felt the radiation off the page. It was humming.”

When she inquired about the piece, the gallery assistant demurred, chancing that the origins were totally unknown. As this was well before the internet, the encounter lived inside the artist’s mind for a long time, tenured in memory, until New York City’s Drawing Center mounted Heavenly Visions, a show of gift drawings and gift songs, in 2001.

Years after that, the artist Sarah Cain, a student of Guyer’s at SFAI, recognized the images in a lecture and connected Guyer with the Shaker Museum, where Cain’s mother coincidentally worked. The experience with the Shaker aesthetic became so important to her practice that when the Wattis Institute mounted form in the realm of, a 2018 exhibition of Guyer’s work, they even procured a few actual gift drawings for an introductory vitrine.

The decorative, handmade gift drawings present language more for its aesthetic qualities than for its meaning. They remind me of how talking is so often less about communicating than keeping someone company. Easy, meaningless chatter does the difficult work of assuring someone “Yes, I am here, I am with you. I’m listening.” The Shaker gift drawings are like that: illustrations of small talk replete in its generosity.

Guyer’s paintings don’t talk, but they do populate space emphatically enough to offer a kind of companionship. The Susan Howe poems included in a booklet made for the House of Seiko show seem to vibrate in agreement.

Ancient symbols

Another touchstone for the artist is the Mycenean figurines of ancient Greece. These relics’ simple shapes adhere to a few stylistic properties. The Mycenean bird goddess, for example, always has a long stem and a small squat face that sits above a flattened ceramic circle gesturing at wings.

There’s one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Guyer visits often, sometimes using her recent status as a Guggenheim Fellow to access the exhibition in the off-hours. Its body is striped with simple brown paint, and defined by bowing curvature that leaves a trace of the hands that molded its shape, lending the ceramic an organic, living quality.

Much like her own work, the Mycenean bird goddesses feel symbolic; they adhere to their own secret shorthand. Both her work and the figurines jump out of time, essential and audacious, refusing to be pinned to any specific context. Instead, they feel constantly at home in the present, almost already familiar to the viewer.

“Form has a meaning — but it is a meaning entirely its own,” writes the 20th-century art historian Henri Focillon in The Life of Forms in Art, a foundational text for Guyer that shines a specific light on her practice.

Bodies of pure, essential feeling

The artist’s oblique, careful paintings turn simple shapes into bodies of pure, essential feeling. Her forms share a consistent style, patterned by their own hidden rules. I offer these considerations of gift drawings and Mycenean figures as just one way to look through Guyer’s works at the interior logic of the universe from which they spring.

The imagist poet H.D. says we must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision. We must begin with the sympathy of thought. This intimacy feels alive in Guyer’s work. Each piece is nonrepresentational, it does not point away, or towards something else, but instead pulls the viewer inwards — towards itself, closer.

The vitality of Guyer’s work resists interpretation. In this way, her paintings offer the viewer a new encounter, every time.

‘Three and Three and One’ is on view at House of Seiko (3109 22nd St., San Francisco).

Despite appearing like a fairly straightforward Vallejo storefront, a few clues hint at Personal Space’s mutability. There’s even a “sign,” if you could call it that, mounted to the edge of the building. For the duration Slipper, it’s a halftone-dotted black-and-white image of something involving a hand.

Distortion is a perfect visual announcement for the current show, curated by the art space’s founder and director, Lisa Rybovich Crallé. Since Personal Space opened in July 2023, Crallé and guest curators have organized eight group shows, bringing together local, national and international artists, commissioning writing and editions, and hosting some of the best-attended openings in recent Bay Area history.

If these presentations have shared a hallmark, it’s an embrace of texture and material experimentation. Any given exhibition might contain paintings, yes, but there’s also a possibility of objects cast in oozy resin hanging on the gallery walls. The most recognizable objects in Slipper are a pair of framed drawings, but what they depict … well, that’s up for interpretation.

In a show about slipperiness, a certain amount of horizontality is expected. Suitably, Erik Frydenborg’s Nonnnecenonnn, the first piece to greet visitors’ eyes, is a stretched-out sculpture of basswood, acrylic and sand. Curves and painted hatch marks hint at Frydenborg’s source material, an archive of infographics and diagrams from a bygone era. What at first glance looks like digital skew is, up close, delightfully tangible, with a rough texture running down the sculpture’s black-painted sides.

The horizon line continues with Elina Vainio’s And stones only breathe once, a flat oblong of sand on the gallery’s floor that contains delicate lines of weighted cord camouflaged within it. From the corner through Frydenborg’s piece, a clear line of sight to Kari Cholnoky’s wall-mounted paper-pulp sculptures: spiky objects made ominous by fluorescent red paint and the attachment of tiny, menacing images.

When we encounter indecipherable things, or, as Slipper artist Albert Herter puts it, objects “that cannot be fully accounted for,” multiple pathways emerge. We can cocoon ourselves against intrusion, which Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Sound Blanket No. 10 (psychically) welcomes us to do. The massive “fur” coat, made of hand-felted wool and human and synthetic hair, is a looming note of verticality in this very horizontal front room.

We can strain for comprehension, suggested by Catalina Ouyang’s trio of elegantly carved stone ears. Or, a third option: lean into the dissonance and chaos, captured by Herter’s William T. Wiley-esque drawings of two figures pontificating in a frenetic landscape.

Sitting with the weirdness is the modus operandi of the exhibition’s second room, a smaller presentation of work by sculptor and video artist David Bayus, ceramic installations by Ximaps Dong and a second photographic print from Lemia Monet Bodden, also responsible for the exterior “sign.”

In a mix of live action and computer generated imagery, Bayus’ Sessions 1 & 2 begins with a robotic voice asking a pair of filthy arms, “Tell me, why did you create this? What does it mean to you?” A 27-minute video spins out from there, full of meticulously rendered machinery, unsettling sound bites, cowboy iconography and the artist posed as a grimy caveman, subject to an unknown scientific experiment.

Dong’s combination of ceramics, green plastic netting and steel bars fit right alongside this fleshy yet machine vision of the future. Despite its cheerful title, Caught The Catches, Yay looks like something straight out of David Cronengberg’s eXistenZ (a horror film that features a mutant fish farm and plenty of bony gristle).

In a moment of mass uncertainty (I write this on Nov. 5, as Americans cast their ballots), Slipper reminds us that uncertainty is now a constant state. The artworks included may have achieved a relatively fixed form, but they are momentary pauses in a chain of events: captured distortions that produce a rippling effect, a frisson, on their subsequent audiences. When everything is slippery and everything is mutable (including, unfortunately, facts), some combination of cocooning, hard listening and sitting with the disquiet will be the only way through.

‘Slipper’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Nov. 24, 2024.

The NBA season is in full swing, and with a 7-1 record, the Golden State Warriors are balling.

As the Bay Area prepares to host the NBA All-Star game in February, and with the WNBA’s latest expansion team the Golden State Valkyries set to debut in May, it’s a good time to be a local hoops fan.

That is, unless you’re a big Klay Thompson fan. But don’t worry. After his sign-and-trade deal this past off-season, the beloved former Golden State Warriors shooting guard makes his return to the Bay as a member of the Dallas Mavericks to play the Warriors on Nov. 12.

Amidst the mixed emotions, there’s no denying that Captain Klay played a huge part in the Dubs dynasty that brought about four championship titles over the past decade.

To recognize that fact ahead of the splash brother reunion, Oakland’s SoleSpace — a sneaker store and creative lab — hosts a weekend-long art tribute to Klay Thompson called Klay Area.

Co-coordinated by SoleSpace owner Jeff Perlstein and artist Jonathan Chan, the event will feature visual art pieces paying homage to Thompson, who holds the NBA record for points scored in a single quarter (37) and the most three-pointers made in a game (14).

Works from Kaitlyn Joe-Johnson, Shomari Smith, Jason Wong, Ray Yuen, Joel Rebello and more will be on display inside of the building on 9th Street in Old Oakland. Bright illustrations, creative remixes of images from popular culture and a dig at Klay’s comedic time in China are among the pieces included.

‘Klay Area,’ an all-ages exhibition, opens Friday, Nov. 8, and runs through Saturday and Sunday. Entry is donation-based. For more details check SoleSpace’s Instagram. 

There’s no way to sugar-coat it: here in the Bay Area this week, a lot of people are holed up, feeling despair at another Trump presidency and doomscrolling on their phones.

Some of the more introverted among us prefer to stay home, and that’s fine. But man, there is no feeling so refreshing as getting outside and being among others, many of whom are probably feeling just the same as you.

Here’s a quick list of 25 outdoor events, concerts, exhibitions and more, all offering company or community, and all happening this weekend.

Take a Hike
Not to be all “touch grass,” but c’mon, you already know that going on a hike is helpful for anxiety. Call up that friend you haven’t seen in a while and consult our guide 12 Bay Area Hikes and Nature Spots for Escaping the Election This Week.

Opening Nov. 7, 6–8 p.m.: Troy Lamarr Chew II at Altman Siegel
The former Bay Area artist returns with a solo show of portraits that depict people as glassy, translucent outlines (à la The Secret World of Alex Mack), underscoring their “invisibility” in contemporary society.

Grab a slice at the new Golden Boy Pizza
Everyone’s favorite San Francisco square slice shop just opened a brand new location. Golden Boy’s long-awaited Sunset location is slinging the same crunchy-bottomed, idiosyncratic pizzas that have been locally beloved since 1978, for takeout only. (Or you can, of course, always opt to head back to the North Beach original.)

Opening Nov. 8: ‘The Piano Lesson’
Based on the recent Broadway production, this film version of August Wilson’s award-winning play should be excellent. With a cast including Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington, it’s been getting good reviews.

Opening Nov. 8: ‘Heretic’
There are those of us who can turn our brains off by watching Hugh Grant being dashing in rom-coms like Notting Hill, and there are those of us who would rather see him cardigan-clad, chilling and chattering about religion in this new horror from A24. Heretic will keep your nerves and brain in high gear for its unnerving entirety.

Nov. 8–10: Klay Thompson Art Show at SoleSpace in Oakland
The great Splash Brother makes his return to the Bay Area this weekend in — sigh — a Mavericks uniform. Before he plays against his former team, this sneaker shop and creative space hosts an art show dedicated to the beloved ex-Warriors player.

‘David King Publications 1977–2019’ at San Francisco Center for the Book
Best known for designing the logo for punk band Crass, artist David King also illustrated zines and flyers, many of which make up this exhibit. In her review, Rae Alexandra said it “can only act as a sort of tasting menu — but oh, what a delicious introduction it is.”

Buy a whole Malaysian durian at Liu Shang Pin
Because surely there’s someone in your life who would feel comforted by some ripe, pungent tropical fruit. And if so, this new durian shop in Richmond is the swankiest spot to get your stink on.

Opening Nov. 8: ‘Born of the Bear Dance: Dugan Aguilar’s Photographs of Native California’ at the Oakland Museum of California
This show of photographs by Dugan Aguilar (just a fraction of the museum’s recently acquired collection of the late artist’s personal archive) documents the vibrancy of Native life in the state between 1982 to 2018.

Nov. 8: Oakland Symphony’s ‘Two Black Churches + Carmina Burana’ at the Paramount Theatre
New music director Kedrick Armstrong leads the Oakland Symphony in his second program, featuring two pieces from living composer Shawn Okpebholo. (A post-election note, presented without comment: one of the first sections of Orff’s Carmina Burana is titled “I lament the wounds that fortune deals.”)

Nov. 8: Chinatown Night Market
Friday nights in San Francisco Chinatown are never as packed and lively as they are during this monthly night market — and this edition will be the last market of the year. Come early to avoid the longest lines, and enjoy the dim sum and boba stands, cultural performances and fun, family-friendly atmosphere. (5:30–9 p.m. on Grant Avenue, b/w Sacramento and Jackson)

Nov. 9: Cereal Cinema at Oakland’s New Parkway
Nostalgia is comforting, so mentally travel back to your childhood (and take your own kids with you, if you have them) to Cereal Cinema. The New Parkway Theater’s Saturday morning screening of classic cartoons is accompanied by — what else? — all-you-can-eat cereal. The retro fun starts at 10:30 a.m.

Visit a brand new museum: MarinMOCA San Rafael
In this expansion beyond their Novato home base, MarinMOCA has curated an inaugural, intergenerational show that celebrates the exceptional art made in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais.

Nov. 9: ‘Dahomey’ opens at the Roxie, San Francisco
Mati Diop’s followup to her narrative film Atlantics follows 26 statues and cultural objects on their repatriation journey from France to Benin. Our film critic calls it an “unexpectedly inspiring documentary” that “movingly captures the immediacy of art in contemporary life.”

Nov. 9, 12–4 p.m.: Chinatown Ross Alley Zine Festival, San Francisco
Check out work by 10 local publishers and 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Hotam Press (all the way from Vancouver) in this afternoon-long event filled with art, zines, books and other cultural goodies.

Nov. 9: Afrolicious at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell, San Francisco
Afrolicious always brings a dance party, and Saturday should be no exception in this, the final concert in the SF Live series. The Golden Gate Park bandshell sits right between the de Young and the California Academy of Sciences — two places to consider visiting to make a day of it. Los Calderones open.

Nov. 9: White Crate Anniversary Party at El Rio, San Francisco
Picking up where the Bay Bridged left off, White Crate is a music site covering Bay Area indie music and beyond. Their fourth anniversary party at El Rio features bands Sour Widows, Tony Jay, Pocket Full of Crumbs and Margot James.

Nov. 9: ‘HUQ: I Seek No Favor’ at San Francisco’s Root Division
If solidarity is what you seek this weekend, consider joining Root Division on Saturday for the opening reception of this exhibit that brings together more than 100 artists and writers to collectively respond to the impact of 2022’s Dobbs decision on reproductive rights. ‘Huq’ is an Urdu/Arabic word that means both ‘rights’ and ‘truth.’

Nov. 9–10: San Francisco International Hip-Hop Dance Fest
Forget breakdancing in the Olympics. As part of San Francisco Hip-Hop Month, this three-day fest brings dance troupes from all over the world together to battle for cash prizes.

Nov. 9–10: Lydia Lunch’s ‘Verbal Burlesque’ at the Great American Music Hall in SF and the Ivy Room in Albany
On any given day, Lydia Lunch’s provocative observations about herself, her life and the world around her are primed to provide solid distractions. This weekend she’s upping the ante with two spoken word sets of exclusively raunchy material. Lunch will perform a matinee show in San Francisco on Saturday and another in Albany on Sunday.

Nov. 10–11: Sunami at the San Jose Civic Auditorium and Berkeley’s 924 Gilman
Sometimes you just gotta get mad. Enter Sunami, one of the Bay Area’s best and most aggressive hardcore bands, known for their crowd’s insane pits. If slamming your body against hundreds of others is your preferred method of catharsis, this is the show for you.

Nov. 10, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.: ‘Slipper’ at Personal Space, Vallejo
The artist-run space packs plenty of art viewing into its small footprint, bringing together a group of artists who make objects that slip between registers: flesh and machine, digital and handmade, 2D and 3D. Also: a giant “fur” coat made, in part, from human hair!

Nov. 11: The Sound Healing Symphony at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco
If you need to simply chill out this weekend — but among others — the Sound Healing Symphony uses gongs, crystal bowls, vibraphone and didgeridoo to help attendees at scenic Grace Cathedral “go beyond the veil in a celebration of unity.”

Nov. 11: Blood Incantation at Cornerstone, Berkeley
How did this proggy metal band behind the landmark album Hidden History of the Human Race kick things up a notch this year? With an even more complex, dizzying outing, Absolute Elsewhere: a collision of death metal and krautrock.

Through Nov. 24: A Chuck Sperry Retrospective at the Haight Street Art Center, SF
Sperry’s flower-power-infused visions of beauty are always a colorful shot of much-needed dopamine. The Haight Street Art Center is currently displaying a collection of the San Francisco artist’s silkscreen prints, rock posters and tapestries stretching across his 40-year career.

When the art community bid adieu to the Wattis Institute’s decade-long home on Kansas Street earlier this year, I was heartbroken. It had been a good run of shows at the California College of the Arts’ exhibition space and research institute, as quiet and reflective as a selection of gelatin silver prints by Hervé Guibert and as boisterous and experimental as a three-part deep-dive into the relationship between music and visual art.

I loved the Wattis for bringing ambitious programming to a location a bit off the beaten path. It was a hidden gem in the no-man’s land between the Mission and the Dogpatch.

Now, the Wattis has reopened, smack in the middle of CCA’s newly unified campus in San Francisco’s Design District. (The school closed its storied Oakland campus in 2022.) Though the campus opening coincides with the recent announcement of a $20 million deficit, the new buildings are an impressive network of studios and classrooms, with the Wattis overlooking rooftop gardens and an amphitheater.

The Wattis is also under new leadership, with longtime director Anthony Huberman passing the torch to Daisy Nam, who comes to San Francisco by way of Ballroom Marfa and Harvard’s Carpenter Center.

So what better way is there to inaugurate the Wattis Institute’s new home than with an exhibition tapping artists with Bay Area ties whose work examines the concept of place?

All This Soft Wild Buzzing, curated by Deputy Director and Director of Programs Jeanne Gerrity, features artists re-evaluating and re-mixing the legacy of landscape art. With particular attention to the American West, the show confronts and counters historical associations with Manifest Destiny that once undergirded the colonial framework of the landscape genre.

The group show features nine artists, including CCA alumni Saif Azzuz, Teresa Baker, Christopher Robin Duncan, Bessma Khalaf and Dionne Lee, alongside Nicki Green, Young Suh, Stephanie Syjuco and Zekarias Musele Thompson, working across disciplines that include sculpture, painting, installation and video.

True to Gerrity’s vision, each artist takes a different, unorthodox approach to landscape art. You won’t see pastoral paintings or panoramic photographs here. Instead, it all feels more hands-on: not exalting the sublime from a reverent, if safe, distance but instead wading in up to the neck and getting hands dirty. These artists are exploring nature with a sensibility that foregrounds collaboration and reciprocity.

Khalaf’s are some of the most traditional landscapes in the show — at least at a glance, they appear to be. The black-and-white photographs are actually pictures of pictures sourced from magazines and books, which Khalaf photographs after partially burning them. Similarly, Suh’s color photos of the mechanizations of environmental disaster might qualify as agrarian landscapes — if it weren’t for the figures of firefighters trawling like ants across the scorched earth. Both artists play in the space between beauty and destruction, between nature’s course and the human intervention that both interrupts and accelerates it.

Lee, who recently exhibited in the Whitney Biennial, contributes a multichannel video installation of footage shot in and about the American Southwest. Grayscale landscapes are spliced with fragments of Bureau of Land Management signage at the entrance to national parks admonishing viewers to “Notice: You are on federal lands,” while Lee reads excerpts from “Observations on the Ground” by Mary Ruefle. Here, nature is all cerebral experience: a navigation not of the land itself but the human impositions that govern it.

In a more direct engagement with nature, Duncan employed a photogram process to treat fabric he then exposed to sunlight on the rooftop of the old Wattis location. The finished piece acts as both a collaboration with nature and a relic of the venue’s history of place. Syjuco, in turn, has used fabric to activate the new gallery, draping curtains across the exterior that feature reinterpretations of American landscape painter Albert Bierstadt’s 19th-nineteenth century lithograph prints.

Similar outdoor activations will be a mainstay of future exhibitions, as well as special commissions that take advantage of the Wattis’ proximity to CCA’s fabrication studios. And while the new location certainly opens the doors for certain possibilities, it also closes doors to others. Because while All This Soft Wild Buzzing explores the expanse of nature, spilling into the school’s outdoor spaces, that sprawl feels out of necessity rather than curatorial panache.

The old Wattis boasted a larger square footage, much higher ceilings and an open floor plan that could accommodate a variety of curatorial visions. It was expansive, pregnant with possibility. There’s something about the Wattis’ new home that feels limiting.

Maybe it’s the separation of the space’s two discrete galleries by the narrow hallway accommodating an elevator shaft. Maybe it’s the fact that three of the gallery’s walls are made of glass, restricting the ability to display wall-hanging artworks. Maybe it’s the on-campus nature itself that feels claustrophobic (though there is potential for commingling between the student body and the larger Bay Area art scene).

While the Wattis’ inaugural show feels like a celebration of Bay Area art and landscape, unified by a strong curatorial vision, I keep thinking how it could have been better served in the old space, with more room to unfold both in situ and within the community. The old Wattis had a decade to explore the space it occupied. It remains to be seen how the Wattis team plays within, and expands beyond, its current confines.

‘All This Soft Wild Buzzing’ is on view at the Wattis Institute (145 Hooper St., San Francisco), through Dec. 14, 2024.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the California Theater in Berkeley, which closed in 2020.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the United Artists theater in Berkeley (“the UA”), which closed in 2023.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the Pussycat Theater in Oakland, which showed adult films before it closed in 1989.

Who could forget the pussy hats, the colorful protest banners, the nude statues and subversive murals of the first Trump administration?

Voters, apparently.

Despite a surge in art-as-resistance eight years ago — hailed as crucial in the fight to defeat Trump once and for all — America is back where it started in 2016, give or take a few racist marches, abortion bans and felony counts.

And while the stakes for the future of the country are unquestionably higher this time around, artist reaction has been conspicuously subdued. Not only are activists organizing far fewer protests, there’s noticeably less anti-Trump art. Yes, even in the Bay Area.

How could that be? Well, it depends on who you ask.

“It feels to me like everyone just got wiped out,” said Brent Lindsay, artistic director of the Imaginists Theatre Collective in Santa Rosa, of the relative quiet from artists, post-election. “Everyone’s just — I don’t know about retreating, but everyone’s sort of going deep. Having to. And I don’t know what’s on the other side of that.”

A time of reorientation

Lindsay is no stranger to explicitly political art. In 2017, the Imaginists presented Stop That Show!, a bicycle-powered, bilingual outdoor satire squarely aimed at the Trump White House. Lindsay played “President Corn,” in a disheveled blonde wig and Russian-branded garb.

“It was good in that we all needed to find joy in some darkness, and we all needed to find a way out, shake it off, be entertained,” Lindsay said, acknowledging that the show was more a balm than a weapon of resistance.

No one can predict exactly what the next four years will bring from the arts sector. But Lindsay believes that alongside explicitly political art, the world may see more politically informed work based in storytelling and emotional resonance.

“You need both,” Lindsay said. “We need the bombastic, the in-your-face, the revolutionary. And this may be a silly analogy, but we need the bunny slope. Because we need new people coming and trying it, and working their way up.”

At Oaklandside’s Culture Makers panel on Nov. 14, comedian W. Kamau Bell, who endorsed Kamala Harris, was optimistic about the next era of direct political art.

“There’s going to be a type of artist now who’s going to be much more clear than they were in the past,” Bell said. “It’s an invitation to be much more clear on what the message is, what your goals are, to have art that actually points towards the change. I think it’s going to be a wave of really classic-era, political [art] — the right side of propaganda, pointing to the right side of history.”

Bell’s friend and colleague Favianna Rodriguez is the founder of the Center for Cultural Power, an organization that supports artists and arms people with artistic tools for resistance. In 2017, in opposition to Trump’s Muslim ban, Rodriguez’s series Migration Is Beautiful surged in visibility. Climate justice and reproductive rights have also been prominent themes in her work.

“I have seen both a moment of reflection, and a moment of reorientation,” Rodriguez said of the weeks following the election. “Our response as artists is going to take some time for us to get organized. But I do trust that artists are going to rise up and create work, and be angry and bold.”

Artists, Rodriguez asserts, have the power to change cultural narratives, which in turn shape political narratives.

“We can show the humanity,” she says. “We can help normalize things that were once seen as rare. We can help tell human stories that move people’s hearts.”

‘Not just an attack against Trump’

Pianist, hip-hop artist and member of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Commission Kev Choice says he’s angry and disappointed about Trump winning the presidency. He’s also contending with how many in his community — people who care about social justice and want an end to U.S. military aid to Israel — disengaged from the election.

He sees a disillusionment with the Democratic party’s role in the devastation in Gaza, as well as with the two-party system. Choice was just as disappointed with Trump’s victory as he was with progressive propositions, like rent control, failing in California.

“I’ve been sitting with how to address it on all fronts, not just an attack against Trump, but just our general engagement in politics and how we can be more impactful — and have just honest conversations about what it means to even be engaged,” he says.

Choice says he’s working on a song that airs out his community’s disappointment and grief over the election results, but he’s also looking beyond music. “Music is one thing, but supporting grassroots organizations to get people to register to vote, who will get people to campaign for certain measures or props — the day to day things that it takes to win a campaign,” he says. “It’s not always the flashy notoriety, like being on TV or releasing a song. It’s phone banking, canvassing, calling, traveling to other areas — and also bringing up those issues constantly in the art that we create.”

Filmmaker Josh Healey has advocated for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza with his podcast, Friday Night Semites, and organizing with Jewish Voice for Peace and beyond. His work, including the comedy series The North Pole, has also addressed class issues such as gentrification.

“I think the next couple of years we are going to see — and some of the people in this room are going to make — some of the dopest and most powerful art we’ve seen,” Healey said at Oaklandside’s Culture Makers panel.

“Where I’m at as a filmmaker is not just ‘fuck Trump’ and whatever local billionaires are running these campaigns,” he continued, “but also, Hollywood is done. And I’m ready to actually celebrate that. And what I mean by that is not the death of filmmaking, but the death of capitalist, consumerist — the normalization. So many of the stories of what is normalized comes from arts and culture. And so that is my responsibility, and our responsibility.”

Artists shifting to the right

Supporting Trump was more taboo among artists during his first administration, but with rappers like Kanye West, Sexyy Red, Kodak Black and Azealia Banks backing Trump, some observers see a rightward turn in the entertainment industry.

At the Culture Makers panel, hip-hop artist and organizer Maddy Clifford, who campaigns for student debt abolition with Debt Collective, talked about this shift.

“I think a lot of the country will go to the right, let’s be honest about that,” said Clifford, who has contributed to KQED as a cultural critic. “And so it’s going to be more important than ever for us to be really righteous and really stand in our solid values, because there’s going to be a lot of pressure to basically sell out, straight up.”

Clifford looked beyond Trump’s candidacy — which made gains with young men — and pointed towards conservative trends in culture, name-checking social media movements that promote conservative gender roles and normalize misogyny. “People are like, ‘How did this happen?’” she said. “Well, what about trad wife content? What about the manosphere? This has been happening for a long time.”

Déjà vu

”We’ve been here before,” says Angela Hennessy, an Oakland visual artist and California College of the Arts professor. Hennessy, whose work will be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the 2024 SECA Art Award Exhibition, says this is déjà vu.

She’s more surprised that people are surprised. “This is America,” Hennessy wrote in an email to KQED.

Hennessy, a survivor of gun violence, uses hair weaving and braiding in her artwork as she navigates the connections between loss and liberation, death and despair, grieving and growing. She says that given her subject matter, her art has always political. And in this moment, Hennessy wrote, “My work can be seen as responding to the death machine that is our country.”

Hennessy asks people to read beyond the popular Toni Morrison quote, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” and see that the late author wanted people to make the connection between chaos and the potential of art as a kind of wisdom.

In this moment, “the opportunity,” Hennessy wrote, “is to be more brave, more unapologetic and articulate in knowing what we know. To make art, music, poetry, etc. as if something was at stake.”

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is the UC Theatre in Berkeley, which is now a live music venue.

This week, KQED is proud to present Movie Theaters We Have Lost by Briana Loewinsohn, a cartoonist, teacher and author of the upcoming graphic memoir Raised By Ghosts, about growing up in the East Bay.

At a time of unprecedented movie theater closures, Briana illustrates her memories of shuttered East Bay theaters, and the ways they adorned our lives. Today’s installment is The Parkway in Oakland, which closed in 2009 (and was reborn three years later in a new location).

An energetic array of colors greets visitors walking through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition Amy Sherald: American Sublime. From mint greens to velvet lavenders and canary yellows, these are colors you’ve seen before — except not quite like this.

Sherald mixes her individual variants of these hues and carefully catalogs them for future use; her color choices imbue her dazzling paintings with radiance and freshness. She applies contrasting colors with precision. Solid backgrounds make the memorable wardrobes of her subjects pop out vividly, and through her careful arrangement of forms and shapes, Sherald makes each of her portraits distinctive and layered, indicating intricate narratives within.

From the opening, massive triptych Ecclesia (The Meeting of Inheritance and Horizons), the SFMOMA show captures a feeling of Italian Renaissance art. Part of that comes from Sherald’s genius for figuration and detail, bringing to mind the old masters, and part of it is the simplicity and uniformity with which she poses her subjects and arranges her spaces. Sherald’s typical portrait is head-on, from the knees up against a solid background. In less able hands these galleries might easily fall into a dull ubiquity, but here the effect is one of abundance and endless, forking storylines.

“Ecclesia,” a word dating back to ancient Athenian democracy and meaning “a gathering of those summoned,” is a fitting opening gesture for American Sublime. Sherald has explained that her purpose as an artist is to help give Black people their place within the collective consciousness of figures and narratives built up by artists over the centuries. This show summons the many inhabitants of her artistic vocation to see what their gathered presence has to tell us — and what they have to say to one another.

Sherald tends to work roughly on a 1-to-1 scale with the human body, although she is not shy about painting much more monumental figures (many works in this show come in at double that size). In any one gallery, the scale shifts from intimacy to majesty.

At the beginning of the show, Welfare Queen depicts an impressive, life-sized woman ironically wearing a crown, an empire-waist dress and a sash; at the other end of the room, For Love, and for Country stands up like a billboard. This enormous, iconic re-imagining of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph V-J Day in Times Square, replaces the original photo’s heterosexual, white couple with two Black sailors kissing.

For Love, and for Country is something of an outlier, as Sherald’s work rarely references the exterior world so directly, even when she is working with highly politicized subjects. One of the distinctive things about this show is how largely ahistorical her paintings feel, even as her subjects’ gestures, wardrobes, and expressions point toward larger social narratives (as do the poetic titles that Sherald gives to her works).

Most portraits have backdrops of little more than color and texture, and even subjects who are more situated are seen amid relatively de-politicized objects like a beach umbrella, a tractor, a slide or a doorway.

It’s interesting, then, to see how Sherald’s approach works when applied to individuals of great political import. If you know anything about Sherald, it’s probably either that she made the official portrait for Michelle Obama while she was first lady, or that her portrait of Breonna Taylor was on the cover of Vanity Fair in the summer of 2020, when COVID lockdowns and uprisings over police brutality seized America’s collective focus.

Show curator Sarah Roberts has been thoughtful in how she has placed these most famous paintings. Obama resides alone in a small alcove behind a freestanding wall, and Taylor prominently inhabits a small gallery where an unobtrusive seat allows for extended contemplation.

Each portrait rewards a patient, supple eye — Obama sits regally before a powder-blue background, the long, flowing skirt of her dress (a work of art itself) forming a kind of pedestal for her arms and torso. The effect is one of coiled strength, intensity mixed with a leonine repose.

Taylor also inhabits a light blue setting, although hers is much more saturated — the blue of a glorious summer afternoon — and unlike Obama she stands, hand perched on her waist, the skirt of her dress dancing around her thighs. The pose might be playful or even flirtatious, except for the look in her eyes, which expresses a weariness far beyond her 26 years.

Opposite Taylor stands the very large A Midsummer Afternoon Dream, in which a woman in a blue off-the-shoulder dress leans up against her bicycle, daisies dancing in her basket before a picket fence. It is to my eye the show’s most optimistic piece: a summer treat. The lush and soft greenery in the distance speaks of easiness and vibrancy. One wonders at the juxtaposition of the two young women in blue dresses — one embodying a tragic story, the other seemingly so full of potential.

The show concludes with a gesture drenched in American history. In the towering work Trans Forming Liberty, a trans woman wearing a blue gown holds a torch capped not with flames but flowers. Sherald says part of her intent was to explicitly state that trans Americans deserve the rights and freedoms guaranteed to all citizens.

It is, unfortunately, a very necessary statement at a time when Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has introduced legislation to ban trans women from women’s bathrooms and locker rooms on federal property. This follows a similar measure the Congresswoman introduced to regulate the use of facilities on the House side of the U.S. Capitol — all of it a direct response to the election of America’s first out trans congresswoman, Sarah McBride, from Delaware.

The right’s attack on trans rights — and Sherald’s painting — brings to mind Sen. Jesse Helms’ 1993 harassment of the country’s first Black senator, Carol Moseley Braun. As Moseley Braun stepped into an elevator with Helms and Sen. Orrin Hatch, Helms began to sing what’s known as the national anthem of the Confederacy. “I’m going to make her cry,” Helms said. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”

Ultimately, Trans Forming Liberty conveys dignity, resilience and a vulnerability that comes with knowing you’re on display. This is the one form of ubiquity that I would argue rests over American Sublime. These are paintings that look back at us just as much as we stare into them — not necessarily in a confrontational way, but as testimony, as though Sherald’s subjects are saying, “come and meet my gaze.”

It is a tool very familiar to the marginalized, to ask that those who hold power over us must come face-to-face with who we are and what their power has brought upon our lives. Amy Sherald is absolutely the right artist to facilitate these gatherings and encounters.

‘Amy Sherald: American Sublime’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through March 9, 2025.

I am of two minds when it comes to public museums exhibiting private collections. One mind grumbles, the other respects.

Collectors with the funds to support their art-buying habits can accumulate incredible amounts of work by “great” artists (see the Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). They are free to pursue their desires as they see fit, without the democratizing goal of fleshing out a museum’s holdings beyond those “great” artists (see again, the Fisher Collection).

Collectors can also lean into niche fields (see Eli Leon’s African American quilts, now donated to the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Pamela and Richard Kramlich’s focus on time-based media; or Rene di Rosa’s penchant for funk art). Such focus allows them to enact monomaniacal, sometimes visionary approaches to preserving art that might otherwise be undervalued, or even lost to time.

All to say: it’s complicated. Which brings us to Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection, on view at BAMPFA through April 20, 2025.

Making Their Mark is, hands down, a lovely show. The Shah Garg Collection, created by Bay Area philanthropist Komal Shah and her husband Gaurav Garg, has turned acquiring art into a political statement about the earnings gap between white men and … everyone else. And this presentation of over 70 women artists proves gender has nothing to do with the quality, scale or material of one’s artistic output.

Which we hopefully all know. But it’s always nice to witness that fact with one’s own eyeballs.

The show is filled with monumental pieces, in terms of both size and art historical import. Dominating the former, Mary Weatherford’s Light Falling Like a Broken Chain; Paradise (2021) is a 24-foot-wide swirl of luminous, rainbow-hued Flashe on linen, a painting of immense physicality that conjures images of giant, soaking-wet brushes.

Of the latter, the show opens with Janet Sobel’s much humbler Untitled (1946), an all-over composition of dripped paint mixed with sand. A simply rendered face peers through her dynamic squiggles of black, red and cornflower blue. We learn that Jackson Pollock saw Sobel’s work in the early 1940s, before his 1946 foray into drip painting. A woman in the background, indeed.

It’s some of the older pieces in Making Their Mark that are the most exciting to see, and the majority of those are contained within the “Luminous Abstraction” section of the show. Here we get Leonore Tawney’s elegant black-and-ivory weaving Inquisition (1961), Rosemarie Castoro’s languid sculptural relief Gentless (Brushstroke) (1972), a 1978 Howardena Pindell and a 1969 pour piece from Lynda Benglis.

Yes, there are examples in Making Their Mark of women working in small-scale, craft-adjacent ways, or creating depictions of their own bodily experiences, but there’s more of a “yes, and” emphasis here. Yes, an elegant Toshiko Takaezu ceramic vessel, and a Simone Leigh bronze. Yes, an eyeball-sizzling Freedom Quilting Bee piece, and Jacquline Humphries’ digitally enlarged, stenciled canvas pattern.

The Shah Garg Collection has a certain taste, but to our benefit, that is good taste. The collection tends toward the colorful and the abstract, and indulges in a variety of delicious textures. Its focus, while slightly more narrow than “all art,” leaves plenty of room for curators Cecilia Alemani (of the High Line) and Margot Norton (BAMPFA’s chief curator) to arrange the selected work into slightly unruly, yet educational groupings.

This exhibition also marks the beginning of a significant relationship between the Shah Garg Foundation and the museum, which includes the launch of a Women Artists Research Fund and the promised donation of “select artworks” to BAMPFA’s permanent collection. Part of me bristles at the ethically gray area of exhibiting the collection of a major museum donor, and yet this project feels more pure than your average pay-to-play.

Some day, hopefully, we won’t need such corrective measures.

‘Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection’ is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through April 20, 2025.

What do you think would happen if raccoons inherited the Earth?

San Francisco artist Andrea Bergen posits that they’d be racing around on monster trucks, chowing down human snacks, slurping energy drinks and riding animatronic horses outside convenience stores. And if the content of her new exhibit, Modern Menagerie — a group show at The Drawing Room Annex with Fuzz E. Grant and Richard Menendez — is anything to go by, these trash pandas would also revel in hanging with their friends. (Those pals being possums, rats, pigeons and the occasional escaped zoo animal, naturally.)

Bergen’s image of Earth in the future is one in which humanity has been erased, leaving behind tacky monuments to convenient living, and clearing a path for urban animals to run entirely unimpeded. Hers is a hypercolor, gleefully unhinged landscape where a rat can casually eat a Slim Jim while watching a fight between a seagull and a snake. This is a place where a (literal) vulture opts to raise its offspring inside a broken TV set. In this world, when aliens finally do invade, they concern themselves only with getting drunk on cheap liquor, letting their tiny green babies ride around on possums, and abducting cute dogs.

“This is kind of my way of dealing with the idea of climate change and how horrible it is,” Bergen tells KQED Arts, “and proposing this alternate future where everything is going to be okay — for the animals at least.”

Compounding the unusual nature of her compositions is the medium in which Bergen most likes to work: paper and gel medium. The Oakland-born California College of the Arts graduate constructs her art by hand cutting intricate shapes one by one, out of colored paper. She does this using very sharp scissors, then lays those pieces down, slowly building them into complex and texturally wondrous scenes.

“It’s just more satisfying [for me] than painting,” Bergen explains. “I really wanted a graphic quality that I feel too impatient to achieve with paint. The paper gives an immediate saturation and opacity.”

Bergen does not, she reassures KQED Arts, ever pre-cut paper before she’s ready to apply it, and she very rarely uses blades to achieve her clean edges. This painstaking process creates minuscule details that work together to mind-bending overall effect.

Not all of Bergen’s intricate moves are immediately obvious to the viewer; they’re even tougher to capture and convey in photographs. In person though, her compositions act like a sort of Where’s Waldo? for grown-ups — except this time, the final goal is pure, hero-less anarchy and hedonistic chaos for the hell of it. And no wonder. The way Bergen designs her pieces is often off the cuff.

“I’ll block out the big things on the surface that I’m working on,” Bergen explains, “but then it’s improvisational. I just fill up the whole thing until it feels finished.”

More recently, Bergen has expanded her output by creating highly unusual sculptures out of cardboard and papier-mâché. These figures are her artworks brought to surreal, hilarious, 3D life. Modern Menagerie includes three giant flying pigeons carrying snacks to their destinations, a huge seated donkey, a wall-climbing tiger, a mischievous goat, a mandrill (with a very special bright red rear end), a raccoon eating a big burger and a bug-eyed, Monster Energy-drinking chihuahua.

“It’s kind of a distillation of humanity’s footprint on nature,” Bergen says, “and how I envision the future after we’re gone.”

If the animals do one day inherit the Earth and it’s anything like Bergen’s vision, their future will be uproarious.

‘Modern Menagerie,’ featuring work by Andrea Bergen, Fuzz E. Grant and Richard Menendez opens at The Drawing Room Annex (599 Valencia St., San Francisco) on Nov. 30, 2024 at 5 p.m. The show runs through Jan. 12, 2025.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the multidisciplinary arts space in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens complex, today announced the appointment of Maricelle “Mari” Robles as its next CEO. Robles comes to YBCA from Headlands Center for the Arts, where she served as executive director for the past four years.

“YBCA has this amazing legacy of presenting experimental, cutting-edge, community-focused Bay Area artists and then having them in a larger global conversation about the arts and social justice,” Robles told KQED. “I’ll be looking to continue and build on that legacy.”

YBCA in the news

Robles arrives at the 31-year-old institution at a fraught time in its history.

Earlier this year, artists in its Bay Area Now 9 exhibition altered their own artwork in a pro-Palestinian action on Feb. 15. YBCA, led at the time by interim CEO Sara Fenske Bahat, shut its doors following the event, canceling scheduled programs, and stayed closed for an entire month.

While the altered artwork remained on view after reopening, the museum installed wall labels to explain that messages like “free Palestine” and “ceasefire now” represented the artists’ views, not YBCA’s. Fenske Bahat resigned on March 3, citing “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash” directed at her after the protest. (She has since been hired to lead Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s transition team.)

At least nine staff members left YBCA in the aftermath of the closure, and open letters from staff and artists accused the museum of censorship. A new interim CEO, Jim Rettew, was hired to lead the organization after Fenske Bahat’s departure.

The events received extensive coverage in both local and national news outlets as pro-Palestinian activists and artists called on institutions to address the war in Gaza.

“There was a lot of growth for the organization, going through these very public steps and missteps,” Robles said of YBCA. “What I feel most committed to is making sure that we live our mission and making sure we create a space where artists, staff and board are free to feel safe and comfortable in their work environment.”

At Headlands, Robles oversaw the creation of two new fellowship programs and brought in new funding sources, but her tenure was also marked by layoffs and fundraising shortfalls. Prior to that role, she held positions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and DreamYard Art Center in the Bronx.

YBCA, which shows an operating budget of around $18 million in recent tax filings, is a much larger organization than Headlands, which had an operating budget of $5.2 million in 2023.

Robles said some of her initial hiring priorities include a chief of programs, and rebuilding the institution’s artistic team, which will include positions in visual arts, performance and film. (YBCA hasn’t had a full-time film curator since 2018.)

“The city has a rich history of film programming and YBCA in particular was part of that,” Robles said. She credits her time at Headlands with introducing her to the Bay Area film community.

She’ll officially start on Jan. 6, 2025, in time to help shape YBCA’s next strategic plan, which will guide the institution for the next five years. At the top of her list are partnerships with other local organizations like SOMA Pilipinas, the Filipino Cultural Heritage District, which regularly hosts events at YBCA, including parts of the upcoming Parol Lantern Festival on Dec. 15.

YBCA will be under even more pressure to bring a sense of vibrancy to the immediate neighborhood in the coming year. The Contemporary Jewish Museum will close to the public on Dec. 15 in an attempt to reconfigure its expenses. The Museum of the African Diaspora will close March through September 2025 to upgrade its galleries. The Mexican Museum still has yet to move into its planned home across the street from YBCA.

Despite these challenges, Robles is ready to take the helm at a museum she says occupies “a unique place” in the local and global arts ecosystem.

“I believe in institutions,” she said, “And YBCA was founded in the early ’90s really with this thought of ‘What does a downtown revitalization effort focused on arts look like?’ And so that remains. I’m excited about picking up the baton.”

Well, that snuck up on us! Can you believe that we’ve just capped the first 25 years of the millennium?

Here at the KQED Arts & Culture desk, we started thinking about what the Bay Area arts scene has been through. The pivotal moments. The launches and openings. The inspiring, funny, touching and just plain weird — an entire quarter century that’s shaped our region.

So we did what people online do, and we made a list.

Note that this is by no means comprehensive, nor are these the most important moments from the past 25 years. We really didn’t overthink it. But hopefully you’ll scroll through, see some familiar developments here, and think: Damn. We did that!

The Very First Bring-Your-Own-Big-Wheel Race (2000)
Participants in the Lombard Street race consist of John Brumit and only John Brumit. Nice one, John Brumit.

The Sims (2000)
Electronic Arts develops the definitive human tamagotchi game; teenagers capitulate to the temptation to kill their Sims families in various creative ways.

The Grand Century Mall opens in San Jose (2000)
One of the first all-Vietnamese shopping malls to open in America, the Grand Century helps establish San Jose’s Little Saigon neighborhood as one of the most vibrant hubs of Vietnamese food and culture in the U.S. — a one-stop shop for ripe durian, V-pop albums and steaming-hot bowls of phở.

Deltron 3030 Takes On Interplanetary Corporate Overlords (2000)
Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator and Kid Koala kick off the millennium by blowing everyone’s minds with a hip-hop space opera — recorded in San Francisco, of course.

Jess Curtis Launches Gravity (2000)
Dancer and choreographer Jess Curtis starts the forward-thinking dance ensemble Gravity. Nearly two decades later, in 2017, Gravity expands into Gravity Access Services, which devises ways for blind and visually impaired audiences to feel, hear and experience performances.

Seeing San Francisco Through Hamburger Eyes (2001)
The black-and-white photo zine’s first issue, printed at Kinko’s, comes out on Valentine’s Day. Over the years, the influential publication would go on to make over 200 zines, magazines and books, capture a gritty skate- and graffiti-filled world, run an analog photo lab and open a Mission District gallery.

PeaceOUT World Homo Hop Festival (2001)
After chatting on message boards for years, queer rappers and DJs from all over the globe have a place to come together. Juba Kalamka of experimental rap group Deep Dickollective put on the PeaceOut World Homo Hop Festival at East Bay Pride every year until 2007.

COPIA Opens (2001)
The massive “Food and Wine Disneyland” of Napa opens with less-than-expected attendance for its galleries, theaters, restaurant, library, and gardens; it would close just seven years later.

The Strictly Bluegrass Festival Launches (2001)
“Hardly” gets added to the name after a few years, but the free admission and absence of advertising stays. Thank Warren Hellman for refusing to take corporate sponsorship for this annual concert in Golden Gate Park!

The Coup Has to Change the Cover Art for ‘Party Music’ (2001)
“Oops, we accidentally planned to put out an album in September 2001 with images depicting us blowing up the World Trade Center.”

Steve Jobs Introduces the First iPod at Moscone Center (2001)
It may have been small, but it revolutionized how the world listens to music. (At the time, 5GB of song storage seemed like an entire universe.)

Sketchfest Launches (2002)
Debuting at the Shelton Theater with six local sketch-comedy groups, this beloved comedy festival still brings in big names each year.

A Crew of Underground Artists Becomes ‘the Mission School’ (2002)
Bay Area arts writer, curator and educator Glen Helfand pens a feature for San Francisco Bay Guardian that cements a loosely defined (and later hotly contested) emerging artistic movement while writing about Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, Chris Johanson, Alicia McCarthy and others.

Blue Bottle Launches (2002)
What started as a cart selling pour-over coffee at East Bay farmers markets eventually helps turn the Bay Area into one of the epicenters of the “third wave coffee” movement — along with all the smug tasting notes, mansplaining and, yes, genuinely exciting coffee that came with it.

826 Valencia Opens (2002)
San Francisco’s young writers now have a place to go for creative writing classes and homework help, a Mission District tutoring center founded by authors Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari. 826 Valencia publishes student writing and produces impressive alumni, including Marvel screenwriter Chinaka Hodge and poet Sally Wen Mao.

Sean Dorsey Starts Fresh Meat Productions (2002)
It’s the first major platform for transgender and gender-nonconforming dancers and performers, and puts on an annual festival every year.

Michael Lewis Publishes Moneyball (2003)
Subtitled “The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” the nonfiction book (later made into a 2011 movie starring Brad Pitt) covers the incredible 20-game winning streak of the Oakland A’s and its general manager Billy Beane.

Restored SF Ferry Building Reopens (2003)
No longer just a transit hub, the new Ferry Building establishes itself as one of the Bay Area’s most iconic food destinations, anchored by its nationally renowned farmers market. (In his novel, Sourdough, Robin Sloan lovingly satirized it as the place where passionate artisans launch a little “ramshackle cart” that eventually allows them to sell their company to Starbucks for $19 million.)

California College of the Arts and Crafts (2003)
After opening an additional campus in San Francisco’s design district, the nearly 100-year-old Oakland school drops its historic connection to the arts and crafts movement from its name.

Another Planet Entertainment Launches (2003)
A bunch of former Bill Graham Presents staffers upset at the direction of their former company, sold to non-local corporate yahoos, decide to quit and start their own. Their first show is Bruce Springsteen for over 40,000 people at the Giants’ ballpark in San Francisco.

Friendster Kickstarts Social Media as We Know It (2003)
Mountain View tech guy Jonathan Abrams launches the first widely popular social media site. Time-wasting begins in earnest and has not ceased since.

Mac Dre Dies, Forever Infusing His Spirit in the Bay (2004)
If you don’t lose your mind when “Feelin’ Myself” comes on, are you really from the Bay?

Same-Sex Weddings Take Over City Hall (2004)
Gavin Newsom gets his first taste of the national stage by saying, “The hell with it — let’s start doing the right thing.” Same-sex marriage would eventually become legal in all 50 states.

Yelp Launches (2004)
Almost immediately, restaurant owners everywhere decry the outsize influence the San Francisco–based review platform — which turns every keyboard warrior into a critic — has on their bottom line.

The Prelinger Library Opens (2004)
Megan and Rick unpack their quirky collection of decommissioned texts and print ephemera in SoMa, opening the stacks to all for free.

Green Day Releases American Idiot (2004)
Who’da thunk a Bush-era protest rock opera about alienation in the West Contra Costa County suburbs would become a smash on Broadway?

The Trans March Becomes an San Francisco Pride Staple (2004)
Activists circulate an anonymous email inviting gender nonconforming people to march on the Friday that kicks off Pride weekend. Eventually, the Trans March becomes an annual staple, with a youth and elder brunch, resource fair and more.

Metallica Does Group Therapy, Releases Some Kind of Monster (2004)
Lars Ulrich screaming “fuck” in James Hetfield’s face, Kirk Hammett looking bored, Dave Mustaine bawling — the entire two and a half hours are pure comedy gold.

Pandora Streams Online Radio Out of Oakland (2005)
Eons before Spotify Wrapped, a small Oakland start-up begins streaming personalized internet radio algorithmically tailored to listeners’ tastes.

Piece by Piece Documentary Explains the Writing on the Wall (2005)
Nic Hill’s definitive history of the San Francisco graffiti scene remains essential viewing.

The Museum of the African Diaspora Opens (2005)
The long, destructive tail of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency leads to the very excellent creation of the non-collecting arts institution MoAD, just around the corner from SFMOMA.

The de Young Museum Reopens After Major Renovation (2005)
The new copper-clad building reopens in Golden Gate Park after a $208 million fundraising campaign led by notorious doyenne Dede Wilsey.

E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go” Video Brings Hyphy to the World (2005)
Operating a vehicle on Bay Area streets will never be the same.

First Fridays in Oakland (2006)
A gallery crawl turns into the place to be each month.

Alternative Exposure Grants (2007)
Southern Exposure starts doling out grants to spaces and projects that are too small for larger awards and too big to run without help, funding a new generation of artist-run endeavors across the Bay.

Treasure Island Music Festival Starts (2007)
Beating Outside Lands’ start by one year, the scenic festival run by Noise Pop would eventually boast headliners like OutKast, LCD Soundsystem and Sigur Ros to the island — with fans taking mandatory (and sometimes wild) shuttle rides to and from the island.

San Jose’s Joey Chestnut Wins His First Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest (2007)
With a final tally of 66 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes, Joey “Jaws” Chestnut dethrones longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi for the first time, inheriting his mantle as the world’s top-ranked competitive eater.

Outside Lands Music Festival Launches (2008)
Radiohead, Tom Petty and Jack Johnson headline the first year; Bay Area trust funds take a subsequent annual hit to buy tickets, cutoffs, flower crowns and blankets.

Pop-Up Magazine Pops Up (2009)
The multimedia live storytelling series launches, envisioned as a magazine-on-stage. At the Brava Theater in San Francisco, the inaugural event features Michael Pollan, the Kitchen Sisters, Roman Mars, Peggy Orenstein and others.

The “Figs on a Plate” Moment (2009)
Noted New York City restaurateur David Chang (of Momofuku fame) starts a bicoastal feud after making an off-the-cuff comment about how Bay Area chefs don’t really cook — they “just put figs on a plate.” A whole generation of Chez Panisse–pedigreed chefs gasps in horror.

Oscar Grant Protests (2009)
Protests erupt after BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle shoots and kills Oscar Grant, a young father, on the Fruitvale BART platform on New Year’s Day. Artists such as Mistah F.A.B. and Boots Riley join the frontlines of the movement.

Turf Feinz Go Viral In the Rain (2009)
Turf dancers No Noize, Man, BJ and Dreal give an improvised, poetic performance in heavy rain, honoring Dreal’s late brother Richard Davis, who was killed at the intersection the night before in a car accident. A YAK Films video of their dynamic, graceful moves goes viral on a relatively new platform called YouTube and introduces turfing to the world.

The Fox Theater Reopens (2009)
Long dormant, this theater built in 1908 undergoes a $75 million renovation to become the crown jewel of downtown Oakland.

Oakland’s Food Scene Gets National Recognition (2009)
Several classic restaurants (Commis, Pican, Chop Bar) open during this golden age for Oakland’s food scene. When Commis wins the city’s very first Michelin star that same year, The New York Times parachutes in to offer its two cents, famously describing Piedmont Avenue as “gritty.”

Ashkon’s “Don’t Stop Believing” Becomes the Giants 2010 World Series Anthem (2010)
Featuring lyrics like “Buster Posey — hands down, rookie of the year!”

Off the Grid hosts its First Mega Food Truck Party at Fort Mason (2010)
The event’s popularity helps kickstart the Bay Area’s burgeoning gourmet mobile food movement.

A Renovated Uptown Theatre in Napa Reopens (2010)
After a decade-long closure, the 1937 movie theater opens its doors as a live music venue.

Instagram Launches in San Francisco (2010)
Starting with its first photo, of South Beach Harbor near Pier 38, the app forever changes how people present their lives (#nofilter) and gives artists a direct platform for sharing their work with audiences.

Mission Chinese Food Opens Inside Lung Shan (2010)
To this day, one of the most divisive Bay Area Chinese restaurants of all time (people either love it or hate it). Mission Chinese was also one of the first pop-ups to go big, and it was on the vanguard of a new era of experimental Asian American cooking in the Bay.

Pier 24 Opens (2010)
Andy Pilara opens a free exhibition space on the San Francisco waterfront to showcase his massive photography collection.

Tartine Bread Publishes (2010)
The phenomenon of the modern-day “sourdough bro” can largely be traced back to the publication of Chad Robertson’s hugely influential bread Bible.

EMPIRE Launches (2010)
Not since the 1980s (Huey Lewis! Journey! “We Built This City on Rock ‘n’ Roll!”) has there been such a prominent music industry presence in the Bay Area as this powerhouse hip-hop label and distributor.

Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im Begin Their Curatorial Reign (2010)
It all starts in the Oakland apartment gallery MacArthur B Arthur. The duo opens Et al. with Facundo Argañaraz in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 2013, expands to the Mission in 2017, and adds a bookstore in 2021.

The Occupy Movement (2011)
Shouts of “We! Are! The 99%!” echo throughout Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco as protesters set up encampments and artist coalesce to draw attention to income inequality and corporate greed.

The Green Music Center Opens at Sonoma State University (2012)
Jerry Brown and Nancy Pelosi show up for the grand opening of the opulent $145 million hall, while former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill buys the naming rights for himself, which everyone subsequently ignores.

Bay Area Bagels Get a NYT Mention (2012)
The headline promised bagels that are “as good as Brooklyn’s” — could such a thing be possible given the NorCal bagel scene’s deplorable reputation at the time? (Editor’s note: Yes, it was!) East Coast and West Coast bagel snobs have been rehashing the same argument ever since.

The Vinyl Revival Inspires a Spate of New Record Stores (2012-now)
Stranded, Hercules, Needle to the Groove, Rain Dog, Econo Jam, Tunnel, Dave’s, Originals Vinyl, Noise, Contact, Discodelic, etc. etc. etc.

SFJAZZ Center Opens (2013)
The jazz festival once held at various venues, halls and theaters throughout the city gets a home base.

Fruitvale Station Offers an Intimate Portrait Beyond the Headlines (2013)
Ryan Coogler, raised in the East Bay, makes the definitive film about Oscar Grant.

The Bay Lights Blink On (2013)
Leo Villareal’s massive public artwork, inspired by his time at Burning Man, animates the western span of the Bay Bridge.

Persia & Daddies Plastik Release “Google Google Apps Apps” (2013)
The anti-gentrification banger of the decade is catchy, discourse-provoking, hilarious and from the mind of one of our best drag queens, as it should be.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Folds (2014)
Founded in 1966 by Bruce Brugmann, the progressive alt-weekly is unceremoniously shut down and kicked out of its offices; it is later reborn online as 48 Hills.

924 Gilman Becomes a Registered Nonprofit (2014)
A slipshod crew of punk volunteers finally gets their papers in order to preserve the legendary club’s future. The bathrooms still smell just as bad.

Paul McCartney Closes Down Candlestick (2014)
The Beatles’ final official concert? At Candlestick. Candlestick’s final concert? A Beatle. (Condolences if you were stuck in the traffic jam from hell trying to get in.)

Alamo Drafthouse Opens (2015)
The Austin movie chain moves into the former New Mission Theater, tells you and your friend to shut your mouth while the movie’s playing (unless it’s to eat and drink the food delivered to you by a hunched-over employee).

The Warriors Finally Win the NBA Championship (2015)
Let’s not forget that Berkeley rapper and internet provocateur Lil B the Based God put hilarious curses on James Harden and Kevin Durant.

The Last Video Rental Store in San Francisco Closes, Solidifying the Streaming Era (2015)
It is unfathomable that Blockbuster nostalgia continues to surge while an actually good video rental store like Le Video had to close its doors. Kudos for being the last one standing, Le Video.

Daveed Diggs Plays Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton (2015)
The former Youth Speaks kid in a rap group with his friends Rafael Casal and Chinaka Hodge suddenly finds himself starring in the biggest Broadway smash of the century.

Oasis Becomes a Drag Destination (2015)
Two queens with raunchy humor and big hair, Heklina and D’Arcy Drollinger, open a new venue that becomes the premier destination for local and touring drag artists.

BAMPFA Relocates (2016)
This one’s easier to get to on public transit, but we still kinda miss Mario Ciampi’s brutalist concrete cavern TBH.

Pokémon GO Launches, Turns Public Space Into Bizarre Zombie Alterworld (2016)
Developed by SF-based Niantic, the augmented reality game had hoards of would-be Pokémon trainers of all ages wandering the streets with their cellphones six inches away from their face, in an endless quest to “catch ‘em all.”

Frisco 5 Hunger Strike (2016)
Hip-hop artists Equipto and Sellassie join activists Edwin Lindo, Ike Pinkston and Maria Guttierez, Equipto’s mother, in a hunger strike against police brutality. They galvanize major protests, and the police chief resigns at Mayor Ed Lee’s request.

The Ghost Ship Fire Irreversibly Changes the Underground Landscape (2016)
Thirty-six artists die in a fire at an underground electronic music party at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland. Afterwards, the city cracks down on unpermitted live-work spaces artists had flocked to due to the Bay Area’s unaffordable housing market, and underground shows go even further underground.

Minnesota Street Project Opens (2016)
A privately owned complex of warehouses in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood turns into a hub of galleries and studios, just in time for many of the galleries priced out of their Geary Street buildings.

Light Field Film Festival Premieres (2016)
Film is dead! Long live film!

SFMOMA Reopens (2016)
After a three-year closure, SFMOMA reopens with a Snøhetta-designed expansion rising like a cruise ship over the 1995 Mario Botta building. Now we have to look at art collected by the Gap founders until 2116.

SF Art Book Fair Launches (2016)
The first annual event draws huge crowds of zine-makers, publishers and their enthusiastic collectors.

SoMa Pilipinas Officially Recognized as a Filipino Cultural District (2016)
Still home to thousands of Filipino Americans, SoMa continues to be a nexus for Fil-Am cultural expression in the Bay, including periodic night markets and block parties and the country’s only dedicated Filipino American performance art venue.

First Dog World Dog Surfing Championships Contest in Pacifica (2017)
Five dogs compete. A rescued Australian Kelpie named Abbie Girl wins. She won the 2018 competition, too.

Jawbreaker Plays Their First Show in 21 Years (2017)
The Mission District heroes return with a five-song set at the Ivy Room in Albany; Blake recites “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats before starting the set that fans had dreamed about.

Ear Hustle Launches, Bringing Prison Stories to the World (2017)
For its wide listenership, the San Quentin podcast humanizes incarcerated people and leads to real-world reforms.

San Francisco Opens the World’s First-Ever Transgender District (2017)
It’s anchored by the former site of Compton’s Cafeteria, where trans women rioted against police brutality, three years before Stonewall, in 1966.

San Francisco Symphony Snags Esa-Pekka Salonen (2018)
The classical superstar initially says he doesn’t want to lead another major orchestra, but San Francisco convinces him otherwise.

Oaklash Launches (2018)
The experimental platform for drag puts racial and disability justice at the forefront.

Tommy Orange’s There, There Becomes a Bestseller (2018)
The Oakland author’s debut novel builds out a world of complicated Indigenous characters and sparks conversation about the legacy of colonialism.

Black Panther, Blindspotting, Sorry to Bother You Put Oakland Filmmaking Back on the Map (2018)
All three had the misfortune of being released the same year as The Green Book, which, as everyone knows, solved racism (and won Best Picture).

Salesforce Tower Turns On (2018)
The top of SF’s tallest building lights up with Jim Campbell’s hi-tech lo-res Day for Night.

Quesabirria Blows Up in the Bay Area (2019)
A movement fueled by social media turns these cheesy, red-tinged tacos from Tijuana into a new Bay Area staple.

Comedians Rally to Save The Punch Line (2019)
Dave Chappelle, Nato Green, W. Kamau Bell all speak on the steps of City Hall in support of the venerable comedy club.

A Global Pandemic Shuts Down the Arts Completely (2020)
(Please, let’s never do this again.)

Muralists Pay Tribute to Kehlani in West Oakland (2020)
New York City subway riders have the Brooklyn Bridge. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. And BART riders passing through West Oakland can bask in the stunning view of the San Francisco skyline on one side and a tribute to the Grammy-nominated musician by Timothy B and Steven Anderson on the other.

SF Conservatory of Music Opens New Bowes Center (2021)
Yo-Yo Ma kicks off the grand opening in a performance with City Hall as the backdrop.

Oakland Gets Its First Poet Laureate (2021)
Activist, educator and Lower Bottom Playaz theater company founder Ayodele Nzinga becomes the first person to hold the title in Oakland’s 169-year history.

Frost Amphitheater Reopens After Four-Year Renovation (2021)
This Stanford venue that had hosted a whopping 14 Grateful Dead shows reopens after being closed for renovations before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Slim’s, a San Francisco Live Music Institution, Is Replaced by YOLO (2021)
In a sign of the “new San Francisco,” the beloved venue reopens under new ownership with $800 VIP areas, bottle service, velvet-rope treatment and a huge “disco jellyfish.” Ugh.

SFAI Closes Its Doors for Good (2022)
After 151 years, the storied and unruly art school graduates its last class.

Anti-Cruising Ordinances are Banned, Lowriders Celebrate (2023)
Gov. Newsom signs a bill recognizing cruising and lowriders as freedom of expression after decades of selectively enforced anti-cruising laws.

Castro Theater Begins Renovations (2024)
Film buffs lose their fight to keep the Castro’s seats as live music promoter Another Planet Entertainment begins renovations to turn the movie palace into a multi-use venue.

Keith Lee visits the Bay Area (2024)
The popular TikTok food reviewer’s lukewarm experience and early departure causes an existential crisis among the Bay Area food-influencer class.

The A’s Officially Leave Oakland (2024)
At the team’s last game, Rickey Henderson throws out the first pitch, Barry Zito sings the national anthem, and the P.A. plays Tower of Power’s “So Very Hard to Go.”

The San Francisco Ballet and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have announced a new partnership to annually commission curtain drops from Bay Area artists.

Earlier this year, Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s curtain appeared on stage before and between SF Ballet’s Dos Mujeres program. The Oakland artist’s preparatory maquette, a textile collage that SF Ballet scenic artists carefully translated in paint onto a 30-by-60-foot canvas, was later acquired by the Fine Arts Museums.

For the ballet’s 2024–2025 season, multidisciplinary artist Ranu Mukherjee will design a curtain for Cool Britannia, a Feb. 13–19, 2025 program of three ballets by British choreographers: Sir Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, Christopher Wheeldon’s Within the Golden Hour and Dust by Akram Khan.

Mukherjee is no stranger to dance. For the past six years, Mukherjee has collaborated with choreographer Hope Mohr on increasingly in-depth performances, including a recent residency at the Mills College Art Museum. In January, Mukherjee and Mohr’s piece score for transitional times will combine live dancers and projected video at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts.

It also just so happens that Mukherjee lived in London when the term “Cool Britannia” (a pun on “Rule, Britannia!”) was coined — picture the rise of Oasis, Blur and the Spice Girls in the mid- and late ’90s.

Of the music included in SF Ballet’s Cool Britannia, only Chroma includes a bit of rock, with a score by Joby Talbot and The White Stripes’ Jack White. But all three are decidedly modern.

“Cool Britannia features three essential choreographic innovators in ballet who are unafraid to break with and reimagine artistic traditions and push them forward,” SF Ballet Artistic Director Tamara Rojo stated in Monday’s announcement. “This new work of art speaks directly to Cool Britannia’s themes while supporting the Ballet’s vision of bringing new, multi-disciplinary artistry work to the War Memorial Opera House and to our San Francisco community.”

One of Mukherjee’s challenges was to create a cohesive image that could introduce audiences to ideas flowing through the three separate pieces. “There’s this incredible conversation between really angular movements and machine language, and then the fluidity of the body,” she says. Her final painting, set against a shimmering, deep blue background, depicts plants in space.

“Plants are the ultimate makers of form because they make form out of air and light,” Mukherjee says. She included specific species that were grown by civilians during WWI to create medicine for the war effort; Dust is a one-act ballet about the human experience of the war.

Now, the work lies with SF Ballet’s scenic artists to transform Mukherjee’s roughly 18-by-36-inch painting into a massive mural.

The collaboration between SF Ballet and the Fine Arts Museums will also mark the Legion of Honor’s 100th anniversary. Several notable events are planned for 2025 to celebrate the milestone, including pre-performance conversations with museum curators and artists at the ballet; a discussion of SF Ballet’s 1990 production of Krazy Kat (alongside the Legion of Honor’s upcoming Wayne Thiebaud exhibition); and chamber music performances and Dance-Along workshops at the Legion of Honor.

The Berkeley Art Center, a 57-year-old nonprofit arts space in North Berkeley’s Live Oak Park, announced on Dec. 13 the departure of co-directors Kimberley Acebo Arteche and Elena Gross. Arteche left the organization in August; Gross left in November. The search for a new executive director has now begun.

Like many nonprofits in the Bay Area, the Berkeley Art Center has struggled financially in the wake of the pandemic. In a Nov. 12 appeal to the Berkeley City Council for a $100,000 one-time emergency grant, Councilmember Sophie Hahn explained the nonprofit’s “significant financial hardship” was a result of “the end of COVID-19 relief funds, a reduced donor base, and more.”

Berkeley Art Center Board President Kerri Hurtado confirmed to KQED that Arteche and Gross’ departure was a financial decision made by the board. The art center will now rely on volunteers, board members and a gallery manager — the lone paid staff member — until a new executive director comes on.

“We can financially support a single executive director,” Hurtado told KQED, as opposed to their previous co-director structure. “We’re really looking for someone who can help us strategically think about how to have a model that is really sustainable for a small organization like ourselves, where we do need multiple staff people and we want to be able to pay those people a living wage, a good wage.”

Berkeley Art Center’s most recent tax filings show an operating budget of around $370,000. The nonprofit prides itself on paying artists and curators for their participation in shows, at three to seven times the rate recommended by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), which establishes payment standards for artists working with nonprofits.

And while they have been successful in securing funding for exhibitions and programs, Hurtado said, that doesn’t pay for workaday things like salaries or the cost of maintaining their building. (The city of Berkeley owns the heptagonal structure and the Berkeley Art Center occupies the space for free, but is responsible for its upkeep.)

“It’s just been really hard to secure general operating funds, especially from private foundations,” Hurtado said. “The philanthropic landscape has also been very challenging recently.”

Indeed, inflation and shifting funding priorities have created a perfect storm for arts nonprofits of all sizes.

Berkeley Art Center’s announcement came just two days before the Contemporary Jewish Museum, a much larger nonprofit in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena arts district, closed its doors for at least a year to restructure and hopefully stave off permanent closure.

Despite their slimmed-down operations, Berkeley Art Center will remain open and free to the public. Their current show, Painting Ourselves into Society, featuring the work of eight currently and formerly incarcerated artists, will be on view through Jan. 12, 2025.

Arteche, a talented artist in her own right, first took on the role of co-director in 2021, alongside Daniel Nevers. Gross, who has an impressive background in curation and arts writing, joined Arteche in 2022. Together, the co-directors grew and diversified Berkeley Art Center’s membership.

They also did remarkable grant-writing and curatorial work, Hurtado said — which is why Berkeley Art Center has exhibitions scheduled through 2025. In February, the art center will open Archives Yet to Come, a group show curated by artist Hannah Waiters. The annual juried member’s exhibition will take place in the summer. And toward the end of the year, a Creative Work Fund grant will support Black Point Reinterpretive Site, an installation by Torreya Cummings and Sarah Lowe.

It’s telling, though, that most grants are project-specific, and don’t cover general operating expenses — like the salaries of the staff members who worked to secure those funds. “We’re not the only ones going through a crisis like this,” Hurtado said.

Nonprofit arts space 500 Capp Street, located in David Ireland’s former Mission District home, will move forward as a collective, staff members announced on Tuesday. Under the new leadership structure — part of an effort to strive for “equity, inclusion, transparency, wellbeing, and collaboration,” according to a statement — five full-time staffers will run the nonprofit collectively, with equal pay and shared responsibility for the organization.

“We already worked collaboratively in a way, but we wanted a sense of ownership, a sense of agency on how things are run,” said Lian Ladia, who is in charge of curatorial, exhibitions and programming aspects of 500 Capp Street. “And because of the economic situation, we see executive leadership just struggling with fundraising.”

500 Capp Street’s move comes at a time when a significant number of Bay Area arts nonprofits are without permanent executive directors. Among them is Berkeley Art Center, which announced just days ago the departure of its co-directors due to financial cutbacks.

In addition to Ladia, the 500 Capp Street leadership team includes Amy Berk (education), Alexander An-Tai Hwang (operations and programming), Justin Nagle (collections and facilities) and Gui Veloso (communications and community partnerships).

Ladia said the decision partly came out of conversations and workshops the staff undertook on the issue of decolonization. Before settling into his art practice in San Francisco in the 1970s, Ireland worked as a safari guide and importer of artifacts; the 500 Capp Street collection contains objects from Ireland’s travels in Asia and East Africa.

Over time, critical questions of decolonization seeped into the very structure of the nonprofit’s day-to-day operations, Ladia said. The staff has actually been running the organization collectively since the departure of 500 Capp Street’s last interim executive director, Jennifer Rissler, in March.

In May, 500 Capp Street, Berkeley Art Center and Canyon Cinema held a collaborative fundraiser called the Spring Invitational. “We had a goal and we reached our goal,” Ladia said, pointing to the staff’s ability to raise money without an executive director. “That’s when we thought, we can actually do this.”

Responsibilities that once would have been expected of an executive director are now spread across the organization. “We’re all doing it as a board and staff,” Ladia said. “We’re all brainstorming through it.”

The staff is supported by a four-person board, a community advisors group and a “Creative Counsel.” Most are artists.

In addition to preserving Ireland’s artworks and home (which is an artwork unto itself), 500 Capp Street hosts exhibitions and residencies, inviting artists to engage with the house and collection. Presentations earlier this year included projects by Marcel Pardo Ariza and Mildred Howard. Artist yétúndé ọlágbajú was the nonprofit’s 2023–24 artist in residence, culminating in the presentation of a spiral fuels and fills.

“500 Capp Street was David Ireland’s studio. A place where he was trying things out, experimenting, finding solutions,” staff member Gui Veloso stated in Tuesday’s announcement. “That same kind of creative problem solving is what we try to inspire in our residencies and is what the House asks of all of us. This makes so much sense for us.”

Ladia acknowledges that this is a difficult time for Bay Area nonprofit arts organizations, but said the collective is excited about what this new leadership structure means for their future.

“Some organizations choose to furlough. Some organizations choose to close,” Ladia said. “But instead, for us, we chose to think about how our budget can work.”

Other than September, there is no bigger month for Bay Area visual art than January. Major shows open, year-long projects kick off, and the FOG Design+Art Fair (Jan. 23–25) caps off SF Art Week, a jam-packed affair running Jan. 18–26 which includes programming well beyond that titular city.

We’ve got 10 recommendations to fill up the blank days of your brand-new calendar:

Viola Frey, ‘Transitory Fragments’

pt.2 Gallery, Oakland
Jan. 11–Feb. 22

Frey, who died in 2004, might be best known for her oversized and decidedly sturdy ceramic figures, but her practice (which spanned five decades) also included painting, drawing, bronze-casting and some truly wacky assemblage. It’s been five years since a local institution gifted us with a solo show of her work. Knowing pt.2’s careful attention to presentation, this show of art made between 1974 and 1995 will be a must-see.

‘Stitched: Contemporary Embroidery’

Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek
Jan. 11–March 30

This is a show for anyone who admires the things talented people can do with a needle and a bit of colored thread. Featuring 18 national and international artists, Stitched pushes back against the idea of embroidery as a fiddly craft reserved for “women’s work,” surveying the political, social and artistic messages that can be conveyed when we leave the rigid definitions and materials of fine art behind.

Kota Ezawa, ‘Here and There – Now and Then’

Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco
Jan. 11–March 9

The 11th is emerging as a tricky day to prioritize art openings. At Fort Mason Center, Kota Ezawa distills iconic images into flat, mesmerizing still images and graceful video works. Familiar or nearly forgotten moments become otherworldly in Ezawa’s hands, like the surreal arrival of the Grand Princess cruise ship in March 2020 — the beginning, though we couldn’t possibly grasp it, of a very different world.

Daniel ‘Attaboy’ Seifert, ‘Upcycled Garden’

Richmond Art Center
Jan. 22–March 22

Here’s another artwork born from pandemic times. In Seifert’s hands, and with the help of house paint, repurposed boxes lose their sharp corners and nondescript branding to become frilly, flowery forms. His Upcycled Garden installation has morphed as it traveled from venue to venue across the U.S., but here, it gets a very special staging in Seifert’s hometown.

Cian Dayrit, ‘Liberties Were Taken’

Root Division, San Francisco
Jan. 22–April 11

Philippines-based artist Cian Dayrit brings embroidered textiles, paintings and multimedia work to Root Division for his first Bay Area solo exhibition. Described as a “counter-cartographer,” Dayrit uses the language of maps to illustrate complex layers of power and legacies of colonialism. His dense, richly textured and gorgeously tactile art speaks of marginalized communities in the Philippines while tapping into larger global resistance movements. This show will have a special resonance in SoMa, the center of San Francisco’s Filipino community.

Ethel Revita, ‘Ethereal Material’

Creativity Explored, San Francisco
Jan. 23–March 29

While Revita has created artwork at Creativity Explored since 1994, this is her first solo exhibition at the space. Her works on paper are filled with repeated shapes and thin strips of color, but there’s a dynamic irregularity to her pattern-making. Rendered in marker and watercolor (often in delicate jewel tones), Revita’s compositions are both deeply satisfying and a little off-kilter, the perfect recipe for long, slow looking.

‘Artist as Witness’

SOMArts, San Francisco
Jan. 25, 7:30–10 p.m.

Artist and filmmaker Adrian L. Burrell hosts a night of screenings at SOMArts that brings together short films by Burrell, Erina C. Alejo, Aurora Brachman and Imani Dennison (plus a poetry reading by Mimi Tempestt). Come for stories of womanhood, identity, community and overlooked histories, stay for a rare chance to view short films en masse (and take in a post-screening artist conversation).

Ruby Neri, ‘Taking the Deep Dive’

Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis
Jan. 26–May 5

In a month that opens with a Viola Frey show, it’s only logical to follow the through-line of Northern California ceramics to Ruby Neri, whose figurative bronzes and ceramics pick up on Frey’s flea-market aesthetics and take them to a cheerfully zany place. Her smiling flowers, nude women and technicolor finishes are by turns monumental and unhinged. This is her first solo museum show.

‘Folds’

Personal Space, Vallejo
Jan. 26–March 9

Bodies enter the landscape in the next group exhibition at Personal Space, which includes a smattering of local artists alongside heavy-hitters like Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar. Documentation of actions or interventions, like Xandra Ibarra’s excellent Turn Around Sidepiece (a 2018 video in which the artist poses atop a spinning chunk of marble), expand the show beyond the confines of its storefront walls.

Maya Gurantz, ‘The Plague Archives’

de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University
Jan. 28–June 14

Exciting things are happening down in Santa Clara. Ciara Ennis, the new director at the de Saisset, Santa Clara University’s art museum, first brought a lovely and meditative Julia Haft-Candell show to the collegiate space. (For those who missed it, Haft-Candell’s work will also be on view at Rebecca Camacho this month.) Next up is an installation from Los Angeles artist Maya Gurantz, filled with video, archival material and interactive elements that chart the history of epidemics and outbreaks — and their disastrous side-effects, including racism, paranoia and mistreatment of vulnerable populations.

The morning after New Year’s Day, one of my oldest friends in San Francisco very suddenly, quite unexpectedly, died. His name was Pete Doolittle, and if you didn’t know him personally, you might know his distinctive paintings that were most often rendered on discarded window panes.

Pete’s loss is a significant one for an awful lot of folks in San Francisco. His friends, his family, his fans, his neighbors in the Haight. But it’s a loss for the city too. Because to me, Pete Doolittle was one of the last bastions of a San Francisco underground that has in many ways vanished — one that I am grateful to have experienced by his side.

I first met Pete in 2002, when we were both adrift and trying to find our feet in San Francisco. We were newbies in the city and I was introduced to him by a mutual friend who knew Pete from Minnesota. Pete, 25 at the time, wasn’t a professional artist yet, but he sure did doodle on bar napkins a lot. He still went by his birth name, which he hated. I’ll leave it unsaid out of respect, but it’s still the secret name I call him by in my head.

Back when we met, San Francisco was awash with folks like me and Pete: struggling creative types with quiet ambitions that mostly had to do with avoiding boring jobs and/or living conventional lives. We were chronically broke and barely feeding ourselves, but we always managed to acquire beer. We both had stints of couch surfing. I was just learning how to hustle enough to scrape by but Pete was already well-versed in the practice, and an enthusiastic teacher.

Pete was the first person who ever showed me how to dumpster dive. I don’t remember much about the location now, but I do remember that he had a very specific pair of socks he wore for such occasions. They were knee-high, stripy and in no way impervious to filth, but the look of unabashed glee he got every time he pulled them on was completely infectious.

One of Pete’s most memorable dumpster scores was a child’s Spider-Man costume. He recovered the outfit, somehow managed to squeeze into it, and took it upon himself to go down to Pier 39 to tap dance in the street for tourists. He looked so patently ridiculous, passersby didn’t know whether to laugh at him or pity him. Either way, something about this grown man in that tiny costume inspired audiences to cough up. He wound up making a stack of cash that day. We celebrated with whiskey that night.

Pete was generous with whatever he had. I still have a Haight Ashbury Youth Outreach handbook that Pete proudly hand-delivered to me that first year, for the sake of my survival. Inside are listings for free health, dental and eye care resources, places to get free food, clothing and showers, instructions on how to get social security assistance and even information about how to escape abusive relationships. It also happens to contain step-by-step instructions on how to “safely” inject narcotics (actual quote: “Not in yer neck!”) and what not to do if someone is overdosing (“Do not inject the person with speed.”)

I have held onto the book all of these years, partly because it is a perfect time capsule of San Francisco street culture in the early 2000s, and partly because it reminds me vividly of my early friendship with Pete. He somehow came by this tiny goldmine of resources and then just willingly handed it over to me.

My admiration for Pete was immediate and born from his scrappiness, confidence and unfiltered saltiness. He was the first person who ever pointed out to me that my boyfriend at the time was a monster. “Don’t trust that man,” he told me. “He’s not who you think he is.” When my relationship imploded after a three-month marriage, I was able to return to Pete and congratulate him on being entirely right. He didn’t take the opportunity to gloat. “I’m just glad you’re out of it,” he shrugged.

My abysmal taste in men did, however, provide Pete with something that would turn out to be incredibly important. One night, Pete knew I was at the boyfriend’s home on my own, so he paid me a visit. When he stepped into the living room, Pete was immediately taken aback by a piece of art hanging next to the couch. It was a depiction of an abstract figure and a few pieces of detritus, but it was painted on a framed window pane.

Pete immediately had a multitude of questions about it, none of which I knew the answers to. I have to wonder now what direction Pete’s art would have taken if he’d never seen that window painting in that terrible man’s living room. Pete’s attatchment to that particular format has been so enduring, his name is now more synonymous with windows than probably that original painter.

In 2013, when my second husband died — the man from Minnesota who had originally introduced us — Pete presented me with an incredible gift. I was scrambling to raise money for the funeral and Pete wanted to help. He made a painting to auction off, with all proceeds going into the funeral fund. He opted to paint a rendition of our lost loved one, titled No Umbrella. The first time I saw it, I burst into tears. In simple bold strokes, Pete had captured the essence of Jef entirely. A teddy bear wearing a smiley face, head bowed in sorrow, left out in the rain, hearts clutched in his hand.

In the end, Pete’s painting brought me the single largest donation I received for the funeral. Shortly afterwards, I got a slightly edited version of the painting tattooed on my left forearm. It’s an image I will treasure always.

A few years later, Pete was being a curmudgeon about something, I got mad and we wound up having a major spat that dragged on for two years. It only ended when we finally ran into each other at a punk rock show. As soon as we saw each other face to face again, we just hugged, picked up where we’d left off and forgot all about our stupid rift. I let him back into my life and was immediately relieved to have done so. Now, I am enormously grateful that we found a way to fix things before it was too late.

Much of how I think about Pete has to do with survival. How he helped me to survive in those early years. How he survived as a fiercely independent artist in one of the most expensive cities on Earth. For him to be gone is still entirely unfathomable to me. I am only grateful that he will live on in the many colorful panes of glass he left hanging in every corner of the city. As long as they’re still here, part of him will be too.

San Francisco-born-and-raised artist Nora Lalle’s life has always found its way back to film photography. After being laid off during the pandemic, for example, Lalle visited Photoworks SF on Market Street, where she saw a job posting, applied, and soon began working among fellow film photo lovers.

“I started meeting people who were putting on group shows, and sort of embraced my identity as an artist within that,” Lalle tells KQED. Later, in August 2023, the Tenderloin gallery Book & Job exhibited her photography in a solo show. “Then I was like, ‘I guess I am an artist. I guess I am a photographer,’” she says.

Even before that level of personal validation, Lalle had sought to create a “well-rounded source of inspiration” for other photographers in the form of a physical, high-quality art magazine. In 2021, she founded Pamplemousse Magazine – a film photography art magazine containing basically just photos, an extension of her zine-making past. A small but engaged Instagram following responded to quarterly open calls, activating the Bay Area’s ready talents, and Photoworks became a host site for Pamplemousse release parties and events.

“I hope that we can be a cutting edge, discover people before they hit success — whatever that means,” says Lalle, wanting to pay forward the opportunities she’s had herself. “I want to nurture people’s voices that I believe in, and give them the opportunity to spread their art with the world.”

Lalle took an online workshop on magazine making with London’s magCulture in February 2023. The workshop began: “There is no money in magazines.”

Lalle powered on, discovering that it’s actually cheaper to print a magazine in England, even with the exchange rate and shipping costs. She began working with an London printing facility, Park Communications Ltd., and landed a deal with Ra & Olly Ltd., a U.K. distributor that facilitates mailings and works to get Pamplemousse on bookstore and magazine shop shelves around the world.

The magazine has grown in other ways too. It now provides more context to the photographs it presents, with artist interviews, articles, essays, personal statements, and more.

“It is a very vulnerable thing to put out each magazine,” says Lalle. “It’s my taste. It’s my selection of people. It’s my vision. I’m very critical of myself: each magazine I usually find something wrong or that I’d change once it’s printed, but any time people are into it, react positively, it’s just very validating, and I just feel like people can tell how passionate I am.”

It’s Lalle as independent publisher, editor-in-chief, event planner, and more. Dedicated volunteers like Senior Editor Jess Rhodes, Associate Editor Camila Gutiérrez Cordova and Graphic Designer Hannah Mendenhall Schmuck work on each issue, and Frank Lalle and Sue Schwartz help with consulting, planning and staffing. Pamplemousse now publishes three times a year, in the spring, summer and fall.

Lalle is drawn to film photography for its “precious and intentional” nature. It’s a grainy, tangible way to document life. For many photographers, the mechanics of the camera elevate the simple tool into a memorable experience of translating complex emotions into a still image.

“Each image that comes out of that is more special,” she says, noting that the constraints of film, like a roll’s limited capacity, the cost of developing and printing, and the specific looks of varying film stocks, all guide artistic exploration.

Lalle seeks to feature talent from all over the world, while staying grounded in the Bay Area. In addition to local events in San Francisco and the East Bay, she tables at book fairs, art fairs, exhibitions and festivals domestically and internationally.

With a tagline of “Fresh Voices, Classic Formats,” Pamplemousse aims to highlight creativity and originality, and to platform underrepresented, emerging artistic voices. (Occasionally, the magazine features established artists.) Lalle’s goal is to reach people who may not know anything about photography or even consider themselves art lovers.

Unfortunately, sustainable business models for physical magazines are more past relic than modern practice. Bay Area sponsors help make Pamplemousse a reality while she applies for grants to secure funding. Lalle sees photo walks, pop-ups and meet-ups as a means to keep fostering the Bay Area’s local film photography community, along with name recognition. “It has started happening where people say, ‘Oh I’ve heard of that,’” she says.

True success, Lalle says, will mean paying the team that works on Pamplemousse, as well as the featured artists. Long term, Lalle can imagine forming a nonprofit to expand operations beyond the print magazine into workshops, events and a physical exhibition space.

In the meantime, Lalle encourages film photographers to submit to Pamplemousse’s open calls — even if they are not chosen for one issue, they could be invited to contribute to a future one.

Four years and 10 issues into her life as the publisher of an independent film photography magazine, Lalle reflects, “Now I don’t know what else I’d be doing, honestly.”

Pamplemousse Magazine can be found online and on Instagram. The print magazine can be found at numerous Bay Area locations, including the Harvey Milk Photo Center Library, Photoworks SF, Glass Key Photo, Underdog Film Lab and Dog Eared Books. A call for submissions to the Spring 2025 issue is open now.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has announced more than $2.5 million in 2025 grants to 88 different Bay Area arts organizations.

The largest grant in the region will go to San Francisco’s Bay Area Video Coalition, which was awarded $100,000 to support a fellowship for documentary filmmakers and a film digitization and preservation program. The second highest grant, totaling $85,000, will go to Oakland’s Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, a restorative justice organization that brings victims and offenders together.

Just days before a new administration takes office, widespread unease remains about the future of the NEA. During President Trump’s first term, he made annual attempts to eliminate NEA funding, categorizing both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as “wasteful and unnecessary funding.” His attempts failed due to a bipartisan effort in Congress.

A full list of 2025’s Bay Area recipients is below, organized alphabetically by city.

Berkeley

AXIS Dance Company
$40,000
Purpose: To support AXIS’s national tour of dance performances and engagement activities.

Berkeley Repertory Theatre
$40,000
Purpose: To support the creation, development, and production of new work in the Ground Floor program.

City of Berkeley, California
$40,000
Purpose: To support a competitive grant program for nonprofit organizations.

Mahea Uchiyama Center for International Dance
$25,000
Purpose: To support the development and presentation of Popoloheno – Songs of Resilience and Joy.

National Film Preserve, Ltd. (Telluride Film Festival)
$20,000
Purpose: To support community and education initiatives at the Telluride Film Festival.

Oaktown Jazz Workshops
$10,000
Purpose: To support a series of jazz concerts in Oakland public libraries.

Regents of the University of California, Berkeley (on behalf of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive)
$40,000
Purpose: To support an exhibition exploring African American quiltmaking traditions in California and related programming.

Transit Books
$40,000
Purpose: To support the publication and promotion of books of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, including work in translation.

Burlingame

Kids & Art Foundation
$10,000
Purpose: To support healing arts workshops for pediatric cancer patients and their families.

Campbell

Local Color
$20,000
Purpose: To support the Mural Museum, a collaborative community-based public art initiative.

Claremont

Prageeta Sharma
$25,000
Purpose: To support a creative writing fellowship.

Monterey Park

Vincent Price Art Museum Foundation
$40,000
Purpose: To support a retrospective exhibition on Mexican American altar maker, or Chicana altarista, Ofelia Esparza (b. 1932), and an accompanying catalogue.

Oakland

Artist Magnet Justice Alliance
$10,000
Purpose: To support the development and workshop production of an immersive opera.

Madeleine Cravens
$25,000
Purpose: To support a creative writing fellowship.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces
$85,000
Purpose: To support a participatory research and trauma-informed study exploring how the design of the built environment can support individual and collective healing for at-risk populations.

Diamano Coura West African Dance Co.
$30,000
Purpose: To support the Collage des Cultures Africaines festival.

Maurya Kerr
$25,000
Purpose: To support a creative writing fellowship.

Omnira Institute
$10,000
Purpose: To support the Black-Eyed Pea Festival, a celebration of Black music and art.

Open Architecture Collaborative, Inc.
$25,000
Purpose: To support Pathways to Equity, a leadership development program for community design practitioners.

Opera Cultura
$15,000
Purpose: To support performances of Cuentos, an opera by composer and librettist Hector Armienta.

Piedmont Choirs (Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs)
$20,000
Purpose: To support a choral opera project.

Project Bandaloop (aka BANDALOOP)
$20,000
Purpose: To support the creation and presentation of FLOCK, a vertical dance theater work with a multilingual score, with accompanying engagement activities.

Redwood City

TheatreWorks Silicon Valley
$10,000
Purpose: To support the Bay Area Core Writers Group

San Anselmo

Enriching Lives through Music
$30,000
Purpose: To support personnel costs for a free music composition program for students.

Whippoorwill Arts Inc
$25,000
Purpose: To support the Music aLIVE program, which will provide paid performance opportunities at non-traditional venues for professional roots musicians.

San Francisco

San Francisco Symphony
$30,000
Purpose: To support an orchestral performance project.

3rd i South Asian Independent Film
$15,000
Purpose: To support 3rd i Films’ San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival and associated public programming.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet
$20,000
Purpose: To support staff salaries and artist fees for the creation and presentation of a new work with choreography by Artistic Director Alonzo King.

American Conservatory Theatre Foundation
$40,000
Purpose: To support actors’ salaries for the production of Co-Founders, a new play with music by Adesha Adefela, Ryan Nicole Austin, and Beau Lewis.

Asian Art Museum Foundation of San Francisco
$30,000
Purpose: To support an exhibition and associated programming that focuses on contemporary West Asian perspectives.

Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center (APICC)
$50,000
Purpose: To support the United States of Asian America Festival.

Aunt Lute Foundation
$75,000
Purpose: To support the production and promotion of audiobooks, as well as updates to Aunt Lute Books’ database platform.

Bay Area Video Coalition, Inc. (BAVC)
$100,000
Purpose: To support the MediaMaker Fellowship and Preservation Access programs.

Bridge Live Arts
$12,000
Purpose: To support Bridge Live Arts’ dance and leadership festival.

California Lawyers for the Arts, Inc.
$45,000
Purpose: To support the statewide expansion of a creative workforce development program for formerly incarcerated individuals.

Canyon Cinema Foundation
$20,000
Purpose: To support a curatorial fellowship, screening series, and national touring program of experimental film and video works.

Catapult Film Fund
$50,000
Purpose: To support year-round artist development programs for independent documentary
filmmakers.

Center for Asian American Media (CAAM)
$30,000
Purpose: To support CAAMFest, a media arts festival dedicated to Asian and Asian American cinematic works, and related public programming celebrating Asian American culture.

Center for the Art of Translation
$45,000
Purpose: To support the publication and promotion of international literature.

Circus Bella
$30,000
Purpose: To support Circus in the Parks.

CounterPulse
$15,000
Purpose: To support the Artist Residency and Commissioning program, which provides space and support for emerging and mid-career choreographers.

CubaCaribe
$10,000
Purpose: To support the CubaCaribe Festival of Dance & Music.

Cultural Conservancy Sacred Land Foundation
$50,000
Purpose: To support the reconstruction and restoration of Native California traditional dance regalia.

Eldergivers
$20,000
Purpose: To support art classes and exhibition opportunities, with a focus for older adults.

Eyes and Ears Foundation (San Francisco International Arts Festival)
$20,000
Purpose: To support the San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Flyaway Productions
$25,000
Purpose: To support the creation of a new work by choreographer Jo Kreiter.

Foglifter Press
$15,000
Purpose: To support the publication of the literary journal Foglifter.

Frameline
$20,000
Purpose: To support Frameline Voices, an online showcase of curated short films.

Friends of SCRAP, Inc (SCRAP)
$25,000
Purpose: To support SCRAP’s Sustainable Fashion Design program for underserved youth.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
$50,000
Purpose: To support the Gray Area Festival and associated programming focused on the intersection of arts and technology.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
$50,000 San Francisco, CA
Purpose: To support a mixed-methods study examining how new media artist training programs in the San Francisco Bay Area are using generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Patrick Holian
$25,000
Purpose: To support a creative writing fellowship.

Jewish Film Institute
$25,000
Purpose: To support the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and related public programming.

Kitchen Sisters Productions
$25,000
Purpose: To support production of The Keepers, a podcast and multimedia series exploring the work of archivists, librarians, historians, curators, and collectors from around the world.

Kronos Performing Arts Association (Kronos Quartet)
$40,000
Purpose: To support the Kronos Festival.

Kulintang Arts (Kularts)
$15,000
Purpose: To support the creation and presentation of Burden of Proof, a new dance theater project exploring the colonial legacy of Pilipinx nurses in the United States.

Kultivate Labs
$15,000
Purpose: To support the Balay Kreative Growth Masterclass Series.

McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund
$25,000
Purpose: To support staff salaries for the publication of the literary journal McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.

New Conservatory (New Conservatory Theatre Center)
$20,000
Purpose: To support the development and world premiere production of Simple Mexican Pleasures by Eric Reyes Loo at New Conservatory Theatre Center.

ODC
$15,000
Purpose: To support the creation and presentation of new works by Artistic Director Brenda Way, Associate Choreographer Kimi Okada, and a guest artist.

ODC Theater
$15,000
Purpose: To support the fourth annual State of Play Festival, and additional performances at ODC Theater.

Opera Parallele
$25,000
Purpose: To support the West Coast premiere of the reorchestrated version of Harvey Milk by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie.

Pocket Opera
$15,000
Purpose: To support the creation and development of Hansel y Gretel: Una Aventura Operistica Animada! an animated/live-action hybrid film of the opera Hansel and Gretel by composer Engelbert Humperdinck.

Jacques J. Rancourt
$25,000
Purpose: To support a creative writing fellowship

Roxie Theater
$20,000
Purpose: To support a curated series of Spanish-language films and associated public programming.

San Francisco Cinematheque
$25,000
Purpose: To support Crossroads, a festival dedicated to experimental film, video, and performance-based cinema.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP)
$20,000
Purpose: To support a contemporary music performance project featuring composer Tania León’s Indígena.

San Francisco Jazz Organization (SFJAZZ)
$30,000
Purpose: To support the SFJAZZ Collective’s tour of new works inspired by the visual arts.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
$20,000
Purpose: To support a posthumous retrospective and an accompanying catalogue on artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013).

Stanford Jazz Workshop (SJW)
$20,000
Purpose: To support the Stanford Jazz Festival.

Women’s Audio Mission (WAM)
$45,000
Purpose: To support Girls on the Mic, a free music and media arts training and mentorship program primarily with a focus on girls and gender-diverse youth.

World Arts West
$60,000
Purpose: To support the World Arts West Dance Festival.

Yerba Buena Arts & Events
$50,000
Purpose: To support a series of multidisciplinary arts programs at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival.

Youth Speaks, Inc.
$45,000
Purpose: To support the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival.

ZYZZYVA, Inc.
$12,500
Purpose: To support the publication and promotion of the journal ZYZZYVA.

San Jose

City of San Jose, California
$20,000
Purpose: To support an artist-led community engagement program.

Opera San Jose, Inc.
$25,000
Purpose: To support a new production of Zorro by composer and librettist Hector Armienta.

San Jose Jazz Society
$20,000
Purpose: To support the Latin Tropical stage of the San Jose Jazz Society’s Summer Fest.

San Jose Multicultural Artists Guild Inc. (aka SJMAG)
$10,000
Purpose: To support the production of the musical Crowns by Regina Taylor.

San Jose Museum of Art Association
$50,000
Purpose: To support the presentation of The Imaginative Landscape: Pao Houa Her, an exhibition and catalogue.

San Jose Taiko Group, Inc.
$35,000
Purpose: To support the production of Taiko Town, a series of online educational videos designed to share Asian American stories.

San Mateo

Zawaya
$10,000
Purpose: To support concert performances.

San Rafael

Marin Shakespeare Company
$20,000
Purpose: To support the development and a chamber reading of a musical theater work based on Rebecca Solnit‘s children’s book Cinderella Liberator, in partnership with Lauren Gunderson.

Saratoga

Montalvo Association (Montalvo Arts Center)
$10,000
Purpose: To support a hybrid remote and on-site artist residency program at the Montalvo Arts Center.

Sebastopol

Sebastopol Center for the Arts
$30,000
Purpose: To support an artist residency program.

Voice of Roma (VOR)
$35,000
Purpose: To support the presentation of the Herdeljezi Roma Festival in multiple Romani communities across the United States.

Stanford

Stanford University, Leland Stanford Junior University (on behalf of Stanford Live)
$45,000
Purpose: To support a series of performances at Stanford Live, with associated public engagement programs.

Walnut Creek

California Symphony Orchestra, Inc. (a.k.a. California Symphony)
$20,000
Purpose: To support the Young American Composer-in-Residence program.

In the month since I first visited the 2024 SECA Art Award exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, much has changed. Not to the show itself: The delicate paintings by Rupy C. Tut, Rose D’Amato’s signage-inspired work and Angela Hennesy’s elegant, elegiac sculptures all remain as they did on opening night. But the world around them has shifted. My eyes, especially, are seeing things differently.

I think this is a good thing.

Art is made in a particular time and place, drawing from an artist’s unique experiences, interests and aesthetic sensibilities. But it also needs to exist beyond its maker; once a piece of art has left the studio and entered the public realm, it becomes something else (a different else) to each person who views it.

As of Jan. 7, I can’t help but see Hennessy, D’Amato and Tut’s work in relation to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. How do we describe a place that no longer exists? How do we voice our grief? How do we imagine what happens next?

The first gallery, painted a deep navy blue, is filled with Tut’s paintings on linen and hemp paper. Her process is meticulous. Tut creates her paint with a mortar and pestle, grinding vivid pigments into powder and mixing them with gum arabic and patiently gathered rainwater.

But that’s behind the scenes. What’s visible to SFMOMA visitors are the thousands of tiny brushstrokes on her surfaces. In The Dreamweaver ਸੁਫ਼ਨੇਕਾਰ (sufnekaar), a figure lies atop a mountain range, its peacefully reclining body made up of bushes, grasses and flowers in every shade of yellow and green. Above, a cloudy sky is rendered in concentric white lines on that same deep navy. In Tut’s world, every whole is made of many, many, disparate parts.

To me, these pieces are now a reminder of all the transitory, possibly overlooked elements that make up a familiar landscape or a family home. In a pair of works on paper, Beeji da Ghar (My Grandmother’s Home) ਬੀਜੀ ਦਾ ਘਰ and Beeji de Ghar (My Grandmother’s Home for Me) ਬੀਜੀ ਦੇ ਘਰ, Tut offers two disorienting views of a house’s interior spaces, one closer to reality, the other a dreamscape. Each is teeming with patterns: lush greenery, pink bricks, those watery stars on blue.

Tut talks about being the author of her own story, of fashioning narratives out of traditional materials and methods, but drawing from imagination more than strict representation. It’s this capacity to dream — and self-fashion — that appeals to me now.

In the next gallery, this one painted a chocolatey brown, D’Amato’s paintings, photographs and a video installation in a 1955 Chevrolet panel truck capture a disappearing landscape. In large paintings, words like “Mission Chevrolet,” “emporium” and “high style” repeat and reflect as if glimpsed through a rearview mirror.

There’s a shimming, fleeting quality to D’Amato’s work, despite the precision of her lettering and the sturdy materials she’s referencing: oxidized metal, curving windshields and gleaming chrome. Her relationship to time — and its markers — is strange. D’Amato’s photographs, gelatin silver prints of friends posed in front of Mission shops, are oddly timeless. Similarly, the video projected in the Chevy (transferred from Super 8) captures what could be scenes from over a half century ago.

Yet despite the glossy vintage car in the gallery’s center, the artwork in this room isn’t nostalgic. It’s more about noticing the traces of past activity in one’s everyday, urban surroundings, and honoring that activity with your own. What are paintings if not indoor signs? “Stop here” reads Roadtest and Multicheck (From the Chevrolet Six Construction Site), implying, “look at me and where I came from, while I still exist.”

The show’s final gallery is its most pared down in terms of palette and display, but it hits the hardest. In front of a wide bench, Hennessy has arranged Wake Work, over a dozen sculptures that resemble floral memorial wreaths, all made out of black and white synthetic hair. Set against a black-painted wall and platform, they form an altar of recognition and mourning, each circular form distinguished by its own complicated pattern of rosettes, braids and gauzy drapings.

In the thin catalog accompanying the SECA show, Hennessy, in conversation with California College of the Arts dean and professor Jacqueline Francis, talks about beauty as a means towards an end. “The beauty is what gets people to look,” Hennessy says. “The beauty makes difficult things more accessible. I don’t want to use beauty to minimize the horror or grief or whatever those feelings are. But beauty will bring us in and hold us there a little bit longer.”

As visitors sit and contemplate, held in thrall by the arrangement, Hennessy casts Grief Spell, a three-minute sound piece on loop. A single voice begins, followed by several others, “For the exiled, the profiled, the vaporized before your eyes.” Together, they chant, “We called the bones in the archive, they say genocide.”

The spell is haunting, as intended. It’s a reminder that grief is rarely a passive experience. It comes from somewhere and, if we’re lucky, can be directed back towards something. Hennessy’s spell does not allow audiences to ignore the Palestinian experience in Gaza, just as her sculptures refuse to let any death to go unmarked. In their beautiful, intricate opulence, their underlying purpose cannot be ignored.

Existing alongside unfathomable disasters near and far, the grief can knock us horizontal. Before we right ourselves again, perhaps the answer is to emulate Tut’s Dreamweaver, turning our laid-out bodies into fertile seed beds.

‘2024 SECA Art Award: Rose D’Amato, Angela Hennessy, Rupy C. Tut’ is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through May 26, 2025. The exhibition is free and open to the public on the museum’s second floor.

San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum will soon have a new director and CEO. The museum announced today the appointment of Soyoung Lee, who most recently worked at the Harvard Art Museums as chief curator.

Way back in April 2023, current director Jay Xu announced his plans to step down this year, giving the museum board plenty of time to launch an international search for his successor. Xu has led the Asian Art Museum since 2008.

Prior to her work at Harvard, Lee spent 15 years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its first curator of Korean art. Her most recent exhibitions at Harvard include Future Minded: New Works in the Collection and Earthly Delights: 6,000 Years of Asian Ceramics. Since 2024, she has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where she recently gave a talk on the history of collecting Asian art in American museums, and discussed the future of collecting Asian and Asian diaspora art.

“What a singular honor to be leading this premier institution, and in the beautiful city of San Francisco,” Lee was quoted saying in today’s announcement. “It is thrilling to imagine charting an audacious path for the future of Asian and Asian diasporic art and culture — for everyone to experience.”

The Asian Art Museum has grown considerably during the 17 years of Xu’s leadership, both in terms of its collection and square footage. In 2019, the museum raised $100 million to refurbish and expand exhibition spaces. The resulting 13,000-square-foot Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion opened in 2021 with an interactive teamLab exhibition.

Lee steps into the position during a difficult time for Bay Area arts institutions. The Contemporary Jewish Museum initiated layoffs and closed its doors to the public on Dec. 15, 2024 for what it hopes will be a year-long reconfiguring of its expenses. In its 2023 tax filings, nearby San Francisco Museum of Modern Art reported a deficit of over $30 million.

While the Asian Art Museum is partially funded by the city of San Francisco, the majority of its $38 million operating budget comes from contributions. It showed a $7.5 million deficit in its most recent tax filings.

Lee steps into the role in April 2025.