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.

Outside of Tom Marioni’s studio on Howard Street, directly facing the great white side of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s cruise-ship-like extension, I find the artist and a few friends smoking cigars. After some niceties, we head inside to begin Marioni’s long-running conceptual piece The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, which has taken place on Wednesdays in San Francisco since 1970.

As an artist and curator, Tom Marioni, 87, is perhaps best known for starting the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, which, in his own words, was created “as an excuse to party.” In 1970, it was the first alternative art space (probably) in the country.

His inaugural show was Sound Sculpture As, a concert of actions by sculptors that included Paul Kos’ now-famous The Sound of Ice Melting. He also invited a young Chris Burden to do his first-ever performance piece at MOCA, an “undercover hippie” act in which the artist had a star pattern stabbed into his chest, shaved his head, then donned a fresh business suit. MOCA closed in 1984.

Today, in Marioni’s studio, there’s an easy formality to the social assembly. Etiquette is paired with hands-on hosting. I’m instructed on where to leave my coat and I watch the regulars assume their positions on purple-topped bar stools running along a handmade, curved bar. Above the bar are seven framed photographs of men I know I’m supposed to recognize.

I sit down at one of the curved brown leather bar booths, which I learn were purchased from a Third Street bar called Breen’s, now gone. Marioni tells me he used to host the event there; NEA funding, he says, meant the beer was free.

“Breen’s had the longest bar in San Francisco,” Marioni tells me. “It served German food, with a steam table offering sauerbraten every Wednesday.” When Breen’s closed in 1979, he moved the piece next door to the also now-gone Jerry and Johnnie’s and printed credit cards for free beer on meeting days.

“I’m a born-again conceptual artist,” Marioni says with a smile while I accept my glass of Pacifico. The sentence spins off like a pick-up line. During the gathering, it is impossible to tell how many times the stories being traded across the table have been told.

For the next three hours, I am audience to the lost art of holding court. I become vaguely concerned while realizing how rarely I actually see people take the formalities of social pleasantries seriously. Structure is required for good conversation and the charming group of seven or so people gathered around the bar really understand this.

This is illustrated, in part, by several attendees who make up elegant glasses of water, each mixed then served with precisely three ice cubes, gingerly administered with tongs. The median age in the room must be 85, so one imagines there’s a limit on day drinking.

The act of drinking with friends is approached vivaciously. I enjoy myself entirely as gossip, light philosophy, art polemics, and the schedules of various opera houses across North America are tossed around the room.

“Do you remember that woman’s name,” Marioni queries, “I was handcuffed to her for three days?”

“Oh! You mean the nun!” Dan Max excitedly recalls.

“What was her name?”

“I can’t say.”

Someone walks in, catches up quickly, and has the answer: they’re talking about Linda Montano. We speak briefly of the New York artist Tehching Hsieh, to whom the Linda in question was tied to for a full year in the psychologically wounding endurance performance Rope Piece, before the conversation turns once again.

At one point Marioni picks up an invitation to his Jan. 12 event at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, tied to his 2024 book Social Art and then bends down, sweeping a few crumbs onto it with a hand brush, before flicking them off and then extending the card to me.

Lydi Titcomb, an art collector tactfully bartending (this is in accordance with a strict “no art collectors except in disguise” rule posted behind the bar), has arrived from San Francisco’s mayoral inauguration.

“It was wonderful,” she preens, in an elegant fitted cap and long-stranded necklace. “He invited everyone in for bagels and fresh cream cheese.” The decorum felt performative, pleasant. I couldn’t quite tell if it was sincere or ironic. I thought of Tippi Hedren in the pet store scene that opens Hitchcock’s The Birds.

What is conceptual art, anyway? It has a sort of “if you have to ask, it’s already too late” feeling. I asked every so often anyway. Nothing seemed to count.

Dan Max, an artist who’s been attending these meetings since the ’70s, jumps in to share a $100 dollar gift card presented to him by his local coffee shop for being “the best customer.” We admire the lamination. Such a card, and its hand-scrawled note of gratitude, could find its way into the framed objects on the wall, which included a matcha whisk carefully paired with a shaving brush and a collection of unusual glass beakers.

Anything considered with sensitivity, intention or a bit of humor might become a work of art.

The youngest attendee, and the latest person to be issued a “bartender diploma” by Marioni is the artist Alberto Cuadros, who alongside Laura Black and MP Knowlton runs Society of Art Los Angeles (SALA). Cuadros and Black are in San Francisco to broaden their organization’s scope, in part by drinking beer with Marioni.

Many of those gathered tell me they came to San Francisco in the ’70s to have a beer with Tom Marioni. If you were interested in conceptual art, it was the place to be. Cuadros, who hadn’t yet gone to art school when he started attending 10 years ago, echoes the sentiment.

“What I appreciate most is the link between what’s upcoming and what existed before,” Cuadros says of his first visits to Marioni’s weekly gatherings. “I would get these epic educations from 5:00 to 8:00 and then burst out to Howard Street, and feel like I was tapping into this epic portal to San Francisco.”

Thinking about Marioni’s project and how they too might imbue everyday life with art, Cuadros and Black have started centering their programming around the concept of a living archive. The organization’s idea is that it’s possible to bridge the past and the present through collaboration.

They place an emphasis on ongoing contributions and reinterpretations, Black says, “often involving diverse voices from the community.” Following Marioni’s lead, they hope to open a space downtown that invites people to engage with a non-esoteric and immediate setting for social art. The “art bar” (Cuadros has made several), is a guiding model.

Continuity is rare. The recent fires in California remind me of how often we imagine permanence, when really, we’ve built that idea on unstable structures. There have been so many declarations of the Bay Area’s stagnation, but what isn’t moving towards decay?

The fact that Tom Marioni has for 55 years been hosting a more-or-less weekly social gathering for friends to drink beer together excites me. A living archive is constituted by presence. It can happen when we gather; it is contained by repeated stories, by conversations, by talking with a friend over a beer.

The one downside of the exhibition RugLife, on view through April 20 at the Museum of Craft and Design, is that you cannot touch the art. In a group show of technicolor textiles, lusciously thick piles and sculptural weavings, the urge to run one’s hands over the wall-hanging rugs, especially, is difficult to contain. (I don’t think I’m the only one starved for texture in a world of slick surfaces and shiny screens.)

The truth is there’s plenty more going on in RugLife than sensory evocation. The show, guest curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox, features the work of 14 contemporary, international artists whose rugs engage with issues as wide-ranging as climate change, geopolitics and upended cultural traditions.

To accomplish this, several artists take advantage of the rug’s inherent three-dimensionality. In one of the show’s opening pieces, Liselot Cobelen’s California Drought (from the Dryland series), geographic features are rendered in different pile heights, creating a fluffy topographical map in gradations of green, brown, white and blue. The effect is psychologically scrambling, acting as both a welcome and an indictment: Here is a soft, luxurious textile work that documents the damage we’ve done to our natural landscape.

Conversely, Andrea Zittel’s Carpet Furniture: Drop Leaf Table is exceedingly flat — made of that rough, barely-there carpet that signals, more than anything, “easy to clean.” A dyed design on the carpets’ surface shows the layout of a dining table and eight chairs, two place-settings laid out as examples on their nonexistent placemats.

It’s an enigmatic piece. Is it a template for home furnishing, or a replacement for furniture itself? Much in the way designers of interior spaces seek to engineer the interactions within them, it could be that reducing a centerpiece of family life to utter flatness might actually allow for new, anarchical relationships to form. (It’s worth noting there is no head of the table in Zittel’s layout.)

Rugs, it’s clear by now, are potent symbols of home, comfort and belonging. They fill domestic space and demarcate it. They roll up and move to new places, bringing with them a reminder of their former locales. One of the most poetic pieces in the show comes from Stéphanie Saadé. With Stage of Life, the artist stretches a family carpet brought from Lebanon to fit a new space, slicing it into dozens of thin strips so that it fills the exact distance of her Paris apartment’s hallway.

It’s a simple, beautiful gesture that captures the elongated feelings of homesickness and nostalgia — a pulling toward a past and a place now out of reach.

Other standouts in RugLife include Ali Cha’aban’s Grandpa’s Monobloc, a Persian rug–covered plastic chair imbued with throne-like regality; Sonya Clark’s Comb Carpet, a tactility seductive “weaving” made from hundreds of black plastic combs; and Oksana Levchenya’s Pac-Man and Cossacks, a traditional kylym rug with some delightfully non-traditional imagery. And be sure to spend some quality time with Azra Akšamija’s mesmerizing animation, a glitchy, shimmery representation of Yugoslavia’s art history.

RugLife is, in all, a perfect Museum of Craft and Design show, and a great reminder of the importance of this small museum in the Bay Area’s cultural landscape. Don’t let the overly punny exhibition title — or its subtitle, “covering new ground” (groan) — keep you away. The MCD is doing the work so many institutions struggle to do: connecting poignant artistic efforts to the familiar, everyday objects in our own lives.

‘RugLife’ is on view at the Museum of Craft and Design (2569 Third St., San Francisco) through April 20, 2025.

The Bolinas Museum has named Jessica Shaefer as its new executive director. The appointment comes just three months after Louisa Gloger left the position to lead Headlands Center for the Arts.

Shaefer’s background is predominantly in public art. She most recently worked at Google as a program lead for its artist in residence program, commissioning large-scale, site-specific art installations. Prior to that she was part of the Meta Open Arts team, leading programming and partnerships with organizations like the Hammer Museum, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and the art fair UNTITLED, Art.

Locally, her most publicly accessible work came about through Sites Unseen, a project to activate alleyways in downtown San Francisco with site-specific artworks and events, specifically around the Yerba Buena neighborhood. She has previously served as a board member at The Lab and for Artadia, a national granting nonprofit.

The Bolinas Museum, founded in 1983, operates four separate galleries around a shared courtyard in a historic building in “downtown Bolinas.” Always free, its exhibitions are dedicated to the art and history of coastal Marin. Upcoming shows include Charles Hobson’s artist books, Arline Mathieu’s meditative works on paper and photographic-based work by Mary Daniel Hobson, all opening Feb. 8.

“I am excited to continue to expand the museum’s role as a community-centered space and steward of the rich cultural heritage of the area while supporting deepened engagement with new voices and diverse artistic practices,” Shaefer is quoted saying in today’s announcement.

Shaefer’s track record of bringing artwork out of galleries and into everyday life, as well as her experience with public events, appears to represent a new chapter for the Bolinas Museum. Today’s announcement noted that plans are “already underway” to expand community-centered programming and “enhance the museum’s role as a dynamic cultural space.”

With bedazzled basketball court backboards and nets styled in the fashion of Egyptian jewelry, Ann “Sole Sister” Johnson’s exhibition Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It puts an eye-catching spin on San Francisco’s NBA All-Star Game celebrations.

And despite the exhibition’s title, Johnson, a longtime teacher and basketball fan, says the work (on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora from Feb. 5–Mar. 2) was inspired by movies — and none of them are the classic date-night movie Love and Basketball.

Johnson started adorning discarded rims in the mid-’90s, around the same time the documentary Hoop Dreams debuted. She’d noticed that many of her male students had hopes of becoming the next Michael Jordan or “going straight to the league” as a way to get paid to play ball.

“There was no NIL in ’98,” says Johnson. “If they were getting paid it was on the low,” she adds, noting how many students would fall short of their dream without a backup plan.

The landscape may be different 30 years later, but the concept of the “hoop dream” remains, as do issues of money, pressure to perform and lack of professional guidance for many star athletes. “And bottom line is,” Johnson says during a phone call, “you’re still a young Black man. If someone wants to pull you over, they’ll pull you over.”

To highlight these issues, Johnson pulled from Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, a film largely about flipping derogatory images on their head. A major thread in the movie is the artwork of Michael Ray Charles, the visual artist known for remaking racist depictions of African Americans, including a piece Johnson was already a fan of, titled The NBA is Tantastic.

Charles’ artwork and Lee’s film taught Johnson a valuable lesson. It’s one she still shares with her students: “If you look into the work, and not at the work, you start to see the other messages.”

Johnson applied that same maxim to the hoop dream deferred. “The struggles and the pressure,” says Johnson, “that’s what I wanted to explore.”

From a distance, she says, viewers might think her work is pretty. “But then they think about what it means, especially The BlingCatchers,” says Johnson, referring to her dreamcatchers gilded in gold and adorned with miniature basketball shoes.

Raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Johnson now lives in Houston, Texas. While seeking out items with which to decorate her backboards, she didn’t have to look far. “I use Mardi Gras beads, which aren’t hard to find in this area,” says Johnson.

She beaded each row by hand while watching Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series Jazz, the third inspiration for her work. Completing each row of beads on the backboard took two hours; the run time of each episode of Jazz.

For five years straight, she decorated basketball backboards in bright beads, inverted them and added a small video component. The first iteration of the project was originally shown in Houston at Project Row Houses in 1998, her work has only grown since then.

Johnson, a printmaker with an MFA from the Academy of Art in San Francisco, has attended art workshops in the Bay Area for the past three summers. But this is her first solo exhibition on the west coast. A proud Warriors fan, she’s excited to have her work shown while the City hosts NBA All-Star weekend.

But to have it displayed at MoAD is the real achievement, she says. It’s something she’s had in the back of her mind for 20 years.

“I used to walk past there when it first opened,” says Johnson.

‘Love + Basketball: My Freedom Gotta Rim On It’ is on view from Feb. 5–Mar. 2 at MoAD in San Francisco. Deatils here.

Update, Jan. 29, 2025:

After backlash from artists on Instagram, Anh Phoong has increased the first prize of the design competition to $5,000. “We apologize if we offended any artists,” she wrote in a comment on KQED Arts’ Instagram post about the contest. “Without the creatives in this world, the world would be bland, but with you all, it is colorful!”

Original story, Jan. 28, 2025:

On Monday, Anh Phoong, the personal injury attorney and billboard queen of Northern California, announced via Instagram that she’s hosting a design competition for her next billboard.

Artists who submit their entries before the Feb. 10 deadline will be judged based on their “creativity, originality and alignment with the theme,” reads the post. The first-place winner will receive $500, as well as the chance to have their work seen by millions of Californians. Second- and third-place winners will receive $300 and $150, respectively.

Phoong is the head of the Sacramento-based Phoong Law Group, and her ads above major freeways and intersections across the state have become part of California’s cultural fabric.

The 2023 film Hit Man referenced Phoong’s billboards. That same year, drag artist Alpha Andromeda dressed as Phoong for an epic number at San Francisco’s Oasis. (It wasn’t the first time Phoong has been imitated: In a 2024 Los Angeles Times profile, Phoong recounted how she caught another attorney impersonating her online.)

Last May, Phoong was the honorary guest at another drag party at The Stud in San Francisco, where she joined fans for selfies in an ensemble of pink highlights and a leather corset. A few months later, East Bay hip-hop artist and illustrator Señor Gigio paid homage to Phoong by featuring a drawing of the billboard baron in his music video for “Bay Area Blue.”

Most recently, comedian JR De Guzman uploaded a video of him singing a song dedicated to his “ex-girlfriend,” Anh Phoong. In a fictional account of a romance gone wrong, the comedian plays a guitar and sings about how he can’t stop seeing her face in different places — because her advertising is just that damn good.

During a 2024 interview with Dregs One, Phoong said she’s invested millions of dollars into her billboard campaigns. Proudly, Phoong told Dregs, “I’m going to spend money on myself and bet on myself before anyone else.”

Originally from San Jose, Phoong explained how she got a discount on billboards during the COVID-19 pandemic. She bought 300 boards in the Bay Area alone, which allowed her to ramp up her business. “The biggest risks,” said Phoong, “get the biggest rewards.”

She’s since scaled back her operation in the Bay to about 100 billboards, she said. But she’s also expanded to Southern California in the past few years, and is looking to become more visible throughout the Central Valley as well.

With her new competition, Phoong gives artists an opportunity to have their work featured across the state, behind one of the most recognizable faces in local advertising.

Anh Phoong’s billboard design competition is open now through Feb. 10. Submission form here. 

In the early ’90s, as an eighth grader in summer school, Andrew “Ando” Caulfield discovered the San Francisco skate shop For The City (FTC) purely by chance.

His school was near the shop, and as a skater himself, he started hanging out there whenever he had the chance. He took on odd jobs around the shop throughout his teens, sealing his affiliation with the FTC skate community. He picked up photography, too, first shooting skaters before moving on to other projects.

Caulfield’s professional photography career has uprooted him to other cities over the years (most recently Barcelona), but to hear him tell it, nothing beats being able to come home to San Francisco. There’s something special, he says, about how deeply woven skate culture has become in Bay Area life over the last 40 years.

“It’s a pretty open and inclusive community,” he says. “Sort of like a big family, regardless of your level of skateboarding, you know, or sponsorship.”

Now, Caulfield and the rest of FTC San Francisco are gearing up for a one-night-only show on Friday, Jan. 31, dedicated to artwork by FTC community skaters.

“We just wanted to do a show that shows what our friends and family are up to,” says Caulfield. “It’s about coming out and… meeting some interesting people that are probably right under your nose.”

Caulfield anticipates several artistic mediums for the show, such as photography of various formats, painting, and possibly some multimedia elements like video. Caulfield himself plans a collaborative piece with San Francisco-based artist Ian Johnson to recreate one of Caulfield’s photos in the form of a painting.

FTC SF has held other art-related events in the past specifically to celebrate and promote upcoming product and book releases. This show, meanwhile, is part of an ongoing effort toward more events that don’t revolve around product launches. Hosting it at FTC SF, which since opening in 1994 has become a local mecca for all things skate culture, only adds to its homegrown feel.

“We have such a big space, so it’s a cool opportunity for people to display work and have fun,” said Caulfield.

Since the show’s initial announcement, the list of artists to be featured has only grown. “There’s some pretty creative elements that are going to be thrown in here,” said Caulfield, “but we’ll have to see how they’re going to all work together.”

The FTC Art Show takes place at 6 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 31, at FTC Skate Shop in San Francisco. Details here.

Before last week, I had never heard of the State Art Academy in Zürich. Then, I saw the exhibition Artifacts from the SKZ, on view at Municipal Bonds in the Dogpatch, featuring student work from the now-defunct art school, alongside drawing horses, tables, easels and smocks once utilized in its classrooms. Since that visit, I can’t stop thinking about it.

The SKZ was founded in 1990 and trained roughly 27,000 students before shuttering in 1999. It would appear that the school modeled itself on the once-radical principles popularized by the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 30s, promoting modernist ideals of geometric abstraction with the goal of creating an objective utopia through accessible and affordable art and design.

The resulting paintings, each titled for the student signature scrawled across the bottom of the canvas, are easy on the eye, if a little dated-looking, even for a 1990s curriculum. The craquelure quality of the monochrome forms, often contrasting or complementing each other on the same canvas, makes them seem far older than that, closer to the period of the Bauhaus aesthetic they emulate.

It’s Mondrian with an Ellsworth Kelly twist, at once delightfully and reproachfully minimal. The paintings raise the question: Is there anything here?

The classroom detritus, reminiscent of Swiss artist Dieter Roth’s sculptural installations of segments of his studio floor, made me wistful for my days at the also-defunct San Francisco Art Institute. There’s a gossamer magic to the accumulation of marks made on these sorts of shared surfaces — a communal yet anonymous experience of meaning-making. Put a pin in that.

Peering into any archive often elicits this sort of nostalgic wonderment. Here, that wonder is amplified by the cracks in the narrative that begin to show the closer you look. More questions arise. Why do these paintings appear so old? How come I’ve never heard of any of these artists? What was the SKZ, again?

I have answers. Sort of.

You might rightfully be expecting a precis on the school. Hopes dashed. Not because I’m too lazy to summarize an obscure passage of Swiss art history — but because the SKZ never actually existed.

The whole thing is the fictional pursuit of Dan Levenson, a contemporary Los Angeles-based artist, who has dedicated nearly his entire practice to manufacturing relics of the school’s existence.

Levenson’s SKZ project isn’t limited to painting and sculpture. It also includes enrollment records (from which Levenson gets the names attributed to each painting) and the school’s curriculum. Occasionally, he’ll even teach these classes to a live audience, using the classroom objects on display in this exhibition, leading students through painting exercises in artistic “self-determination.”

This slip between imagined and experienced reality is a key to comprehending the overarching project.

On the fauxtina surface, Levenson’s postmodern window-dressing allows him to continue the aesthetic project of modernism, unfettered by contemporary mores. Uncharitably, this could be seen as a post hoc ploy to set his geometric abstractions apart in an oversaturated market of decorative painting, simultaneously dodging the critical backlash that fetishizing antiquated European aesthetics might invite. But I’m more interested in thinking about what it means to be a modernist in the 1990s — or a postmodernist in 2025.

At least in the United States, the 90s were a decade when art became closely associated with identity politics and activism. Back in its day, Bauhaus-era modernism was also trying to solve the world’s problems through art. Levenson’s SKZ imagines a political project for the 90s in which the aspirations of modernism were carried on past the point at which, in real life, they had long-since given way to postmodern pastiche and cynicism.

But postmodernism gets a bad rap. It isn’t all heartless sarcasm and smarty-pants parody. At its best, postmodernism is a revelatory admission of the discursive and derivative nature of all cultural production, a mode of art making that doesn’t shy away from the complexities and contradictions of subjective experience. Less “gotcha” and more “get it?”

Levenson’s charade operates in this register. There’s no snark here, but rather an earnest inquiry into the subjective experience of art making and art viewing. Is style a statement of authenticity or a concession of one’s freedom? Are the projects of historical documentation and criticism about celebrating individual genius or manufacturing cohesive narratives? How do both the academy and the art market require forms of standardization from their subjects?

Perhaps accepting the subjectivity inherent to experience is the only route to realizing modernism’s celebration of objective truth. And perhaps unity will be found not in the uniform, but in and in spite of difference and individuation. That kind of collective utopia needn’t be a vision of the past.

‘Artifacts from the SKZ’ is on view at Municipal Bonds (1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco) through Mar. 1, 2025.

As the new administration announces policies targeting immigrants and members of the queer community, local artists are responding with an exhibition highlighting the groups’ unity. From Feb. 15–March 16, the show NOTHING NEW will be on view at the new 465 Collective Space Gallery in San Francisco.

The collection of works by artists across the country will be the first event hosted at this location by the 465 Collective, led by BlackMaria Microcinema (Maria Judice), Alchemy Film Foundation (Madison Young), Ginger Yifan Chen, EARTH Lab SF (Beth Stephens), Lydia Daniller, and Jason Wyman / Queerly Complex.

Existing as both an installation of prints and a digital catalog, the exhibition will feature the works of over 60 immigrant and queer artists. At the gallery, poetry will be displayed alongside images of sculptures, portraits of dancers and banners with political messaging.

Co-curated by local artist Bushra Gill and organizer Jason Wyman, the exhibition, much like the issues it’s combating, has been years in the making. When asked about the show’s origin, Wyman says, “In order to talk about that I need to go back five years.”

Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Wyman was working with friend and artist Rupy C. Tut to create The Immigrant Artist Network, a nationwide collection of artists. “We wanted to find ways to bring immigrants and their comrades together to talk about art,” says Wyman.

During the pandemic-induced lockdown, immigrant artists — unable to show or in some cases produce work — had trouble retaining their visas, so the collective began throwing virtual events. Over the past five years the community has stayed in contact, periodically convening and hosting salons.

This year, as President Trump took office, the network of artists began to discuss the national political landscape.

As a queer person, Wyman says they asked themself the question: “How can I work with immigrants in order to craft something that speaks to this political moment in some way, shape or form?”

When they landed on the idea of exhibiting queer and immigrant artists, exhibition co-curator Gill pointed out a huge barrier artists face when submitting work.

“A lot of times shows have some sort of theme to them,” says Wyman, lamenting how that practice causes artists to create new work or not submit to shows at all. “So we decided to play off this idea of ‘nothing new.’”

“The assault on queer and immigrant folks is actually nothing new in this country,” they add. “It’s nothing new globally, as well.”

The idea of “nothing new” applied to the work shown, as well as the application process. Artists were asked to submit works that could be shown on an 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet of paper, “with no new works, and no new words at all,” says Wyman.

The goal of the exhibition is to not only show how queer folks and immigrants are coming together as an act of solidarity, but also to preserve this work for future generations.

Wyman has submitted every piece in the show to the Internet Archive, and they plan on submitting the project to San Francisco’s Zine Archive as well.

“Artists are notoriously terrible at archiving their work,” says Wyman with a laugh. But as the federal government works to erase the stories of immigrants and queer people, this work is more serious than ever, they said.

“I’ve been doing convening work for a real long time,” says Wyman, who has a background in peer exchanges and nonhierarchical leadership models. “My real hope is that we continue to deepen our conversation among groups of people that are under direct political attack, so that when we see each other in the streets, when those attacks get amped up, we know other people that we can talk to and reach out to.”

‘NOTHING NEW’ is on view Feb. 15–March 16, 2025 at the 465 Collective Space Gallery (465 S. Van Ness Ave., San Francisco). Details here.

A young, barefoot white woman with tousled blonde hair, seated in the rear doorway of a van. An older Asian gentleman wearing a smart suit and Chuck Taylors at the pool hall. A young Black man, shades on, casually watching TV at the Greyhound bus depot. Three very different subjects with one big thing in common: They are all effortlessly cool — as is most everyone immortalized in A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos.

Ramos’ black-and-white photography doesn’t just reflect the fashions of a bygone era (specifically 1969 to 1973), she also has a knack for singling out the most fascinating everyday humans and capturing them at their most unguarded. Whether it’s two older ladies gleefully giving each other noogies at the laundromat, or a young rocker passed out on a car at Altamont, the images on every page feel like a moments worth savoring.

A Fearless Eye is a collection of images that Ramos began taking after she moved from Los Angeles in 1969 to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. She later got a master’s degree in interdisciplinary creative arts from San Francisco State University. To support her studies, Ramos got a job taking photos of patrons and tourists at the Fairmont Hotel, as well as at bars like Top of the Mark and Finnochio’s. She spent her college years in the city honing and perfecting her photography skills obsessively … only to suddenly quit to take up a career in jewelry design.

The photos in A Fearless Eye might have been lost forever if Ramos hadn’t decided to revisit her old negatives during the pandemic, at the urging of her husband. What she unearthed is a vibrant slice of San Francisco life — at bus stops, inside businesses and classrooms, at prestigious events, on street corners and riding public transport. Nobody and nowhere is off limits.

Under Ramos’ gaze, every individual is as essential as the last, whether her subjects are glamorous women attending an art opening or carnies working at Playland on the Beach. The magic is in the fact that these characters are consistently unperturbed by the camera’s lens. Because Ramos gives these individuals space to breathe, she is better able to capture their essences.

Though much of the book is concerned with San Francisco, it also features photos from Los Angeles. And all three essays come from L.A.-based writers. One is by Sally Stein, an art historian from UC Irvine who assisted Ramos in selecting the book’s images. Writer, photographer and teacher Steven A. Heller convincingly compares Ramos to both Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, even if her circumstances do more closely resemble Vivian Maier’s.

The most enjoyable words here are by author Rachel Kushner, who allows Ramos’ images to spark her own memories of lingering at San Francisco street corners and bus stops during her adolescence in the ’80s. At one point, Kushner writes, “Just as the people in these photographs, like the young rockabilly family on Sixteenth Street, are waiting still, in some everlasting plane of reality, there is a part of me that is waiting also, and in those very same places.”

Ramos’ decision to release A Fearless Eye now, after a 50-year hiatus from photography, is certainly a gift to California and beyond. But it’s especially a gift to those of us who love San Francisco: its streets, its people, its history. Ramos has frozen each of those in time and given us a gorgeous permanent record of this city’s past.

‘A Fearless Eye: The Photography of Barbara Ramos, San Francisco and California, 1969–1973,’ is out Feb. 11, 2025 from Chronicle Books.

When I arrive at SOMArts just hours before the opening of its new show, From the River to the Bay, curator and artist Chris Gazaleh is painting the words of Gazan poet Refaat Alareer on the wall.

“If I die / you must live / to tell my story,” he writes in Arabic script in the colors of the Palestinian flag. The text of the poem frames pencil drawings by Gazaleh that feature solemn faces with pleading eyes. They’re surrounded by symbols of everyday Palestinian life — traditional tatreez embroidery, an oud, poppies and oranges — that telegraph Gazaleh’s vision of a vibrant past, and future, outside the Israeli occupation.

The stylized illustrations might be familiar to anyone who’s exited the Central Freeway at Market and Octavia and seen Gazaleh’s 3,000-square-foot mural of a woman looking over a crumbling West Bank wall. In it, she holds a key, symbolizing refugees’ right to return. It’s one of the many pieces of public art Gazaleh has painted in San Francisco over the past 20-plus years.

Gazaleh, whose grandparents are from Ramallah, has dedicated his art practice to uplifting the Palestinian struggle, despite risking alienation from mainstream art institutions, and having his murals repeatedly defaced. Though his work has sometimes caused controversy, SOMArts gave him and the ten other featured artists a blank canvas to express their views. SOMArts’ approach is a rarity in the art world; locally and nationally, museums have accompanied pro-Palestinian work with disclaimers or just not shown it at all.

In From the River to the Bay, his first exhibition as a curator, Gazaleh’s work hangs among a cohort of like-minded artists in a show of solidarity with the people of Gaza and the West Bank. The show arrives at a precarious time as Israel and Hamas negotiate the second phase of their ceasefire deal. On Tuesday, President Trump suggested that the U.S. should take over Gaza, displace its two million Palestinian residents and turn the territory into a “Riviera of the Middle East” — a move that political observers and human-rights advocates say amounts to a call for “ethnic cleansing.”

“We’re going to make art no matter what. We’re going to keep living no matter what,” Gazaleh says of Palestinian people’s resilience. “Let the people in Gaza be the testament to that, because they’ve been living through a 480-day genocide and are still singing and dancing and trying to keep themselves alive.”

Among the most stunning pieces in the show are a trio of colorful acrylic paintings by Palestinian artist Asma Ghanem, of richly rendered domestic scenes with eye-catching textile and tile patterns. In tranquil scenes like the one in Palestinian Childhood of a toddler riding a tricycle, Ghanem sensitively captures a sense of childhood innocence. It’s haunting to look at this piece and remember the enormous death toll of children in Gaza.

That focus on children and the next generation continues with photography by Spie, a veteran graffiti artist who came up in the Bay Area’s influential and politically active TDK crew. Before the pandemic, Spie traveled to Hebron and Bethlehem with Gazaleh as part of an advocacy group called Eyewitness Palestine, and From the River to the Bay features his photos of children from the trip.

“They just bring me joy every time,” Gazaleh says.

Spie also contributed a tent installation that recreates the student encampments that popped up on campuses all over the United States last fall, demanding that universities divest from weapons and surveillance manufacturers. (After a push from student activists, San Francisco State University added a commitment to human rights in its investment policy.)

“The students are very important because they also are the future,” Gazaleh says. “They’re going to be the future doctors and lawyers. … And in Gaza, they’re killing doctors. They’re killing lawyers. They’re killing artists, nurses, medics, police — anybody that has a job. … So there’s no separation.”

That trip with Spie wasn’t the first time Gazaleh traveled to the West Bank for advocacy and mural work. He also went in 2022 with Susan Greene, a member of a Jewish American artist collective called Breaking the Silence Mural Project. The collective has spent decades raising awareness about the apartheid-like conditions Palestinians face, and they were one of Gazaleh’s early inspirations. From the River to the Bay includes a print of their 1990 mural, Our Roots Are Still Alive, of a multi-generational Palestinian family cheering as a prison wall crumbles.

For Gazaleh as a curator, it was meaningful for the exhibition to feature artists from many different backgrounds — Palestinian, Jewish, Chicano, Asian American — in solidarity with Palestinians.

“It’s about showing our Bay Area culture,” he says, “our solidarity with the world.”

‘From the River to the Bay’ features the work of Ren Allathkani, Breaking the Silence Mural Project, Chris Gazaleh, Asma Ghanem, Hussam, Lucia Ippolito, Tarik Kazaleh, Eli Lippert, Diana Musa, SPIE and Maria Fernanda Vizcaino.

The show is on view at SOMArts Jan. 31–Mar. 30, with a closing reception on Mar. 27.

Where do dreams come from? Questions about their origin are worth asking on occasion, especially when a sampling of the work of the prolific, late Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is on view at San Francisco’s Gallery Wendi Norris.

Even in a modern world filled with streams of amazing imagery coming from the likes of Disney, Studio Ghibli and AI-generated visuals, Carrington’s phantasms glow with illuminating persistence, emanating from a unique, focused and enduring intelligence. In the show Mythopoesis, on view through March 15, her work doesn’t simply present striking characters, it prompts cascades of thoughts about the very nature of dreaming.

Each artwork in this show — whether woven, carved, painted, or sketched — is rich in its own details and nuances, balancing the imaginary with the real. Alternate universes are populated by fantastic, half-familiar creatures who perform striking but just-recognizable rituals.

Picture the odd scene portrayed in the painting Sidhe, the White People of Tuatha dé Danann. Four ghostly humanoids circle a table as if sharing a small meal. Most guests are seated, but only on thick air. One rests on the back of a white goose, while another guest with a long white tail stands, juggling glowing white globes amid a vaporous cloud. A faint if full-bodied horse stares at the viewer, as if in a dream itself. The stark realism of colorful victuals on the table and a lively rooster wandering the floor emphasize the otherworldly quality of the rest of the surroundings.

Visions like this could be individually generated, springing full-blown from the artist’s mind and experiences. Or they may be drawn from a collective unconscious.

Surrealism as a movement set out to generate insights from the unconscious, from which dreams derive. Concepts by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung strongly influenced founding Surrealists in the early 20th century, when Carrington fled her oppressive bourgeois British family and sought self-exile in New York and Paris before settling in Mexico.

A cosmopolitan spirit in a pre-globalized world, and one of the few recognized female Surrealists, Carrington exemplified how a singular creative intelligence could re-channel mythic figures and narratives via personal reckonings. Her art reflects her status as a stranger in strange lands; she drew deeply from the myths and mysteries of cultures she was not born into, including from Celtic and pre-Columbian Mexican sources.

The dream-like figures showing up in force in Carrington’s work include creatures with human and animal qualities. They seem to have seeped through some supernatural portal, taking their places within stylized, built and natural worlds.

One dazzling tour de force is a large, untitled and boldly colored wool wall hanging of a boat and its passengers, co-created with the Rosales family of weavers. A version of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl appears as the dragon prow of the vessel, while two large masked creatures ride inside, one holding a dark orb before the figurehead, as if tempting it forward. Though one of the sailors possesses powerful human hands, beneath its mask lies a large flower head on a spindly green stalk.

The show’s most magnificent object is the wooden sculpture La cuna (The Cradle), created during Carrington’s early time in Mexico. No mere toy, the weight of the wood can be sensed in the carved vessel and the wave-form stand cradling it. On the boat’s sides, fantastic painted creatures parade. Noah’s ark-like, some disembark post-catastrophe, though darker figures imply catastrophes to come. Painted stages of the sun run in succession along one side, phases of the moon along the other — cosmological guidance for sea-going vessels, and other creatures too.

To create La cuna, Carrington worked alongside artist José Horna, who also co-crafted Rueda de los caballos. Here, eight colorful horses are frozen mid-canter around a wooden wheel, poised as if awaiting a spin to put them in motion. Rueda de los caballos recalls early moving picture technologies, another form of fantasy.

Carrington paid great attention to other creatures, most notably in her diverse representations of horses, lifelong avatars of self-identification. A striking horse takes center stage in the canvas Equinoxio, radiating layers of combined cosmic and the earthly imagery. Living creatures, celestial bodies and abstract figures overlap one another, hover upside-down, and surge toward or subside from easy view. These dense overlays suggest blurrings of time and space, a favorite Surrealist notion. Hovering above is a complex image of an eye-portal — an all-seeing universal access point to the cosmological infinite.

Such unusual specimens came out of Carrington’s idiosyncratic sensibility. She was dedicated to creating and channeling visions. Her images counter the machined dreams of AI: random, middling, surrealist-seeming results generated from an average of existing cultural products.

Carrington drew and transmuted distinct imagery from the reservoirs of her own subconscious, the collective well of cultural possibilities and the mysteries of the lands she found herself in. Her creative interventions remind and inspire, pointing not only to the sources of dreams but to how meaningful dreaming can be.

‘Mythopoesis’ is on view at Gallery Wendi Norris through March 15, 2025.

The stories behind our names, given or chosen, preserve memories that would otherwise be lost to time. Sko Habibi is the name Jasko Begovic chose when he started identifying as an artist over two decades ago. Sko, short for Jasko, and habibi, the Arabic word for beloved. His name, like his work, is a glimpse at the communities and people who helped him on his journey to create, and survive.

Begovic first heard the word habibi while sitting at the dinner table of a friend’s family. He was a young teen, recently relocated to Germany as a refugee. Even with a full house and over 10 mouths to feed, his friends’ loud and loving Lebanese family were clear that there was always room for Begovic.

Their generosity was the epitome of the immigrant way, making space where there should be none, turning scraps into meals that leave everyone fed and cared for. That ethos is now at the crux of Begovic’s work, and his own drive to create community.

Begovic may finally be getting his flowers from art institutions — his textile sculptures, which bridge the worlds of fashion and soccer, are included in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Get in the Game show — but he has been making waves in the Bay Area art scene for years.

As a multimedia textile artist who splits his time between creating art, coaching young soccer players and raising a toddler, Begovic isn’t interested in climbing the ranks of the art world. He isn’t in competition with anyone else (a rule that admittedly gets tossed as soon as he laces up his sneakers and joins a soccer game).

For Begovic, art is how he stays human and asserts his personhood in a world hell-bent on limiting his humanity: as a man raised in a mixed Muslim family, as a genocide survivor, or as a refugee.

Art as a language

Begovic was born in former Yugoslavia and raised in a small village alongside a huge Bosnian family. His childhood was idyllic; warm memories saturate his stories about running around with cousins. But that was before the war in Bosnia began, before his older brother was conscripted, and his family was separated.

At 11, a Serbian uncle hid Begovic and his cousin until they could escape through a soldier exchange. This miraculous intervention allowed him to flee the country, leaving his family’s ancestral land for refugee status in Germany.

It was as a bored kid in the back of a German classroom, surrounded by a language he didn’t understand and peers who had no context for the genocide he had just survived, that Begovic found art.

By chance, he was seated next to a kid named Daniel who scribbled in journals instead of paying attention in class. Watching Daniel write graffiti and practice his tags was Begovic’s introduction to street art, and it became their shared mode of communication.

In former Yugoslavia, art was a craft some students excelled at — Begovic was not a good artist. But suddenly, the function of art shifted. Through his new classmate he was introduced to the world of hip-hop, and the Balkan, African and Arab immigrant communities who were using it to connect to each other.

“It provoked my spirit,” Begovic remembers. “That’s where understanding art as language was birthed in me.”

Depicting ‘the immigrant’s world’

This bridging of language and cultures through art is at the heart of all of his creations. For Begovic, shedding shame around the violence and displacement he experienced frees him up to create. “I embrace it,” he says. “I’m not running away from my journey. I transform it and make it my own.”

This transformation is emphasized in the fabrics he chooses and the stories they tell. He constructs the mannequins wearing his textile pieces to stand tall, with stretched necks and confident stares. Neon colors and deconstructed sports jerseys announce their presence. Begovic sews the names of loved ones who have passed onto the laces of his figures’ shoes in beads, making it clear that each character is an externalization of the grief he carries.

But there is also a performative, comedic aspect to it all. Instead of “Fly Emirates,” Begovic’s soccer shorts have “Fly Refugees” embroidered on them. “It’s playing on the whole Emirates element, the money, the richness,” he says. “It also comes from the flea market culture. Gucci with three Cs, Adidas with four stripes. That’s the immigrant’s world.”

It’s a world familiar to those who are denied entry across many borders. And Begovic’s work opens a window into lives otherwise relegated to the margins.

In November 2024, Begovic performed an art piece at Light Travels (Du Sang), a runway show by the Oakland fashion designer and artist Asaad Bruno. Begovic, inhabiting his Sko Habibi identity, presented Flee Market, a recreation of the refugee reality on the streets of major cities across the globe. The performance opened with Sko Habibi arranging items on a heavy green tarp while speaking to himself in Bosnian. At least a hundred audience members sat quietly, fixated on the nimble movements of the masked man at center of the scene.

Vendors and potential customers joined him. In this staging, the performers were friends, other members of Oakland’s burgeoning arts and soccer community. They passed a soccer ball around, playing with Begovic’s young daughter on the runway. Suddenly, a blaring police sirens cut through the playful atmosphere, sending everyone on the run. In seconds, the tarp was strategically rolled up, and Sko Habibi made his escape. It’s a scene pulled straight from the streets of Paris, where the audio was recorded.

‘Feels like home’

On the seventh floor of SFMOMA, the museum’s blockbuster art-meets-sports show Get in the Game features work Begovic first created for the Oakland Roots and Oakland Soul soccer teams. His original commission of a few pieces turned into over a dozen, and surfaced a number of characters he felt compelled to depict in a short film titled HumanE.T., made in collaboration with the Oakland Roots.

The title plays on the “alien” status imposed on refugees and migrants. “As immigrants, as refugees, on our passports, on our visas it’s like, alien, alien,” Begovic says. “The E.T. comes from [being seen as] extraterrestrial. You are the other, you’re an outsider, you’re a foreigner, you’re a refugee.”

Begovic’s aim, he says, is to transform that othering into something else. “To ask, am I really that different from you?” he says.

During our conversation, Begovic describes his love for spending time at 24th and Mission Streets with his daughter, whose unabashed curiosity helps him see the world around him with wonder and awe. Part of his attraction to the intersection comes from the expressions of life reflecting “back home,” even if it’s not his home.

“I’m not Mexican, I don’t understand a lot of the tradition, and even the food is different, but at the same time the essence of how they go about life and interacting with each other —” he pauses, “when I go there, I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m home.’ It’s not Bosnian or Balkan culture, but it feels like home.”

“Maybe that’s what I find in these places, in people that are genuine,” he continues. “Maybe home can be an interaction with a person on the street. It can be a lady that has the same laugh as my mom. Even though my village is so far away, I still find that frequency through other communities, through people, through art.”

Where most see limits and irreconcilable grief, Begovic hears connection and possibility. At the heart of Sko Habibi’s inner world is a child, unafraid to question authority and push back on the dominant narrative. His work asks us to face the scarier feelings without fear; it asks us to sit with others and listen to the stories they want to share and the truths they safeguard. If we do that, maybe we will arrive somewhere even more human.

Work by Jasko Begovic (Sko Habibi) is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in ‘Get in the Game’ through Feb. 18, 2025.

Valentine’s Day is around the corner, and whether or not you have a boo, don’t stress. On Feb. 8, the Mission District’s signature V-Day event, Lovers Lane, returns to celebrate love for San Francisco and its creative community.

The free block party takes over Balmy Alley, plus 25th Street from Harrison to Treat, for a Saturday of performances, food, artist vendors, family-friendly activities, lowriders, wellness services like massage and other resources.

Lovers Lane was founded by artists Lucia Gonzalez Ippolito (whose work is currently featured in SOMArts’ Palestine solidarity show, From the River to the Bay) and Alfredo Uribe. Grounded in Chicano culture, the event uplifts the many diverse creatives and community activists of the Mission.

Performances on the main stage include danza azteca from Coyolxauqui SF; an oldies DJ set from Thee Homegirls of Soul; live hip-hop from Sin Fronteras Dreams, Diabbla and Afterthought and the Top Chefs; jazz and soul vocals by Lizzy Paris; live mariachi music from CMC Mariaci; son jarocho and Arabic folk music by Corazón de Cedro; and many more.

Artists Pancho Peskador, 357 Peps, Agana, Josue Rojas, B Fitz and Twick will paint live. And the kids zone offers plenty of activities for families, including a hip-hop bounce house, bubbles, live reptiles and face painting. Hungry party-goers, meanwhile, will have over a dozen food vendors to choose from, including Asúkar Palestinian Cuban Fusion, Cocina Nicaborriqua and Hyphy Iceez.

Lovers Lane takes over Balmy Alley and 25th Street between Harrison and Treat in San Francisco on Saturday, Feb. 8, from 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Details here.

It’s an unlikely end for art found on the street — to be welcomed by a distinguished curator, celebrated at a cocktail-filled fête and ushered into the permanent collection of one of the most prominent museums in Paris.

Yet that’s exactly what’s happening on Feb. 11 with 48 artworks discovered on a concrete bench in San Francisco’s Crane Cove Park in 2022, a fairytale ending for a find that could have easily ended up in the dumpster.

“It’s insane,” says Arianna Cunha, a senior administrative analyst for the Port of San Francisco, who was among the city employees to rescue the art. “To discover that number of pieces by one artist.”

The majority of the found artworks — most of them signed and some of them dated — are by the Jewish painter Ary Arcadie Lochakov, a member of the famed School of Paris group that includes the likes of Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse and Chaïm Soutine. Born in Bessarabia (present-day Moldova), Lochakov moved to Paris in 1920 and died there alone in 1941, when the city was under Nazi occupation.

That the art survived at all is its own miracle, the result of an unlikely line of stewardship, from artist, to nephew, to nephew’s ex-wife, to ex-wife’s sister, to ex-wife’s sister’s daughter. The artworks traveled from Paris to New York to Providence, Rhode Island to Huntsville, Alabama to San Francisco, where they were in the possession of Lochakov’s distant relative Diane Sammons. Sammons, a pediatric nurse at UCSF, died nearly a year before the pieces surfaced.

While many parts of the mystery have since been put together to understand how they arrived in San Francisco, the question of who put them on the bench remains.

“It’s bittersweet,” Cunha says of the art’s final voyage. “We have such an investment in this story.” Cunha helped to coordinate the transfer of the artworks to the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris (mahJ), where she established contact with curator Pascale Samuel.

The timing could not have been better. Samuel had been organizing an exhibition at the museum, Hersh Fenster and the Lost Shtetl of Montparnasse, and was looking for art by the perished Jewish artists from the School of Paris included in Fenster’s book, Our Martyred Artists.

Upon receiving the box of Lochakov artworks, Samuel and her assistant, Sophie Rodrigues, were overcome with emotion.

“We had seen them on paper,” Rodrigues wrote in an email. “But it feels like we just discovered them.”

Cunha, in turn, feels a deep sense of gratitude that the artworks are ending up in a place where they can be studied and appreciated. “It’s the birthplace of this research,” she says. The museum intends to digitize the artwork and make it available online; there are also plans for a future exhibition.

In the meantime, clues have continued to emerge regarding the Lochakov mystery.

From park bench to Ferry Building

In August 2024, San Franciscans got the chance to view the artworks at a free public exhibition at the Ferry Building. There, an attendee recognized a previously unidentified piece as an etching by Joseph Uhl, appropriately titled Lost. Another exhibition-goer recognized a stamp from the Odessa art school that Lochakov attended, positively identifying it as one of his works.

Additional research also revealed that a photograph found on the park bench in 2022 is of a portrait Lochakov painted of the former Prime Minister of Romania, Nicolae Iorga.

The public’s reaction to the artwork was just as emotional, with the sense that this story belongs as much to San Francisco as it does to Paris.

“An only-in-SF story — why I love this city!” wrote one attendee in the guestbook. Another wrote they were moved to tears. Several thanked the city workers for their dedication, another noted the power of investigative reporting.

Over 1,000 people visited the exhibition over its five-day run. The presentation had particular resonance for local writer Jim Van Buskirk, who found out when he was 55 — and his mother was on her deathbed — that he was Jewish. “So many things clicked into place,” he says. Seeing a lost Jewish artist helped him to reflect on his own once-lost Jewish identity. But Lochakov’s story also feels universal.

“He’s a relatively minor artist,” Van Buskirk says. “But the story is gigantic.”

The mystery deepens

Further layers of discovery have made the Lochakov narrative ever more complex. While one Lochakov piece surfaced in an April 2022 South San Francisco Goodwill auction, another recently came to light — an artwork by Lochakov’s brother, Michael.

Michael Solomon Losakov was born in 1882 and moved to Paris in 1926 to join his brother. He moved back to Bessarabia in 1940. (To add to the complication of researching the artists, there are numerous ways of spelling their last name: Losakov or Losacov in Romanian, Lochakov or Lochakow in French, and Loshakov when transliterated from Russian.)

Brent Verkler, who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, snagged the piece signed “Melih Losacov” (Melih is Romanian for Michael) for $50 in April 2022 on an online auction from the South San Francisco Goodwill. The watercolor is framed by the same company as the other pieces found on the park bench, The Wall Paper Co. in Huntsville, Alabama, indicating it likely passed through the same hands and also came from Diane Sammons’ personal collection.

“I’m super grateful,” Verkler says, “because I feel blessed for what I was able to get.” Verkler used to spend hours a day on the site combing through thousands of auctions.

With the Lochakov artworks’ arrival in Paris and subsequent research and exhibitions planned, even more strands of a once-lost legacy could surface in the future.

“I still believe there’s more to come,” Cunha says. “This isn’t the end of this story.”

The Black Panther Party For Self-Defense, founded in Oakland in 1966, was a landmark organization that uplifted the Black community by providing resources to neighborhoods neglected by the local and federal government.

The Party was well-known for its Free Breakfast Program and its independent newspaper, The Black Panther. The group was also widely recognized for its fashion, as its members regularly dressed in sleek black leather jackets and berets.

But the history of the organization’s survival programs, 65 of them in total ranging from health services to transportation assistance, are often misunderstood or overlooked.

To illuminate these programs’ significance, on Thursday, Feb. 13, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation debuts an exhibition of archival photography titled Survival Pending Revolution: The Black Panther Party Service to the People Programs at the Black Panther Party Museum in downtown Oakland.

“A lot of folks know about the free breakfast for schoolchildren,” says Dr. Xavier Buck, the executive director of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. “Some may even know about the free medical clinics.”

As for the contents of the exhibition, Dr. Buck explains, “We’re going to talk about the free ambulance service, the free pest control, the free bussing to prisons so families wouldn’t be broken up.”

By exhibiting rarely seen photos and sharing insight from veteran party members, Dr. Buck says attendees will gain a better understanding of what the Party did, how they did it and why they did it.

Another goal of the exhibition is to dispel the notion of the survival programs as some form of charity. Instead, Dr. Buck explains, the Black Panther Party saw them as organizing tools.

An example is the free breakfast program. “Yes, it was feeding kids in our schools,” Dr. Buck says. But it also served as an entry point for party members to inspire children to think critically about their circumstances — by asking questions like, “In such a wealthy country, why were you so hungry in the first place?” says Dr. Buck.

In Oakland, grassroots organizing has long connected to electoral politics. Dr. Buck points to the 1973 political campaigns of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale and former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown.

“They engaged a new voter bloc,” says Dr. Buck of the Black Panther Party leaders. And four years later, in 1977, when the Black Panthers pushed forward the campaign of mayoral candidate Lionel Wilson, Dr. Buck says, they leveraged that same organized bloc from the survival programs.

In result, Wilson was elected as Oakland’s first Black mayor.

“It’s really about how we tie the services that we give the people to how we actually gain political power,” says Dr. Buck.

The forthcoming exhibition shows the practitioners and the beneficiaries of the Black Panther Party’s survival programs through the lens of photographers Ducho Dennis, Stephen Shames and Bob Fitch, as well as Ruth Marion-Baruch and Pirkle Jones.

The exhibition is set to open on Feb. 13 with a three-hour event where attendees can guide themselves through a tour of the photos; there will also be a 45-minute presentation.

Four days later, on Feb. 17, the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation will celebrate its 30th anniversary on what would’ve been the late Dr. Huey P. Newton’s 83rd birthday.

The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation presents ‘Survival Pending Revolution: The Black Panther Party Service to the People Programs’ at the Black Panther Party Museum in downtown Oakland on Thursday, Feb. 13. Details here.

After nearly nine years at the San José Museum of Art, Executive Director Sayre Batton has announced she will step down at the end of May. The museum will conduct a national search for her replacement.

Batton joined the SJMA in 2015 as the deputy director for curatorial affairs. Two years later, after serving as interim executive director, Batton assumed the top role permanently.

“I was really brought in as a change agent to help build the curatorial team,” Batton says, noting that her very first hire was Lauren Schell Dickens, now the museum’s senior curator. Under her leadership, the SJMA has presented over 50 exhibitions, including the 2017 show Diana Al-Hadid: Liquid City, featuring one of the artist’s delicate yet monumental sculptures, which Batton says set the stage for the type of ambitious programming she wanted to bring to the museum.

“I was told that a lot of people won’t come down to San José to see exhibitions,” Batton says. “And when we brought Diana, we got fantastic attendance from people locally, but also people in the art world, in the wider Bay Area, and California and beyond.”

While the museum established itself as a venue for world-class exhibitions, it never neglected its closer-to-home audiences and community members. The SJMA maintains partnerships with South Bay institutions like San Jose Jazz, MACLA and Mosaic America, as well as with the city of San José itself.

Tuesday’s announcement acknowledges Batton’s role in “refocusing” the museum’s commitment to acquisitions. “We wrote it into the collection plan that we would always try to acquire something in from a major exhibition project wherever we could,” Batton explains.

On March 7, the results of that plan will go on public display. The SJMA will open Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection in its renovated main galleries, marking the first time the 55-year-old institution has created a dedicated space to showcase these works.

The show will include pieces that have been in the collection for some time, including Hung Liu’s Resident Alien and Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral, alongside more recent acquisitions — artworks by Tishan Hsu, Yolanda López and Sarah Sze.

Making the museum’s collection more publicly accessible is seemingly more exciting to Batton than even her own next professional chapter. “That’s what I’ve been hoping that the real story is about,” she says.

“With this inaugural exhibition, many of the aspirations I’ve held with the curatorial team for the museum have come to fruition,” she states in today’s press release. “While the decision to step away was not easy, I am proud to be leaving on a high note, with great pride in what we have accomplished together.”

The next executive director will face the same hurdles Batton says all museums are facing right now: finding the financial support for arts and culture. “It’s a nationwide challenge,” she notes.

Prior to the SJMA, Batton worked at both Dia: Beacon and for the Dia Art Foundation, and served as the project director for “Modern Views,” which invited artists, architects and designers to respond to Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut.

Batton leaves the SJMA without a fixed institutional destination, but will instead “manage independent projects,” according to today’s announcement.

“I have a number of things that I’ve wanted to carve out the time for,” she says. Among them is a book project about art pilgrimages.

Even if you don’t know who Viola Frey is, chances are you’ve seen a Viola Frey. The prolific artist’s large-scale ceramics dot the Bay Area landscape and the collections of our cultural institutions. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the di Rosa — all are caretakers of the late artist’s work.

Maybe you’ve flown out of the country in the past 25 years? In SFO’s international terminal, Frey’s 1999 piece World Civilization is a massive tiled grid filled with the symbology she accumulated during her five-decade-plus career: suited men, vibrantly dressed women, hands, globes and exuberant patterning.

But there’s a gap between recognizing an artist’s work and knowing why that work is an important part of local art history. A gap that can now be filled by the 228 pages of the handsome hardcover Viola Frey: Artist’s Mind/Studio/World. As a bonus, two upcoming events at California College of the Arts and pt.2 gallery, on Feb. 13 and 15, respectively provide audiences with opportunities to cement the Frey’s life and work into their timeline of rich Bay Area art lore.

Reading Viola Frey 20 years after her death, it’s difficult to believe this is the first monograph of Frey’s work. The book exists, in part, thanks Frey’s own pragmatism, evident throughout her life story in the form of savvy artwork sales, real estate acquisitions and a temporary hiatus from exhibiting. The book is published by Gregory R. Miller & Co. and Artists’ Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit established by Frey, Squeak Carnwath and Gary Knecht to steward artists’ estates after their deaths.

Three essays from Nancy Lim, Jodi Throckmorton and Jenelle Porter, along with a detailed chronology from Cynthia de Bos, the foundation’s director of collections and archives, tease out the nesting egg of the book’s title. How do interior and exterior forces shape a life’s work — and what kind of thrilling slippage can take place between the mind, studio and world?

Frey grew up in Lodi on her family’s grape farm, home to scattered, defunct machinery and barns filled with her father’s collections of old stuff. (It’s a predilection Frey inherited: She was a regular at the Alameda Flea Market, which she described as a “human museum without walls,” and where she collected untold numbers of figurines.)

After studying at California College of Arts and Crafts (now CCA) and Tulane, and after a brief spell in New York, she returned to the West Coast for good in 1960. Frey always worked in multiple mediums. Later in her career she celebrated the fact that she was finally allowed to exhibit more than “just one thing” per show.

Among the delightful factoids included in the book are reference to Frey’s participation in the first Artists’ Soap Box Derby (restaged by SFMOMA in 2022), her abstention from domestic duties, and that Rene di Rosa organized buses full of people to visit her art-filled home at 663 Oakland Ave.

The picture that emerges in Viola Frey is similar to the one conjured by Porter’s description of her 1976 sculpture Self-Portrait with Figurines: “a creation stew from which the artist … rises like a goddess.” In a swirl of objects, influences and historical conditions, Frey established herself as an artist with a singular, multifaceted style. Thankfully, unlike so many women of her generation, she also lived to receive the accolades she so deserved.

It makes sense that some of my favorite images in Viola Frey show the artist alongside her own massive figurative sculptures. “All the pieces are complete when there’s someone next to them,” she once said. Together, life and output merge to become a total work of art.

California College of the Arts hosts a conversation with Squeak Carnwath, Nancy Lim and Cynthia de Bos on Thursday, Feb. 13, 6–7 p.m. in Blattner Hall (75 Arkansas St., San Francisco.)

pt.2 Gallery (1523b Webster St., Oakland) hosts an exhibition walkthrough of ‘Transitory Fragments,’ an exhibition of Viola Frey’s work, with Cynthia de Bos on Saturday, Feb. 15 at 11:30 a.m.

Bay Area literary icon Amy Tan has an archive so large it fills over 60 boxes. It’s a collection that’s been growing for decades. Among the treasures are Tan’s personal journals, her correspondence with other writers, family photographs and book manuscripts, including that of her career-altering novel, The Joy Luck Club. Now, slightly reluctantly, Tan is allowing her archive to be housed at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library.

“They are mementoes of my life: what I thought, what I loved, who I loved, what I believed, what I lost — all the moments that led to who I am, which is always evolving,” Tan stated in Wednesday’s announcement.

Letting the Bancroft Library acquire her archive was a decision Tan didn’t make lightly. As if personal journals and family photographs weren’t intimate enough, the collection also contains unpublished works, some of which date back to her childhood. But as a former UC Berkeley student, what ultimately changed Tan’s mind was her trust in the library staff and seeing how much they cared for her materials.

“This collection will prove a rich and rewarding one for students and scholars,” said Bancroft Library Director Kate Donovan in the announcement. “And it also highlights one of the great strengths of Bancroft’s collections — the deep diversity and community of writers in California and the American West.”

In addition to being a literary goldmine, the archive offers a glimpse into Chinese American life in the Bay Area in the 1940s and ’50s. Included are pocket diaries written largely in Chinese by her father, John Tan, and materials that document her parents’ immigration story and their early years living in Berkeley and Oakland.

For anyone hoping to see part of the collection right away, the Bancroft Library currently has some of the original art pieces from Tan’s latest book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles on view through June. The rest of the collection, Donovan says, still needs to be processed and catalogued by archivists before being made available to the public. It’s estimated the process will take about two years.

Once the cataloging process is complete, Tan’s archive will be available in the Bancroft Library’s Reading Room. It will join a vast collection of literary works by other prominent Bay Area writers, including Joan Didion, Yoshiko Uchida and Thom Gunn.

“Amy Tan is a giant of the American literary canon with deep connections to the Bay Area,” said University Librarian Suzanne Wones. “This extraordinary collection of materials documenting her artistic work and personal life will now forever remain close to home.”