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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

At the opening of the San Francisco Public Library’s newest exhibition, the decibels reached decidedly un-library-like levels. In fact, it was an absolute party. There was DJ, a bar. At one point, a cart rolled through stacked high with Outta Sight Pizza boxes. The view down the stairs to the main library’s Jewett Gallery was a sea of beaming people, assembled to celebrate San Francisco as a skating destination and a driving source of skate culture.

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Skateboarding San Francisco: Concrete, Community, Continuity, on view through July 6, 2025, might seem like an unlikely exhibition for an institution that has previously banned skating on its premises. But these days, skateboarding is being recognized for what this show — co-curated the library’s Megan Merritt and Allison Wyckoff and by art historian, skater and This Old Ledge host Ted Barrow — argues it is: a joyful and creative social activity that uniquely responds to and shapes this city.

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Case in point: In 1988, City Librarian Michael Lambert made his first visit to San Francisco from South Carolina because it was a skating mecca. Lambert can now be seen promoting the expansion of the UN Plaza skatepark in a three-piece suit. With a similarly grown-up yet puckish spirit, Skateboarding San Francisco manages to be both academic and anarchic all at once.

Leading the way into the show are vinyl designs by artist and professional skater Marbie Miller. Her smiling characters hang out on the stairs, shoot on a camcorder and face plant (with colorful grace). Inside the exhibition, a mixture of framed photographs, wall-sized vinyl blow-ups, artwork, videos, mementos and ephemera guide viewers through some of the city’s legendary spots: The Dish, the city’s oldest skate park; EMB (the Lawrence Halprin-designed Embarcadero Plaza); Hubba Hideout (demolished in 2011); and Wallenberg (an Anza Vista high school).

What’s the foundation of all this activity? Concrete. “San Francisco is a concrete playground,” Tommy Guerrero says in one of the video interviews in the show. “Everything can be skated.” The uneven landscape, steep hills and all, doesn’t hurt either. In a magical 1993 shot by Gabe Morford, Coco Santiago ollies over a classic San Francisco driveway, floating above a patch of horizontal concrete on a vertiginous residential street.

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Concrete may be the ideal surface, but the red bricks of Embarcadero Plaza show the marks of every hard-won landing, mapping decades of illicit, inventive physical activity. Recognizing these artifacts, and protecting them, is part of an “archival instinct” baked into skate culture, the show argues. When Hubba Hideout was torn down, skaters preserved chunks of concrete, lengths of rebar, even the door of a control box (included in the show courtesy of professional skater and archivist Frank Gerwer). Despite skating’s reputation as a destructive act, the community diligently preserves its own history.

On display is Jacob Rosenberg’s E440 8mm Canon Camcorder, on which he shot San Francisco’s “charismatic and advanced” skate community in the early 1990s. Show me another underground subculture that’s this assiduous about its video documentation.

But of all the rare images and objects, Skateboarding San Francisco’s showstopper is the Cardiel rail. Or, as a friend texted me after the opening: “the motherfucking JOHN CARDIEL HANDRIAL!!!!!” Running 50 feet diagonally through the gallery space, it’s just a portion of the bronze hand rail once installed on a set of Union Square stairs. In 2001, John Cardiel nailed an impossible 50–50 grind down the entire 24-stair-long rail, cementing his — and its — iconic status.

Years later, Gerwer was one of the renegades who sawed through its posts, loaded it in sections onto a van and saved the rail from demolition when the Apple Store was built.

While part of Skateboarding San Francisco exists inside the Jewett Gallery, in its photos, objects and video clips, another part of it is everything outside the library’s walls — all the rails, banks, gaps and yet-to-be-named spots that exist, for skaters, on an alternate plane of reality. It’s their city, we’re just lucky enough to watch them fly across it.

‘Skateboarding San Francisco: Concrete, Community, Continuity’ is on view at the San Francisco Public Library (100 Larkin St.) through July 6, 2025. Co-curator Ted Barrow will lead tours through the exhibition on April 12 and June 14. Check the library’s site for more programming throughout the exhibition’s run.

In her editor’s note for the very first issue of the San Francisco Review of Whatever, Elisabeth Nicula bounces from topic to topic in pithy paragraphs, covering tennis, constellations, Trevor Paglen’s recent Altman Siegel show and the magical act of piecing together of a magazine.

It’s a warm-up for the pages that follow: a delightful back-and-forth volley of macro and micro views, San Francisco seen through the windshield and in the rear-view mirror.

The slim volume, just under 50 pages, is the brainchild of Nicula, Christa Hartsock and Jim Fingal. Hartsock and Fingal previously published the leftist tech magazine Logic (now Logic(s)) and have a professed affinity for the power of analog media.

“Logic Magazine really cemented the love for what a small magazine can do,” Fingal says. “Just the process and the experience of producing it, but then the experience of creating and engaging with your audience.”

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The Review of Whatever creators’ meet-cute involves a synthesizer shop (ROBOTSPEAk in the Lower Haight) and a vague internet awareness of each other that crystallized into a group chat and real-life friendship. “It took us a while to start talking about actually starting the magazine,” Hartsock says.

“I was shooting the shit on Twitter,” Nicula explains. “I was thinking about the LA Review of Books and the New York Review of Books and the New York Review of Architecture and I said on Twitter, ‘Why doesn’t San Francisco have a review? San Francisco needs a review of whatever, too!’”

People on the internet agreed. And just over a year ago, when Fingal expressed an interest in getting back into publishing, Nicula pitched him on the idea. Now, what started as a fun name jokingly put forward is a three-times-a-year print publication that has arrived in mailboxes and on bookshelves, and will be celebrated with a release party on Friday, Feb. 28 at Et al. gallery.

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Back in February 2024, Nicula wrote what now reads like a manifesto for the Review of Whatever in an essay for The Back Room, Small Press Traffic’s online publishing platform. In it, she argued for a rebellion against grant-writing language in art, against playing our perceived roles, and for criticism as an act of attention and care.

“Normal life deserves beauty in describing, ardent feelings, pleasurable clarity, and true likeness,” she wrote.

The “whatever” reviewed in the first issue lives up to its name. “Whatever” includes the Bay Area (seen from Maine and one of its own hills); the shapes of Berkeley’s People’s Park, Donald Judd and Christo and Jeanne-Claude; tennis as a metaphor; a collection of essays by Susan Stryker; and San Francisco fashion.

Also featured: a “CLOUD INTERLUDE” spread, photographed by Sean McFarland; a list of “knitting WIPs and why I haven’t finished them” from Megan Riley; a verbose ad for the Richmond District’s Scenic Routes Community Bicycle Center; and a back page of classifieds (“Have you had your daily recommended dose of bloops? Cheaper than US healthcare”).

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Hartsock dreams of a future in which someone picks up a copy of the Review in their bike repair shop, then meets up with someone from the classifieds looking to trade fruit for jam.

“Part of the idea is to be a little bit Luddite and part of it is to retreat from the internet,” Nicula says. “I think we all perhaps also see print as a different way to connect with people, and maybe a more interesting and healthy way to connect.”

As Hartsock points out, print is just slower. All three creators wear multiple hats, including holding down day jobs, art practices and other publishing projects (Nicula also helms Smooth Friend, which publishes experimental and creative nonfiction).

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“When I think about the internet, I think about monetization and feeds and the speed at which information has to move,” Hartsock says. “That’s not the speed at which I want to think. Print is creating a space where you can sit with something and be consumed by it instead of also having the distraction of whatever else.”

Also, Fingal says, “People will pay for print objects and then you can pay writers.”

In the first issue, the contributors are local (or recently transplanted) artists and curators, poets and writers. Their references are specific, and will be especially evocative for those familiar with the icons and landmarks of this city: the 49 bus; the Harm Reduction Therapy Center; the Joe DiMaggio Tennis Courts in North Beach.

“A big goal for me with this magazine is to show San Francisco as those of us who live here experience it,” Nicula says. “There’s these over-narrativized, usually hyper-politicized views of it, but there’s something very authentic and livable happening beneath all that — and also difficult.”

It’s a big undertaking, but a fruitful, ongoing one. San Francisco has long been a city that excites words, specifically criticism. But the pieces in the first issue of the San Francisco Review of Whatever rely on neither boosterism nor gloominess. They are complicated, authentic, poetic, rigorous and sweet — just like San Francisco itself.

The launch party for the ‘San Francisco Review of Whatever’ will take place Friday, Feb. 28, 2025 at 6 p.m. at Et al. (2831A Mission St., San Francisco).

We all know, many times over, what Paul McCartney’s ears hear. But what do his eyes see? Specifically, what were his eyes attuned to during the Beatles’ meteoric rise in the early years of the band?

Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm, on view March 1–July 6, 2025 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, answers the question with more than 250 recently unearthed photos taken by the famous musician. Perhaps more than anything, the photos in Eyes of the Storm capture sheer bewilderment — not just at being suddenly thrust onto the global limelight as a teen idol, but at America itself.

“We were fascinated with what we were doing and what was happening to us,” McCartney says in the exhibition wall text. “I’ve never lost that sense of wonder.”

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McCartney has also long harbored a sense of earnest silliness, seen in photos of George Harrison wearing a double-decker top hat, Ringo Starr in a Napoleon getup, or John Lennon twisting up his face and picking a fight with a bust by sculptor David Wynne. One photo simply shows an airplane pulling an advertising banner reading “THERE IS ONLY ONE MISTER PANTS”; one can imagine Paul’s youthful amusement as he reaches for his camera.

More intimate moments are shown, whether with McCartney’s bandmates or multiple people credited as “unidentified woman backstage.” The regular presence of adults underscores McCartney’s observation that this era’s photos “remind me more of an England that was more my parents’ generation than my own.” One photo of Harrison’s mother in England shows her with silver hair and a decorative brooch, glancing crookedly up to the camera with a look of hesitation.

And then there is the introspective side. Ringo sitting alone with his signature “I’m doing algebra equations in my head” look. John, up close, with chin rested on his knuckles, like a Rodin sculpture. Paul taking selfies in a mirror in Paris, cigarette plunged sideways into his lips, perfecting his cool-guy look.

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If McCartney’s photographs occasionally constitute fine art, it’s likely by mistake. Many are out of focus or amateurishly composed, which of course lends them a relatability — he’s a 21-year-old playing around with his new Pentax single-lens 35mm, after all. For one so committed to the practiced craft of songwriting (Lennon was always the greater experimentalist), this imprecision is refreshing to see.

Sometimes, though, he strikes gold, as in a mirror selfie with a sharp depth of field taken at girlfriend Jane Asher’s house. I stared at length, also, at a silhouette of French model Sophie Hardy in a slinky black dress, smoking stylishly in profile, her tresses bouncing around her perfect jawline, all framed by two lamps in the foreground.

Bay Area fans will surely want to know if the show includes photos from the Beatles’ concert at the Cow Palace in 1964. It does not, nor does it cover their return concert at the Cow Palace in 1965 or their final commercial concert at Candlestick Park in 1966. (McCartney had slowed down his photo-taking by then, images of U.S. opening acts the Exciters and Clarence “Frogman” Henry notwithstanding.)

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But the exhibition does successfully transmit the wide-eyed fascination of a young British kid abroad. In New York, before sending tectonic shocks throughout the country by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, McCartney photographed the Chrysler building, neon signs and rooftop water towers. He also captured fans running after the band’s car on W. 58th Street, shot from the back window. (Other images show fans breaking through police barricades or gathered in huge crowds at the airport as Beatlemania tore through the country.)

What of the more specific, peculiar objects that caught Paul’s attention? In Washington, D.C., his eye turned to an adult theater marquee promoting a nude film. In Miami, it was a giant Miller High Life billboard. These are post-adolescent interests, but they also represent an interest in America, and the odd way we do things here.

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In Miami, for example, Paul photographed a motorcycle cop, but just his waist. “We didn’t have armed police officers back home,” he explains in wall text. So, through the shocked eye of McCartney, we see a close-up of a holster and pistol, with six reserve bullets stored along the belt.

In innocent, curious photographs like these, taken by a figurehead of the 1960s and a band said to have changed the world, one has to wonder: Has the world really changed that much since?

‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm’ is on view at the de Young Museum March 1–July 6, 2025.

Though not every artist is from “the struggle,” anyone who’s ever survived tough times is inherently a creative person.

That notion is at the heart of Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa’s artwork. A visual artist from Sacramento who lives in Oakland, Samayoa’s pieces depict ethereal images of lowriders on Daytons, dogs barking, tatted homies, smiling kids, Black revolutionaries and Brown pride.

On March 22, a solo exhibition of Samayoa’s work, titled Blood Be Water, opens at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José.

“It’s a lot of storytelling,” Samayoa says about his art. “And the beautiful thing about it is, it’s not just my story.”

A quiet kid who didn’t have much family support growing up, Samayoa leaned on neighbors and community members for structure. Those relationships broadened his perspective on life. “So I often tell a lot of these stories within my paintings that seem a little like nostalgic, and even have a spiritual presence,” he tells me during a recent phone conversation. “But it’s very universal, you know, something that a lot of people can relate to.”

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What’s more relatable than creating out of necessity?

As a kid, Samayoa learned to make do with whatever he had. This resourcefulness, along with the influence of his community, formed his central philosophy. “Life in general is tough,” says Samayoa. “I always say that all people who survive anything… they’re all artists, because you have to think creatively to get to the next day or create something that will help you in the future.”

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Lately, Samayoa’s work has grown from a means of survival to a mechanism for exploring his roots.

“I ventured off into doing a lot of oil and pastels on different surfaces like burlap, soil and plaster,” he says.

As a person of Mexican and Guatemalan ancestry, Samayoa sees using coffee sacks as a canvas — a nod to the robust coffee industry in Guatemala — as a way to further tap into his heritage.

The exhibition will feature 55 new original pieces, made of airbrush, charcoal and ceramics. Outside the gallery will be a night market with food trucks and vendors, and a prayer area for people observing the holy month of Ramadan.

Inside the building, one side of the gallery will show an assortment of black-and-white works, with a wall of color pieces on the other. A short documentary on Samayoa’s creative process will also be shown.

Samayoa’s hope is that folks pull up to the event, enjoy the art, soak up the stories and leave with a little more compassion for each other.

“I want people to open themselves up to one another. Because by doing that, you can see the possibilities that we all can do together,” Samayoa says.

“It’s not artists against artists,” he adds. “It’s artists against the world.”

Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa’s ‘Blood Be Water’ is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José March 22–Aug. 24, 2025, with an opening reception on March 22.

Three years ago, with a grant from the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, a small team of archivists sped up their work of digitizing films in the Prelinger Archives, Megan and Rick Prelinger’s massive collection of home movies and advertising, educational and industrial films.

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So far, Prelinger Archives staff have scanned over 3 million feet of film, equal to approximately 10,000 rare and one-of-a-kind films — still just a percentage of the archives’ total holdings. “We would need like a 10-year project” to scan it all, laughs Project Manager Adrianne Finelli. The collection holds over 40,000 home movies alone.

After these years of immersion, Finelli and her coworkers are presenting, in very personal ways, some of their findings. “Staff Picks from the Prelinger Archives” will be shown at two public events: a Zoom screening courtesy of the San Francisco Film Preserve on Friday, March 21 and a live screening at the Internet Archive on Monday, March 24.

Founded in 1983, the Prelinger Archives is full of weird and wonderful arcana, like the 1947 social guidance short Shy Guy, in which a high schooler takes cues from the popular kids and finds his way “in.” The Library of Congress purchased over 48,000 items from the archives in 2002; since then, the collection has prioritized home movies and amateur films. Attendees of Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes screenings know how home movies can provide magical and relatable glimpses into everyday history.

Getting these 8mm, 16mm and 35mm reels online involves a very physical process, starting with identifying which films are even sturdy enough to scan. Film preparers take stock of the reels in their various storage sites, making note of any labels or identifying materials that can help pinpoint the more mysterious holdings.

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Emily Chao’s portion of “Staff Picks” is an homage to the many styles of handwriting encountered in this process. “Sometimes we’ll just try to help each other read something,” Finelli says. Chao will show clips from corresponding home movies while focusing on the poetry of these bits of ephemera.

Digital Asset Manager Kristin Lipska, whose own work on the project is very behind the scenes, presents what Finelli calls “a celebration of invisible labor,” a series of outtakes from industrial and sponsored films. (Lipska is also the person behind the delightful Instagram account @clapperboardcuties.)

The fact that we even get to see a casually dressed young man with a clapperboard on the set of a railroad safety film is rare enough. “Most archives don’t collect outtakes. They don’t prioritize it, they don’t have room for it,” Finelli says. Alongside the awkward staginess of educational and industrial films, outtakes provide precious moments of reality that speak to the time and place of their making (and the people doing that work).

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Other presentations touch on the surprising beauty of warped and damaged celluloid (from Jen Miko); landscapes marked by colonialism, climate change and gentrification (from Kate Dollenmayer); and a deep dive into one 1950s Midwestern home movie (from Megan Needels).

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Needels uses that home movie of women playing softball, drinking beer and having a slumber party to illustrate the tricky task of categorizing historical material. To a contemporary eye, this footage reads as queer. Is it possible to retroactively flag that reading in an ethical way? Needels and Dollenmayer landed on the tag “possible LGBTQ+ research interest.”

“A big part of this project, bigger than we anticipated, is thinking about language — how to describe what we’re scanning and how to do that in a sensitive way,” Finelli says. “We’re even more dedicated to that because of what’s happening in the country.”

An Indigenous advisory group, which includes filmmaker and professor Colleen Thurston, consults the Prelinger Archives on how to address issues like cultural appropriation and filming of sacred sites. Certain pieces of footage will likely be held back from public access.

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Finelli’s own contribution to “Staff Picks” draws from the work of Henry Charles Fleischer, an Edison, New Jersey commercial filmmaker with an artist’s eye. “Mine’s really a tribute to his filmmaking, a compilation of his footage and a call for makers to use his films,” Finelli says. “They’re beautiful, and there are thousands of possible new works that live within them.”

Ultimately, the goal of the entire project is “mass digitizing for mass access,” Finelli says. The “Staff Picks” presentations are just six avenues into the archives’ vast amount of material. And by the end of summer 2026, researchers, artists and filmmakers will get to make use of all these staffers’ labor, bringing new life to strange, illuminating and forgotten slices of celluloid history.

‘Staff Picks from the Prelinger Archives’ is hosted by the San Francisco Film Preserve on March 21, 12–1 p.m. via Zoom. Registration is here.

An in-person screening will take place at the Internet Archive on March 24, 7–9 p.m. featuring additional presentations by Megan Shaw Prelinger and Brian Eggert. RSVP here.

It’s difficult to get San Franciscans to agree on pretty much anything when it comes to the Great Highway.

But Lucas Lux, president of Friends of Ocean Beach Park, says consensus did emerge when it came to discussions around public art. Lux’s nonprofit is working with San Francisco Recreation and Parks to “activate” the two-mile stretch of roadway for the April 12 grand opening of the yet-to-be-named park.

“After the victory of Prop K, we also spoke with numerous community leaders, neighbors and local art professionals on how best to approach art at the new park,” Lux said in an online meeting with the media on Monday. “The vast majority of people want the ocean to remain the star of the space, and want art and park features that compliment and don’t overwhelm the natural beauty of the coast.”

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He then presented images and renderings of 11 new murals and five sculptures, privately funded by Friends of Ocean Beach Park and other donors, that will be temporarily installed along the Great Highway for up to one year. The planned artwork includes colorful paintings on asphalt at major intersections, a crab sculpture that doubles as an optical illusion and metal giraffe sculptures near the San Francisco Zoo.

Of the 18 artists selected for the park’s opening installations, all but one are from the Bay Area, with four artists making their public art debuts. They are: Zach Coffin, Emily Fromm, Chris Granillo, Sarah Grimm and Jamae Tasker, Peter Hazel, Matley Hurd, Orlie K, Alice Lee, Cameron Moberg, Josue Rojas, Joey Rose, Wesley Skinner, Martin Taylor and Christina Xu.

Work on two of the murals, a “playscape” panorama by Emily Fromm and an homage to local flora and fauna by Orlie Kapitulnik (aka Orlie K), is already underway.

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As the very visible harbingers of the changes to come, Fromm and Kapitulnik have experienced the tension in the neighborhood firsthand. Fromm’s mural was just days away from completion when it was vandalized with white spray paint sometime between Friday, March 14 and Saturday, March 15, right when the Great Highway closed to car traffic.

The message “JOEL LIE$ #RECALL” — a reference to Sunset Supervisor Joel Engardio’s support of Proposition K and subsequent efforts to recall him — was written in what appeared to be the same white paint on the highway surface.

“Having been there for six weeks, I’d say 75% or more of the interactions I received were super, super positive, and people have been really excited,” Fromm said in Monday’s meeting. “Around that time of the closure especially, we had some people who made us feel unsafe and said really hurtful things. And we appreciate you all for stepping up so, so much because when you’re out there all by yourself, it can be a little bit daunting.”

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Shannon Riley, CEO of Building 180, the art production agency that helped Friends of Ocean Beach Park select the muralists and sponsored three of the sculptures, said over 60 volunteers helped Fromm restore her mural over the weekend. Fromm said she’s on track to complete the piece and put the final protective layer on by the end of this week.

Lux stated that protecting the artists involved in the project is even more important than protecting the art. “We hope that people will find more productive and respectful ways to express their opinions than destroying the artwork,” he said. Friends of Ocean Beach Park is spending $400,000 on the artwork and other preparations for the park’s opening day.

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During the Great Highway’s monthlong closure, the city will conduct its annual sand relocation from the north end of Ocean Beach to the south. As the artwork is installed, Recreation and Parks will use the month-long closure to add seating and recreation areas.

While some Outer Sunset residents have raised concerns about the environmental impact of the artwork, Lux stressed that everything installed over the coming month is temporary. “The people of San Francisco, through voting on Prop K, have removed the element that is not natural to the landscape that has been causing the most harm — and that’s automobile pollution,” Lux said.

He said welcomes feedback on the pieces, as well as the contact information of artists who want to be involved in future open calls.

“The work we’re doing is activating day one of the park, which is just the beginning,” Lux stressed. “Rec and Parks is launching a public engagement process to guide long-term improvements, and we hope that our artistic placemaking work helps inform the community’s engagement with that process.”

The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department and the San Francisco Arts Commission will present the full list of planned artwork to the SFAC’s Visual Arts Committee on Wednesday, March 19 at 2 p.m. General public comment will take place in person near the beginning of the meeting.

Art lovers in the Bay Area are often faced with a funny conundrum: art is everywhere, but given traffic and the geographic size of the nine-county region, it’s hard to get to all of it.

That was the intriguing pitch behind Sloane Gross’ Arty Bus, a party bus that took its riders not to the club, but to a circuit of art locations featuring her work on Saturday, March 15.

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The day started inside of Oakland’s Queer Arts Center on Lakeshore Avenue. As DJ Black Woman lowered the music, our tour guide cleared her voice before pouring libations.

“May the Arty Bus be a vessel of healing, joy and liberation,” Gross said to an audience of about 15 people gathered in a semi-circle. “May it awaken something powerful in every city we touch.” Her words were met with a collective response of “asé” and applause from the audience. And then we were on our way.

Inside the bus, more libations were poured, a card game was played and music blasted as we made our way up I-80 en route to the Richmond Art Center.

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In one room we saw Daniel Attaboy Seifert’s radiant exhibition, Upcycled Garden. With its floral paper creations jutting out from every inch of the gallery, the installation feels like walking into a Dr. Seuss book.

In an adjacent room we saw an explosion of pieces from the Art of the African Diaspora 2025 exhibition, covering the space wall to wall. It’s an artistic look at Black history and the future of the diaspora.

The exhibition features paintings of rapper Meek Mill and writer James Baldwin. There’s a small Buddha, a tiny Egyptian pharaoh and miniature mermaids in a mixed-media collage by a poet and visual artist named Paradise. There’s a deep blue futuristic painting by Oakland-based artist Zoë Boston and an ethereal indigo self-portrait of San Francisco staple Mailk Seneferu. There’s also a stunning emerald-green painting by Zarahana Kargbo, an 18-year-old artist from Oakland.

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On the wall across from Kargbo’s work is Gross’ piece, a mixed-media collage. She stood next to it and explained her creative process. “I don’t pay for art supplies,” she said. “I paint on what I can find or what’s donated to me.”

Gross’ series of works depicting lips and faces, the Be Art collection, was born from the COVID-19 pandemic era of nonstop Zoom video calls. She paired her studies of people’s faces with her excess supplies, and added a dash of inspiration from famed artist Romare Bearden. She produced numerous pieces, a few of which are on walls around the Bay Area.

“I made a million faces and lips,” Gross later told me. “I truly feel like I see and hear God through people. … I wanted to capture all of that.”

After the group took a collective photo in the Upcycled Garden, one of the center’s employees told us that The Art of The Diaspora 2025‘s closing ceremony is this coming weekend, from 2–4 p.m. on March 22.

And then we were back on the bus. The third location was just around the corner at Richmond’s NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development).

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An employee explained to the group that the studio is a space that prioritizes adult artists with developmental disabilities, and we perused the gallery and workshop areas, taking in the wide range of art the center offers.

It’s a huge space with clothing and sculptures, paintings, photos and more.

Gross’ sister, Halisi Noel-Johnson, shared her experience working at the center and noted some of the art she’s created. In the back of the center Noel-Johnson has an archive full of visual prints depicting prominent figures like Maya Angelou.

Gross added that her sister’s art has evolved of late, as she’s focused on knitting and quilt-making.

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Gross, who also works with cloth and material, had a display in the middle of the center’s workshop area highlighting her fashion design.

A life-long artist, Gross started painting shoes in high school. Her latest work with paint splatter on clothing is all about “giving art a space outside of the house and outside of the museum,” by getting people to wear it.

“I’m putting art on people,” she told me, “to show that people are art.”

Across the room from Gross’ work was another display, this one by Ericka Stitt, a painter from Richmond. Her depictions of bright-eyed children and optimistic messages stood out in the middle of center’s workshop. I complimented her work and then left with the group, headed toward the next stop: Kaleidoscope Coffee.

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The Point Richmond cafe’s burgundy brick walls made Gross’ painted pieces pop in contrast. The collective moved past the images, ordered espressos and lattes, and then made their way to the backyard patio where Lissette de la Rosa led the group in a breathing exercise.

The wind blew and the leaves rustled as de la Rosa reminded us that breathing from the diaphragm is more beneficial to your nervous system than shallow breaths. de la Rosa, who on March 23 will lead A Breathwork Ceremony for Women’s Strength & Legacy at Oakland’s Black Panther Party Museum, talked us through a 10-minute exercise in breathing from our guts.

As the mediation session came to a close, before everyone got back on the bus, I poked my head into a barbershop next to the cafe.

The shop was pristine, glossy with framed images, mounted instruments and fine furniture; an art gallery in salon form.

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I complimented Park Place Barbers owner Sam Charles on the aesthetics of the establishment and he told me that the shop, which first opened in 1975, also hosts jazz events where gumbo is served.

Again, there’s art at every turn.

The crew got back on the bus and we headed to the final stop, the newly opened Xingones restaurant in Oakland’s Waterfront Warehouse District, not far from Jack London Square.

Gross has multiple pieces mounted in the Mexican restaurant, some on the large far wall and others on a small wall near the restrooms.

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Folks jumped off the bus and into the food line, ordering tacos, chicken sandwiches and burritos. As people polished their plates, the tour came to a close. Before leaving I pulled Gross aside, asking about the importance of this tour.

“Black art needs to be seen,” she said, matter of factly. “So I took people on a tour to see Black art.” Beyond her work, Gross understands that it’s a collective effort to highlight and support local creatives, specifically Black folks trying to make it in the Bay.

“It’s about seeing Black art in its entirety,” she reiterated.

Raised in East Oakland, Gross now has artwork in a dozen places around the Bay Area. And while this tour was an experimental move, a proof of concept if you will, she told me that she’s going to do it again in the near future.

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But more immediately Gross is going to take people on a trip deeper into her creative process, as she prepares to do a series of live paintings at Xingones on March 22 during a happy hour event as a part of Oakland Restaurant Week.

Fine dining and unique food options, another thing the Bay Area has a lot of, but isn’t always accessible. Maybe Gross’ next trip can be an “Arty Bus” and mobile foodie truck that hits multiple restaurants.

On the corner of Jones and Ellis Streets in San Francisco, there’s an open-air art gallery filled with images of the very people who reside in the Tenderloin.

One block from Glide Memorial Church, right behind the sign that designates the area as Compton’s Transgender Cultural District, the images cover an entire building. The series of three-by-four-foot, black-and-white photos show residents from nearby SROs celebrating birthdays, customers patronizing local stores and folks who sleep on the streets, simply living.

The project is the work of photographer Harry Williams.

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He introduced me to his work exactly a year ago, around the time he first mounted the images on the wall. Initially, I had questions:

Are you parachuting into this community? Are you making money off them? What does this do for folks living there? What about the larger societal issues we’re dealing with — how does this combat anything?

A year later, the images are still there. He’s had to repost a few, and some of the ones that remain have been weathered and tagged. Meanwhile, Williams’ work has gotten recognized on some prominent platforms, he’s given a talk at the Commonwealth Club, and he currently has work hanging inside of San Francisco City Hall as a part of the Metaphors of Recent Times exhibition.

Yet I’m still grappling with my quandaries, especially the one about art and the role it plays in the midst of all that’s going on.

To be clear, Williams hasn’t claimed to be “fighting the system” with his visual work. He’s also firmly against taking advantage of people. He insists that, as an artist, he’s simply focusing his lens on a group of people that society has turned its back on.

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During presentations, like his upcoming talk on March 29 at an exhibition titled The Heart is Still Here, he often explains how this project came to be, after similar projects in other states and countries.

Outside of his day job as a visual designer (now freelance, formerly with Williams Sonoma), Williams has created a range of images from the hands of workers in Oaxaca, Mexico to a hill tribe group called the Black Hmong in the mountains of Northern Vietnam.

Another project, Lonesome Ash, focuses on people in the Buckeye state. “It was all these Vietnam vets,” says Williams about the photo project about battling gentrification in Columbus, Ohio. “The people that hung out in this bar were in a community that was being displaced.”

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Williams, who’s lived in San Francisco for over two decades, is a Latino man who was raised in a majority-white area of rural Ohio. His coming-of-age experience allowed him to relate to people who’d been cast out of broader society, he says.

When he started working in the Tenderloin, Williams wasn’t planning on making it a two-year project. Then he met a guy named Shorty.

“He was celebrating, it was his birthday,” recalls Williams. “I said, ‘Oh, well, then you gotta let me take your picture.’ And that’s kind of how it all started.”

Williams has since taken thousands of shots in the neighborhood, mostly portraits. Sometimes he talks to people and leaves without photographing them, other times he takes photos, prints them and holds on to the prints until he runs into the person again.

“There’s people that I haven’t seen in like a year, and then I’ll run into them,” Williams tells me. “And they’re like, ‘Oh my God, you’ve had that whole time!?'”

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Some people have broken into tears of joy, moved by the tangible image of themselves. Williams has also printed photos and held on to them for months, only to find that the person is no longer living. 

After accumulating enough photos, Williams got the idea to display them inside the liquor store-turned-family mart on the corner of Jones and Ellis. The store owner agreed to a small handful of photos, but “as soon as he saw them,” recalls Williams, “he loved them, and the people loved them.” He soon had permission to cover the whole building.

Unsure of how people were going to respond, Williams vowed that if anyone pictured requested it, he’d take them down.

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Just after the images were mounted, it hit Williams. “Everybody that lives in the Tenderloin knows that it has this stereotype,” he says, referring to homelessness and drug use. A common sight is people driving past and taking photos of the conditions without getting out of their cars. 

Williams still remembers what one person he photographed once told him. “‘Now when people come by to take pictures,'” Williams recalls the man saying, “‘they’re going to take a picture of me on this wall and they’re going to be looking up at me, not looking down at me.'”

Once a visitor himself, Williams has become a part of the community. He’s even celebrated his birthday with folks near Jones and Ellis.

“I see a lot of people trying to help each other on the street,” he says. “So I feel like there’s still a lot of that humanity.”

And that’s the word I can’t argue with. Humanity.

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I’ve long understood that the divisions in our society aren’t just about race, gender and religion, but about class, education and the widening economic division between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

In the face of legislation — local and federal — that allows for people on the lower end of the economic scale to be treated like second-class citizens, there’s an urgency for artists to take actions that create measurable change.

A number of multimedia projects focus on people living in the margins, and actionable steps to change their material lives. Street Spirit is an independent East Bay-based publication that not only shares stories of people facing housing instability, but employs them as well. (On Friday, March 28, they’ll celebrate 30 years of work.)

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There’s also the Stolen Belonging Project, which tracked people’s personal items confiscated by the Department of Public Works. Closer to Williams’ work is Amos Gregory’s 2024 Tenderloin photo project, which specifically aimed to dispel stereotypes of the community’s Black residents.

Is lending an struggling person a bit of dignity really such a bad thing?

In talking to Williams about the role of art at a time like this, I’ve realized that the meaning of “a time like this” depends on your perspective. If you’ve been struggling for two or three decades, it doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office. What matters is that there is someone who sees you as a human, who’s part of the larger community of humans.

For a photographer to sit on the curb and celebrate a birthday, or shed a tear over a memory, maybe that’s an important enough role for art at a time like this. It’s a tool, if used right, to make this world a little bit better.

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Williams isn’t paid for this work, and funds his art supplies with his own money. He has a published book of photography, Eye See You, which he sells for $75. (He stresses that getting people to buy photos of other people is a hard sell.)

His work isn’t charity, but when he has loose change, he has no issue with sparing some dough for someone in need. At the same time, he says, “Just stopping and acknowledging somebody and talking to them is worth way more than a dollar.”

As much as people need money, housing and other tangible resources, Williams’ work is a reminder: Before we can change society, we have to change how we treat other people in society — especially those on the outskirts.

The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, a Napa museum with an extensive collection of post-war Northern California art, announced today that it will transform two of its spaces into permanent rental venues and open a satellite museum in San Francisco. The announcement was presented as “a sustainable path forward” amid longstanding financial challenges.

Renovations will begin in July on the museum’s Gatehouse Gallery and the di Rosa residence, to better court event rentals like weddings and corporate gatherings. (Most Napa wineries cannot host weddings due to the 1990 Winery Definition Ordinance; the di Rosa is a rare, preexisting exemption.) Gallery Two and the Sculpture Meadow will remain open on a reservation basis during the 18 months of construction.

The changes also come with reductions in staff, which today’s announcement characterized as “a difficult but necessary step towards lowering operational expenses.” The museum, which currently employs nine full-time and seven part-time staff, will lay off two full-time and six part-time employees in July. All the part-time employees work in visitor experiences.

On Aug. 9, di Rosa will open the Incorrect Museum, an exhibition and education program in the former McEvoy Foundation for the Arts within the Minnesota Street Project complex. The first show will be Far Out: Northern California Art from the di Rosa Collection, featuring work by Joan Brown, Enrique Chagoya, Jay DeFeo, Mildred Howard and Peter Saul. Admission to the Incorrect Museum will be free.

This is not the first satellite space for the museum, which opened di Rosa Downtown at 1300 First St. in Napa in December 2024. Exhibitions will continue here as well, where the group show Second Nature is on view through June 1.

Executive Director Kate Eilersten is quoted saying, “Once this transition is underway, we aim to begin collecting once again, a practice that was core to founder Rene di Rosa’s vision, and which will enable us to present visitors with a more contemporary and expansive view of Northern California art.”

This is a developing story and it will be updated.

It’s difficult to compete with the view from COL Gallery, which looks out from Ghirardelli Square to Aquatic Cove, Alcatraz and a sparkling San Francisco Bay. But if any artist’s up to the task, it’s Susan Weil, whose mini-retrospective in the one-and-a-half-year-old gallery provides a dazzling survey of seven decades of painting, collage and mixed media work.

Weil, who lives in New York and turns 95 later this month, doesn’t fit within a particular art historical narrative — or rather, not just one particular narrative. Instead, she flits in and out of different movements and associations, mostly doing her own thing despite prevailing or commercial trends, and doing it very well.

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Her earliest piece in the show, Collage Figure (1966), is a combination of photographic images and acrylic paint, a horizontal spread of women’s bodies radiating rainbow-hued waves behind a slick plexi surface. Like all of the work in this show, the nearly 60-year-old piece is remarkably well preserved; it looks like it could have been made yesterday.

The multimedia collage is also indicative of Weil’s fragmented approaches to come. In the show’s 13 works, bodies break up or blur into constituent parts and spread across multiple canvases. Painted paper and canvas curves, crumples and hangs in elegant, three-dimensional shapes.

The show opens with a work that seems made for its current San Francisco setting, despite the title of Munich Birds (1989). Made with eight pieces of paper pinned high on the gallery wall, it depicts three birds in flight. One bird’s cut-out wing curls gracefully where it meets the ceiling. Seagull calls from outside add a fitting soundtrack; the whole assemblage seems on the verge of bursting apart like a startled flock.

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Similarly appropriate to its temporary home is the multi-canvas piece Swimmers (2008), a watery acrylic painting that perfectly captures the splashy movements of two swimmers, who could easily be the Dolphin Club or South End Rowing Club members paddling back and forth through Aquatic Cove.

Weil’s interest in bodies includes celestial bodies. Three Moons (1990), a simple construction of three ivory-painted canvas circles, drapes like a set of vestments around an absent religious figure. The triptych Sindhind (1977) is a starry night sky marked not by our Milky Way, but a thick arc of crinkled paper. A favorite moment here: when the unpainted, white backside of Weil’s paper reveals itself, looking like a chunk of light knocked through the firmament.

While there’s a bit of “How’d she do this?” with some of Weil’s work, her materials are never illusory, or trying to render themselves invisible. Even if we don’t have the skill to replicate her vivid cyanotype print or a stiff crumpled paper sculpture, we can clearly see how these things are made.

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Her long career has been one of material experimentation and daily practice, commitments perhaps encouraged by her early involvement with the alternative art school Black Mountain College. It was Weil who told Robert Rauschenberg (to whom she was married 1950–1953) about the school; they met while taking art classes in Paris. In 1948, they studied under Josef Albers alongside Ruth Asawa (whose first public sculpture, Andrea, is installed at Ghirardelli Square).

Weil’s long bio is filled with legendary spaces (112 Greene Street, P.S. 1) and numerous firsts, including the delightful fact that her second husband, architect Bernard Kirschenbaum, built her the first residential geodesic dome.

While Weil’s practice is well known back east, amazingly, this is her first West Coast solo exhibition, a major coup for the fledgling COL Gallery. As an introduction to her inventive, multifaceted practice, this show is a gratifying one, anchored by Array (1982), a nearly seven-foot-wide painted paper piece in which a hand pulls back what I like to think of as a heavy curtain. Revealing, perhaps, Susan Weil’s long life of artmaking.

‘Susan Weil’ is on view at COL Gallery (887 Beach St., San Francisco) through May 9, 2025.

Aficionados of film photography will soon be able to access a new photo lab opening in San Francisco. Low Light Darkroom, a nonprofit, volunteer-led lab opening in Union Square, will offer studio time for emerging and seasoned photographers to develop their own film and make their own black-and-white or color prints.

The darkroom is part of Moongazer Collective, a new community hub that includes a vintage clothing store from The Sunshine Prophecy and art shows put together by Orphan Gallery. The collective’s grand opening, on March 22, includes music sets by local DJs, libations by Madre Mezcal and art by Bay Area painter Charlie Ertola. Low Light Darkroom will showcase photography by San Francisco artist Minnette Lehmann.

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Low Light Darkroom hopes to meet the needs of photographers familiar with developing film and making prints, and are ready for a more hands-on approach. Producing one’s own color prints is easier said than done these days; only a few photo labs in the Bay Area provide public access to color darkroom printing, like Photo Laundry in the Mission. (For off-site developing, Low Light recommends full-service film labs like Underdog, which has drop-offs at San Francisco’s Glass Key.)

Lor O’Connor, a founding member of Low Light Darkroom and a self-taught film photographer, said she’s been working for 13 years to bring her vision of a Bay Area collective darkroom to life. “There just aren’t a lot of color darkrooms left,” said O’Connor. “We hope to serve people who are looking for that — for a working studio.”

Visitors to Saturday’s grand opening will be able to explore the darkroom and collective space, which will operate on a membership model. Memberships to the darkroom are currently priced in tiers based on how many hours photographers anticipate using the space. O’Connor also hopes to start a residency program in the summer.

“We encourage people to experiment and learn from their mistakes, and learn from others,” said O’Connor. “I think that’s kind of the beauty of film … sometimes mistakes become the thing you want to pursue.”

Low Light Darkroom’s open house takes place Saturday, March 22, from 2–10 p.m. Details here.

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Steuart Pittman loves a hard edge. In all his pared-down abstract paintings, whether they’re large or small, oil or acrylic, the Oakland artist creates a precise demarcation between background and “object.” Hard edges solidify simple shapes — no matter how mysterious they are — into objects with a firm reality. Pittman’s shapes are a personal language, plucked from memories and real-life encounters, now scattered like clues throughout his Traywick Contemporary show Les Cheneaux.

The show title comes from a specific place, a chain of islands in Northern Michigan that Pittman grew up visiting with his family. (In a show this reserved, text is another morsel of precious information.) Trying to orient myself to this reference point, I zoom out on the map, looking for a nearby city or landmark. Finally, about five clicks out, I recognize the Upper Peninsula and the nearby Canadian border. This is a world away from the Bay Area.

Les Cheneaux archipelago, via Pittman’s depiction, is a place of horizons, flashing details and slightly muted hues. Befitting the show’s watery themes, taking in Les Cheneaux is a bit like beachcombing. Paintings hang high and low, in small clusters and along a hip-high shelf. What at first seems to be a uniform set of materials reveals itself, through close inspection, as a range of paint types and surface textures, as in Ice, an alkyd painting on plexiglass.

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By the front door, the bold Dardevle enlarges the red-diamond pattern of an iconic fishing lure, a tiny bit of graphic design meant for fish eyes only. But we’re snagged too. There’s playfulness here — and underlying melancholy. Bits of nature are presented in isolation (Minnows reduces the fish to silver slivers on a green background) or as simplified line drawings (Loon and Foxtail are Pittman’s sole excursions into sketchy oil pastel).

Even paintings that depict what look like a congregation of sails or two boats meeting on the water are stoic in their simplicity. One gets the sense that this place has left an indelible mark on Pittman, but that those memories are tinged with sadness. Wedge is a dark cocktail glass with a quarter-circle of lime perched on its edge. Pilings is a tan battlement against a burnt red background. (In a quote in the show announcement, Pittman acknowledges his own family history is layered atop the homeland of the Anishinaabek people.)

The most somber work in the show is Marquette, a small shadow-box construction of oil on panel. The work is entirely horizontal: a dark gray sky, a strip of dark green (Marquette is the largest of the Les Cheneaux islands), a thin line of bright pink, and a liquid gray green. In some zones, Pittman creates a brushy texture; in others, the wood remains smooth.

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Above and below, light and dark. Works in the show tend toward doubles. This is most notably the case in the framed diptych Hessel / Cedarville, a geometric design that represents, possibly, the character of the two towns north of the islands. I find myself looking up more titles. Is Pitkin a reference to a gift shop halfway up the peninsula? I learn about the Soo Locks connecting Lake Superior to the lower Great Lakes. But other references remain opaque: the Josef Albers-influenced Innisfree; the tiny flag-like Pike; what the two ramp shapes of Sloop have to do with a single-masted boat.

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And that’s great. A show that overexplains itself isn’t half as rewarding to spend time with as Les Cheneaux is. Nobody walks along a waterfront hoping to come upon a pre-made pile of beautiful rocks and shells. It’s the peering and finding that makes beachcombing worthwhile, along with all the quiet, contemplative time such undertakings — including the adjacent leisure activities of fishing, boating, birdwatching, etc. — allow.

Pittman’s great accomplishment here is to create a show that submerges viewers in references to a time and place we will never have access to firsthand. But the feelings his paintings evoke are familiar, hard-edged solid, and absolutely real. There are “lures” hidden throughout Les Cheneaux, custom-made to tap into our particular stores of nostalgia and unearthed family dynamics. A skilled fisherman, Pittman hooks us in, again and again, for a closer look.

‘Les Cheneaux’ is on view at Traywick Contemporary (895 Colusa Avenue, Berkeley) through May 17, 2025.

For decades, San Francisco artist Lynn Marie Kirby has created artwork that defies easy classification. In part, this is because she is a natural collaborator, and her work shifts and grows in complexity with the addition of each new voice.

One of my first encounters with Kirby’s work was The 24th Street Listening Project, a 2012 experimental walking tour she created in collaboration with Alexis Petty. The roundabout and sensitive neighborhood portrait culminated in a potted plant giveaway.

A few years later, Kirby and Cristoph Steger temporarily took over the former Alhambra Theater on Polk Street (now a Crunch Gym) for The Alhambra Project, a piece that similarly engaged a cast of collaborators and spilled out into the surrounding neighborhood. Again and again, Kirby’s poetic and abstracted approach to art-making draws lines between disparate things: bodybuilding and tile patterns, fortune cookies and paint colors.

On Sunday, March 30, Canyon Cinema presents “the insufficient frame,” a program of Kirby’s film, video and performance work at the Roxie Theater. More collaborations and improvisations are on view here, along with a wide variety of material approaches to filmmaking (including live singing!).

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Highlighting a selection from the 1980s to the present, the screening is followed by a conversation between Kirby and filmmaker and scholar Jeffrey Skoller (who contributed an essay to the recent publication from X Artists’ Books, Time & Place: on the work of Lynn Marie Kirby).

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The Roxie program includes 11 pieces, ranging in length from one minute to 22. In one of the earliest films, Kirby’s 1987 Sharon and the Birds on the Way to the Wedding, a woman talks about the fading appeal of marriage and her pet birds, while a narrator describes the discovery of “a magazine kind of love.” There’s no sense here of what’s real and what’s staged. The whole thing is interspersed with images of firefighters hosing down a blaze — is it marriage itself that’s the dumpster fire?

A more recent digital video returns us to the confusing, claustrophobic days of 2021, when Kirby made Listen to the World Waking over a period of six months with the San Francisco Girls Chorus. Drawn from objects, images and notes gathered by members of the chorus, the resulting video captures a distorted, ghostly time in the girls’ lives. Their sweet voices sing a haunting libretto written by Kirby and longtime collaborator Denise Newman.

Kirby’s program is part of Canyon Cinema’s ongoing series of monographic screenings of “classic, overlooked, new and restored films.” (Last year they programmed the Toney W. Merrit mini-retrospective “As I Am.”) Take this rare chance to peer into Canyon Cinema’s incredible vault, see a local artist’s work in depth, and hear from Kirby directly about that work. Such opportunities don’t come around often.

‘Lynn Marie Kirby: the insufficient frame’ plays at 3:40 p.m. on March 30, 2025 at the Roxie Theater. Details here.

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Is there any artist as locally beloved as Ruth Asawa? For all of Wayne Thiebaud’s vertiginous streets and Joan Brown’s vibrant renderings of city life, it’s Asawa we most hope embodies the spirit of San Francisco.

That’s because the artist, who moved here in 1949 and died here in 2013, didn’t just contribute fountains, sculptures and landscape design to the city’s physical shape; she helped create lasting institutions dedicated to arts education. Among those are our public arts high school, now named for her; the San Francisco Arts Education Project, offering hands-on arts instruction by working artists; and the creative reuse center SCRAP, the city’s treasure trove of affordable art materials.

Asawa’s influence is so vast, and her artistic output so varied, that it takes 12 galleries at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to honor that legacy. Ruth Asawa is the artist’s first posthumous retrospective, and it goes big, covering six decades of artmaking, with over 300 works on the museum’s fourth floor.

Arranged chronologically and thematically, the show won’t disappoint fans of Asawa’s hanging looped-wire sculptures. By my count, there are nearly 60 of those airy pieces in this show. But co-curators Janet Bishop (of SFMOMA) and Cara Manes (of MoMA, the touring exhibition’s next stop) also focus on bodies of work I was far less familiar with: early abstract paintings, branching tied-wire sculptures and intricate ink drawings of bouquets.

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The exhibition begins at Black Mountain College, the storied alternative art school Asawa attended between 1946 and 1949 after she was unable to receive her teaching degree from the Milwaukee State Teachers’ College. (There was so much anti-Japanese sentiment following WWII, the college refused to place her in a Wisconsin school. “They were afraid for my life,” she later said.)

In North Carolina, she studied under the likes of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller and alongside Susan Weil, Ray Johnson and Albert Lanier, her future husband. In the work from those years, we see Asawa using uncharacteristically bright colors, repeating gestures to create patterns and experimenting with biomorphic forms.

Tucked into a corner is a sweet exchange between Lanier and Asawa: a postmarked envelope addressed to her at “B.M.C.” and the 1948 painting she made using the stamp colors. Asawa joined Lanier in San Francisco in 1949; they were married less than a year after California repealed its laws banning interracial unions.

Between 1950 and 1959, Asawa had six children. Her work appeared in what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and on the pages of Vogue. She secured a patent, was represented by a New York gallery and sold her first piece to a museum (the Oakland Museum of California), among other accomplishments. She didn’t really slow down from there.

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There were other directions Asawa’s career could have gone. Early on, she and Lanier made wallpaper and textile designs. A San Francisco interior design company offered Asawa a contract to mass-produce looped-wire baskets and waste bins. But by 1954 she had fully committed to fine art.

Her looped-wire forms, made by hand through a knitting-like process without tools or hooks, grew increasingly complex. They curve in on themselves, blending different types of metal and suspending forms within forms organically, almost magically. The installation at SFMOMA is stellar, with shadows given almost as much space as the art.

In a series of works on mat board, she approximated the effect of her looped-wire sculptures with cut-outs of pre-printed adhesive film. The moiré patterns that result in these overlaps capture the difficulty of correctly resolving the interior and exterior of Asawa’s forms.

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Even as she developed new ways of making sculptural forms, Asawa was using the humblest of materials in tried-and-true ways. Some of my favorite pieces in the show are stamped ink on paper, repeated shapes of cut apples, potatoes and even a bike pedal. To Asawa, art could be informed by — and physically made from — just about anything in everyday life: fruits and vegetables, flowers, a sleeping child, bentwood cane chairs, a shingled house.

At the exhibition’s center, a large gallery lined with warm wood panels cozily nods to Asawa’s Noe Valley living room, which was filled with her own art, friends’ work and the comings and goings of her family of eight. It’s a nexus, a hub. In 1962, whether knowingly or not, she began to illustrate that concept through tied-wire sculptures.

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While her looped-wire forms are circular and self-contained, these pieces are open-ended bursts of ever-diminishing branches of wire. Think tumbleweed, root structure, fractal, snowflake under a microscope. The spiky sculptures impressively range in size, some of their tips dotted with glimmering drops of resin. When Asawa electroplated these pieces, the chemicals made the metal grow even fuzzier.

The exhibition’s final galleries are given over to a staggering number of works on paper, most of them delicate drawings of flowers, documentation of bouquets given to Asawa by friends and family. Her elegant, exacting lines trace petals, stems and leaves, making permanent these ephemeral, soon-to-be-wilted arrangements.

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It’s a tendency present in much of her work: taking impermanent things like baker’s clay and paper folds, and turning them into solid, lasting bronzes. Starting off small, with at-hand materials, children and volunteers could join in Asawa’s artmaking. Her 1973 Union Square fountain is the handiwork of more than 250 San Francisco residents, aged three to 88.

Public art, printmaking, arts education, ceramics, giant doors — I’ve glossed over so much of the retrospective because there’s simply so much in it. One gets the sense that Asawa couldn’t not make art.

In pictures of her working with school groups in the early days of the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now SFArtsED), she wears a grey sweatshirt covered in paint with a sizable hole below the neckline. In another revealing image, an undated photocopy of Asawa’s hand, her injured pointer finger is wrapped in gauze.

This is the Ruth Asawa I like to picture: the busy, prolific patron saint of San Francisco arts. This is what an experiment-driven, rigorous, collaborative and deeply generous art practice looks like — and what Ruth Asawa captures, in room after room, so well.

‘Ruth Asawa: Retrospective’ in on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art April 5–Sept 2, 2025.

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The spring flyer for Oakland’s First Fridays street fair shows people strolling on an urban avenue past a building festooned with bright, pink flowers.

But that advertisement for an event celebrating creativity wasn’t created by an artist. It was generated by AI.

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“Shame on you,” an Instagram user commented. “You exist because of artists and yet you insist on stealing from and subjugating them…”

Oakland First Fridays was begun by local art galleries in 2006 as a kind of Friday night, art gallery crawl. Organizers say it now draws about 30,000 people each month.

This week the organizers defended their use of an AI image to promote the festival as being all they could afford as a local nonprofit running a free event.

“(W)e do our best to balance creativity with the resources we have available,” they posted on Instagram. “Unfortunately, we don’t currently have the budget to hire artists to create designs for us… it wasn’t a purely AI-generated design,” they added. “(W)e made significant edits and adjustments…”

I think the Oakland First Fridays flyer looks… fine. But knowing it was produced by artificial intelligence doesn’t make you consider what an artist saw with their eyes and hoped to express.

AI is poised to change the world and alter the fields of medicine, manufacturing, accounting, coding, and yes, writing and even broadcasting.

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But people make art to spark imagination and feeling, in the artist and the audience.

Riva Lehrer, the artist and writer who also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, told us: “We in the arts have to understand the machinery of our imaginations in order to become deeper artists. AI is like letting our minds be kidnapped and distorted. It is a vampire mirror, capturing your soul and putting it in a cage.”

Pablo Picasso, by the way, made paintings and lithographs to promote art fairs. Maybe the folks at Oakland First Fridays could have taken one of those and just made a few “significant adjustments.”

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