The Big Buffet in the Sky, Andrea Bergen, Moth Belly Gallery

By Taylor Snowberger

Psychedelic mammatus clouds, known for preceding storms, halo a hyper-real American Bison. Fur ripples over its musculature, its body rearing over a gallery of feral animals. Some appear to be domesticated escapees, others laboratory runaways, all cavorting in the parking lot of a burning JCPenney, wearing expressions of derangement, serenity, or oblivious rapture. All are complicit in a crime with which they are unquestionably pleased. The ground is littered with evidence, food court fare and thriving flora. Nearby, a kitten rears up to high-five a rat, a glimpse of brief camaraderie absolving their age-old rivalry. Overhead, a pigeon resembles an archangel, brandishing a Rocket Pop and a slice of pizza in its talons, its neck ringed by a pink doughnut. A vacant eyed Chihuahua begs, a Rhesus Macaque basks, and a Monarch Butterfly alights upon a gas can in the foreground. Like the scholars of Raphael’s School of Athens, each figure draws the eye in a new direction.

This Past Is Waiting For Us: Kate Haug’s Collaborative Practices at SebArts

By Tamsin Spencer Smith

Bay Area Artist Kate Haug’s takeover of the Sebastopol Center of the Arts immerses viewers in a layered contemplation of popular culture by resurfacing historic moments and forgotten icons from the last American century. Collaborative Practices presents a march through high points of social activism, the downsides of technological progress, and complexities of womanhood and mother-daughter relationships.

Suzanne Lacy, Art, Aging, and Accountability

“Have feminists changed the way we think about violence? For sure. Have they changed violence? I don’t think so. You keep doing it because you believe in it, not because you think it will.”

Nancy Mona Russell, Open Geometry for Emotional Use, Nelson Duni

By Vrushali Anil Dhage

Open Geometry for Emotional Use is Russell’s second solo at the Nelson Duni, San Francisco. Remarkably, all but three of the works in the show, including at least one canvas of mural-sized proportions,date from 2026. The three small pictures from the 1960s act as anchors for the artist’s trajectory, attesting to Russell’s consistent vision and her unwavering belief in abstraction as an artist.

From impasto that builds up, or layers that can be visually excavated, colors that radiate, or strokes that guide dimensions engage the viewer. Spaces that seem to be both mental and physical, emanating forms, and some constricting lines are possibly suggestive of the ‘emotional’ from the show’s title.

Graciela Iturbide, A Mirror of the Self / A Mirror of the World, SFMOMA

By Jan Wurm

The impulse to make art may begin with a marking of an experience; it may begin as an effort to make visible emotion, growth, or change. A manifestation of oneself in relation to family, love, loss, birth and death – art can mirror the surface to reveal internal shifting tides. At times, the reach moves beyond – outward to reflect the social, the cultural, the political, indeed even the geography and nature of the world. Graciela Iturbide holds her camera to mirror her vision in a continuum streaming from the self to the world.

The Shape of Nature, Studio Shop Gallery

By Samantha Hull

Artists have been inspired by nature as long as art has been created. Humanity has been captivated and inspired by the natural world since the dawn of time.

Three internationally acclaimed artists, Foad Satterfield, Kristine Taylor, and Federico Uribe, have been brought together to draw inspiration from nature at the Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, California. From landscapes, wildlife, and organic matter, The Shape of Nature is an immersive exhibition that mimics the natural world while celebrating its beauty and wonder, further captivating our imagination and awe.

Ben Peterson, Tropic of Cancer, reading room, Et al. Gallery

By S Anne Steinberg

At around eleven years old, I dreamed–briefly–of being an archeologist. I imagined I would dig up mysterious, well-formed artifacts, then ponder their former function and the long-lost world from which they came. The outcome of my work would look a bit like “Tropic of Cancer reading room,” Ben Anderson’s current Colpa Press-curated show at Et al. Gallery (through August 30).

GaHee Park, Behind the Curtain, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

By Gabrielle Selz

There is something seductive and faintly disquieting about GaHee Park’s paintings. Their colors are muted but rich—dusty pinks, grays, greens, and yellows—and their surfaces have an almost decorous calm. Flowers sit in vases, fish lie on tables, women recline, cats watch, insects crawl. Then you begin to notice what else is happening. A body doubles. A shadow develops a presence of its own. An eye appears where it shouldn’t. What initially resembles a still life or portrait slips into something erotic, uncanny, and increasingly strange. The longer you look, the less stable the picture becomes.

Caledonia Curry (Swoon) on Art, Trauma, and Healing

“Unconscious and buried pain is like a coiled spring. Most of the time, all that stuff does is ruin your life — but every once in a while, directed the right way, it becomes great art.”

Isaac Vazquez Avila - Unruly Inland Scenes, pt.2 Gallery, Oakland

By Kelly Jean Egan

Born in Mexico City in 1983, Vazquez Avila moved to the United States as a child and eventually settled in San Francisco, where he now lives and works in Bernal Heights. He received a BA in Latino/a Studies from San Francisco State University before earning his MFA from UC Berkeley in 2016, where he has since taught studio courses, alongside teaching at California College of the Arts. His practice has moved freely between painting, sculpture, sign painting and mural work, with exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Guerrero Gallery, Tlaloc Studios in Los Angeles and numerous Bay Area spaces. He has also conducted research in Mexico City through UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative, examining the relationship between art and urban life, an interest in place and lived environment that continues to surface throughout his work.

Noah Charney on AI art authentication and 85.7% Caravaggio

“He sprints across the room, snips the wire, sets off the alarm, grabs the painting Hitler loved, and the security guards are grasping at the van door as he zooms off.”

Rainen Knecht, Alive! with Pleasure, Et al. Gallery

By Taylor Snowberger

Art can be a chore. Do you lately find yourself exhausted by the display of personal vivisection in digital content, or with your eyes glazing over, unable to take in the opaque babble of terse works from antiquity? As you undertake the mirthless rigor of trying to find something valuable, you begin to question yourself, the artist, and the institution — until something redeeming comes along. If this describes you, harken, friend — Et al. has the medicine. Past the stacks of lovingly thumbed used books lies a simple labyrinth of galleries, one of which contains a splendidly unironic and mirthful exhibition by Rainen Knecht in her show, Alive! With pleasure. Under the warm sunbeams emanating from the skylight, Knecht fills the room with a collection of fairy-tale warmth, neither saccharin nor bitter. Like Goldilocks taking to a bowl of porridge, you’ll perhaps declare it “just right.”

Janet Delaney, Too Many Products, EUQINOM Gallery

By Jonathan Curiel

The stories we tell ourselves — about our upbringings, our families, our feelings — often change with time, especially with the passage of decades. It’s a surreal realization, isn’t it?

In early 1980, Janet Delaney used her burgeoning photographic skills to document the doings of her salesman father as he made his rounds of Los Angeles-area beauty salons. Growing up, Delaney had decidedly mixed feelings about her dad’s profession in a business that she said represented an “oppressive hold” on women’s lives. In that era, an increasing number of women mirrored that view, saying their self-image shouldn’t be beholden to the male gaze and certainly not to capitalism’s commercial pressure to look pretty. “Growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s under the aura of second-wave feminism,” Delaney has written, “I had a disdain for the products my father peddled.”

Cannupa Hanska Luger, A Field Manual for the Future

“I make-believe as a career. I’ve been doing that since before I could walk. Me making believe is older than my teeth.”

Philip Guston Estate, Life With P., Philip Guston: Paintings and Drawings 1964 – 1978, Hauser & Wirth

By Patrick James Dunagan

Life with P. continues Hauser & Wirth’s significant collaboration with the Philip Guston Estate and the artist’s daughter, Musa Mayer, on archival publishing projects relating to her and her parents, connected with fresh exhibitions of her father’s work. Walking through the New York show on 18th Street, Guston’s Two Hearts (1978) was hands down the standout work. I couldn’t ever recall previously seeing even an image of it (neither had John Yau in his Hyperallergic review).

Practice Makes Perfect: How Elaine Nguyen Made an Art Practice in the Bay Area

By Erik Recendez

Dream Recital, at CAMi Gallery, is crisp and seemingly effortless. Towering Prussian Blue cyanotypes, a method that uses ultraviolet light-sensitive chemicals, immerse viewers in memory and abandon. The images may appear impromptu, but that illusion depends on a rigorous preparedness. Artist Elaine Nguyen’s career operates in much the same way. Artists like Nguyen know that having an art practice today takes more than making a compelling pièce de résistance. Dream Recital is the product of building relationships, marketing savvy, and fiscal infrastructure as much as it is the result of studio time. In that sense, Elaine Nguyen exemplifies the contemporary artist’s role in the Bay Area and how it has expanded today.

Diedrick Brackens, gather tender night, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

By John Felix Arnold

As I take my first steps into gather tender night, Diedrick Brackens’ solo exhibition at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts curated by Eugenie Joo, something remarkable happens. I am engulfed by an alluring indescribable power emitted from the mixture of colorful fibrous textures and free standing wooden structures. I find a resonance, not just of the human spirit, but the energy we are created of. In the midst of Brackens’ work I feel the complex ingredients of existence collaborating to remind me that we are woven together in a wondrous cosmology. gather tender night allows me to feel uncontained, floating and sinking, submerging and climbing through an unfolding material narrative that weaves worldly tactility into a threshold for the mythological and fantastical.

Roborant Review is meeting up, and we’d like you to join us.

Join us on Wednesday, August 12th, 6- 8 pm at 111 Minna Gallery for Happy Hour, DJ ’66, and The Drawing Machine.

Writers, artists, and creatives connect on art and their next ideas.

With special guest Stephen Millborrow, the creator of the Nonoti, the realistic portrait drawing robot.

Can you join us on Wednesday, August 12th at 111 Minna Gallery?

Best,

Hugh Leeman

Managing Editor

Degas in New Orleans

By Bob Dunlap

In July 1870 the Franco-Prussian War began, a conflict that would redraw the map of Europe, end the French Second Empire, create and then crush the Paris Commune, and unify Germany into the Second Reich. Beyond the vast military and political implications, the war reverberated throughout French society, shifting cultural norms across economic, philosophical and artistic realms. Many artists (Monet, Pissarro and Cezanne) fled Paris, taking refuge in London or remote parts of France to evade the war (and its draft). Others joined the army (Renoir, Rodin and Redon), and still others fought in the National Guard. Enter Edgar Degas…

FBI Special Agent and Art Crime Founder Robert Wittman on Stolen Art, Lies, and the Gardner Heist

“I never lost touch with reality, because I always kept it real. But you could fall in love with the lifestyle.”

Oliver Hawk Holden, Future Relics, 120710 Gallery, Berkeley

By Chad Abbley

The gallery lights weren’t on. A black curtain covered the doorway to keep the daylight out, and behind it, in the dark, a skeleton sat on a red Vespa next to a small CRT portable television from the nineties. The skeleton was wearing a helmet — California state law when operating a motorcycle — and the helmet had a microphone and a speaker mounted on it. You could speak into the microphone and it would transmit whatever you said back out through the speaker, with a layer of reverb added…

Juana Alicia, Not Erasure, But Context, Murals, Memory, and Who Gets to Be a Hero

“I don’t think erasure is good for the history — or herstory — of humanity. The question is: where do they go, and how are they contextualized?”

Andy Goldsworthy, Red Flags, Fort Mason Gateway Pavilion, presented by FOR-SITE and Fort Mason Art

By Carlos Alcalá

I can’t say that the work of Andy Goldsworthy goes unappreciated. The New Yorker recently did a nice piece on him. Out in the world, though, his work does seem to go under the radar. It feels hidden in plain sight.

While the lucky Bay Area art lover may have to wait in a crowd for an unobstructed view of Morisot or Kahlo or Vermeer at a blockbuster show, an equally lucky visitor to one of Goldsworthy’s nearby site-specific works may find themself in solitary meditation with a sinuous rock wall, a towering cypress spire or a winding eucalyptus path.

Emmy Lou Packard in Mendocino

By Robert Brokl

San Francisco artist Emmy Lou Packard, along with her artist husband Byron Randall, packed up and moved to the charming but somewhat down-at-the-heels North Coast California lumbertown of Mendocino in 1960. She and the town were both in transition, and each subsequently impacted the other. Packard was moved to lead the efforts to save the town from commercial development, while making a life for herself and Randall there for nine years, depicting the architecture and landscape.

Valerie Huhn, The Wound Is The Place Where The Light Enters You, Hunterdon Art Museum

By Elizabeth Johnson

Valerie Huhn’s sculpture and painting exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Museum, The Wound Is The Place Where The Light Enters You, joins two important topics: being educated about the empowerment of marginalized people during her formative years in San Francisco, and reconciling her own troubled history with a grateful and creative present. In her teens, Huhn suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. For years, she was intermittently institutionalized until she was properly diagnosed and started medication…

Video Craft, The Museum of Craft and Design

By Hantian Zhang

There are two ways to read the title of the exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco: an exhibition about the craft of making moving images, or one about what craft has made of the moving image. The first reading is not a stretch, as editing, color timing, and the physical labor of slicing and splicing footage are all forms of embodied, specialized knowledge; a show called Video Craft could easily have been about them.

Pam Longobardi, What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience, Momentum Gallery

By Bill Russell

I was strolling through Asheville, North Carolina, as one does in the slow-rolling southern states where heat, history, and memory seem to rise from the sidewalks, and wandered into Momentum Gallery. Inside, a group exhibition titled What We Carry: Meaning, Memory, and the Human Experience unfolded like a quiet chorus of voices.

A Conversation with Oscar Villalon

“What the literary arts do is provide you with that vocabulary. So you can name the place where it hurts. You can name that itch — and now you know where to go and scratch.”

Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, The Art Institute of Chicago

By N Stern

You've walked this path a thousand times, off the zen reverie and cradle rock of the El, down the rusted honeycomb steps, over rain-specked sidewalk, past the patinated bronze lions, gatekeepers of the dreaming. You once shot b-roll on these steps - permitless - because that's the Chicago way - the cinematographer grinning, the actor in shades, lest he tempt the lenses of the Japanese tour group obsessed with his early, funny dance/dance revolution.

The Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters, A Living Version of History’s Greatest Art.

By Liz Goldner

This summer’s Pageant of the Masters, with its theme, the “Greatest of All Time,” celebrates six centuries of art masterpieces, presenting work from many different eras and styles. The theatrical spectacle features 40-plus renowned paintings and sculptures, most with real people inhabiting their artistic counterparts, on the stage.

Michelle Grabner on Unromantic Truth and the Art School Crisis

“If you have to be a barista, or if you have to carry the mail, you do that. Do not entangle the art market into what you need to get your work done.”

Thomas Murray, This is Our Garden, Noyes Museum of Art

By William W. Sokoloff

From a materialist standpoint, gardens are places where life begins, ends and begins again. From a philosophical and symbolic perspective, gardens are spaces of transformation, conversion, rejuvenation, abundance, temptation, free will, metamorphosis, beauty, death, mystery, and paradox. In gardens, life, in its overflowing abundance and incomprehensibility, is on display.

Joel Hernandez, At Least We’re Damned Together, Mothbelly Gallery

When I walked into Mothbelly Gallery for Joel Hernandez’s At Least We’re Damned Together, I felt like I was walking into a really fun, sassy party. There on the walls were so many delightful and startling characters, sculpted in paper mache, looking right back at the viewer and, at times, even playing a kind of peek-a-boo. Faces emerge from masks and eyes peek through clouds and over water. So many characters and stories in exuberant colors, and faces full of lively expressions, greet you like entering an ebullient masquerade…

READ MORE BY GREY DEY

Staging California in Early Hollywood, UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa

During the Golden Age of Hollywood (early to mid-20th Century), an important aspect of filmmaking was the painting of scenic backdrops, especially for picturesque movies. As the producers desired those backdrops to appear as “real” places, the film studios intentionally concealed the fact that they were created by hired artists. Most of the artists, who worked long hours on them, often on high scaffolds, were not credited for their work.

READ MORE BY LIZ GOLDNER

Martin Wong, Chinatown USA, Wrightwood 659

“I was never an outsider to anything,” this proclamation by Martin Wong (1946–1999), written in all capitals in an undated notebook now part of the collection of New York University, preludes Margo Machida’s catalogue essay for the exhibition Martin Wong: Chinatown USA at Wrightwood 659, Chicago. The insider-outsider dynamic has long been a favorite approach to Martin Wong and his art, so much so that the artist himself had to address it. A gay Chinese American, Wong grew up in the San Francisco Chinatown and…

READ MORE BY WEI HUANG

Enrique Chagoya on invisible censorship, keeping our humanity, and uselessness

“The most invisible type of censorship is actually the art market…You have to see the arts as a way to keep your humanity, not as a way to make a living.” —Enrique Chagoya

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To cherish freedom, to uphold liberty – to defend what has been so dearly won – memory must have a place not buried in the past, but integrated and woven through the present so that it may extend into the future. Slavery, conscription, incarceration, internment, expulsion – the plights of individuals, communities, and ethnicities are all readily pushed to the shadows, buried, erased. The work of Mildred Howard gives expression to these sorrows. The lock, the key –they stand larger than life to lead the way into the retrospective exhibition, Mildred Howard –Poetics of Memory, at the Oakland Museum of California.

READ MORE By Jan Wurm

In the historic Japantown neighborhood of San Jose, forgotten history is brought to life. Art Object Gallery, owned by Ken Matsumoto, is the latest location for South Bay artist Renee Billingslea’s exhibition, Ten Japanese-American Concentration Camps. One of the three Japantowns remaining in the nation, Renee’s exhibition documents and connects isolated, wild contemporary landscapes with a harsh national history, to a neighborhood and community that has quietly endured the weight of its memory.

READ MORE By Samantha Hull

Demetri Broxton’s work in Ancestral Echoes at the Museum of African Diaspora is versatile, colorful, inspiring and will “knock you out”, you’ll get that reference if you go and see it. The exhibit is being showcased at MoAD, June 10th - August 16th 2026. His family history is the canvas through which the concepts of safety, opportunity and kinship are explored. His family migrated from the South to California and Broxton describes his family’s migration as having created an “interruption to the transmission of knowledge”.

READ MORE By Tsitsi Michelle

Best known for his representational narrative paintings featuring Greco-Roman classical themes, David Ligare exhibits a group of paintings, drawings, and lithographs he made over 50 years ago which depict sand formations. The fascinating group of works were previously exhibited in a one-person exhibition in New York City at Andrew Crispo Gallery in 1973.

READ MORE By Kelly Jean Egan & Matt Gonzalez

For the past three decades, sculptor Al Farrow has spent countless hours cruising the aisles at gun shows.

Although Farrow can count on one hand the number of times he has actually fired a gun (“I tried it; I hated it,”), he has used all manner of deconstructed weapons and munitions to build exquisite religious reliquaries and intricately detailed places of worship as a commentary on the relationship between religion, violence, and hypocrisy…

READ MORE By Deborah Bishop

“We have a government that’s behaving in a very fragile way — when they put in measures to limit what people can learn in schools and what they can talk about in the workplace, that’s coming from a deep fear of the truth.” — Christy Chan

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Each day when I arrive at my studio, as I enter the floor where my unit is, I instinctively look left and listen for the sound of classical music drifting from KC’s studio. His door is almost always open, filling the air with the intoxicating scent of fresh oil paint and inviting any passerby to stop, say hello, and to satisfy the inquiring eye with a look at what he has recently finished or is currently working on. His output is prodigious for a person that has a full-time career. It seems that in a few days’ time, one can witness the completion of multiple paintings.

READ MORE BY Olin Marcus Johanssen

In a loneliness epidemic, is “Neighbors”, an exhibition at Et al. Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District,the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down?

Weaving through the two-person exhibition featuring Daniel Arthur Mendoza and Daniel Trejo, curated by Justin Mata, my initial read is that it looks like a doll-house interior, in the colors of the night sky: Deep Indigo, Cornflower Blue, Soft Lilac, and Gunmetal. Disney-esque cartoon characters in states of longing are spaced across the walls, while rectangular sculptures vaguely suggest modernist design forms in our everyday lives: the refrigerator, architecture, a side table, and the smartphone inhabit the floor space…

READ MORE BY Erik Recendez

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Guy Diehl has spent fifty years and five hundred canvases convincing himself, and us, that nothing in a room is more or less worth looking at than anything else: a tangerine, a take-out box, a postcard of Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus. But spend twenty minutes in The Quiet Eye, his seventh solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, and a different claim emerges underneath the first one. This is not, finally, a show about objects. It is a show about what happens to time when someone insists on looking at something for long enough.

READ MORE BY GABRIELLE SELZ

Will Yackulic is an artist I encountered first through the Bay Area poetry scene, rather than the art world as such. This is not suggest that he hasn’t had art world success—to the contrary, his work can be found in the collections of SFMOMA, LACMA, and the Berkeley Art Museum—but rather that he’s one of those artists, like a Brainard or a Jess, whom you frequently find in the company of poets, resulting in numerous book and magazine covers over the years. In a superficial sense, you could explain this away by noting his family connections to the New York School of poets: his aunt and uncle were Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, the title of whose posthumous final book of poems A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988) he has borrowed for this exhibition of small scale paintings, all of which are oil on wood panel and most of which measure 9” x 7.25”.

READ MORE BY GARRETT CAPLES

Andy Rappaport on Art, AI, and the Future of San Francisco

“You can’t just hide under the table and hope this goes away…There’s an idea that we’ll be able to push back on the technology, and I don’t think that’s ever worked.”

— ANDY RAPPAPORT - artist, philanthropist, founder of Minnesota Street Projects, and venture capitalist (READ OR LISTEN)

Patricia Piccinini’s show, on view through July 3, begins as soon as you walk into the gallery’s second-floor space. A motorcycle has mated with a cartoon character, and the offspring–machine and rider, or perhaps a single creature–fills the vestibule.The motorcycle’s preening toughness? The cartoon’s simpering cuteness? Gone and gone, replaced with swooping, unselfconscious shapes and two clustered antennae made of side mirrors.

READ MORE BY S ANNE STEINBERG

A Conversation w/ Tom Marioni and John Held, Jr.

“When I sold my first Line Drawing to the Oakland Museum, the art critic in the paper referred to it as, ‘A mindless drawing on cheap brown paper.’ Later I told him he was right on.” — Tom Marioni - artist (READ OR LISTEN)

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues that a house is much more than a physical structure. It is a repository of memory, imagination, daydreaming, and lived experience. For him, rooms, corners, drawers, cabinets, stairways, and attics are not merely architectural features; they are psychological spaces that shape how we understand ourselves and the world. For Bachelard, a house is not simply inhabited; it accumulates meanings over time, becoming a container for memory, imagination, and lived experience.

READ MORE BY TERRI COHN

Rainbow, a show curated by artist and curator Marie Cameron at the Whitney Modern, features more than 130 works by 38 artists. Given the number of artists and the apparent heterogeneity of their works, one wonders whether all of them consciously worked on the concept of the rainbow in their respective practices. Hence, the curator’s concept is the primary premise of the review. The works exemplify the same. The catalog candidly mentions some artists who admit they barely felt the rainbow as a referential element in their works until the curator suggested it. Cameron presents Rainbow from multiple vantages - literal, intensely personal, referential, and political, affecting the masses. While viewing the show at the Whitney Modern, a sense of plurality, near-disparity, and yet a collective appeal is obvious. Nevertheless, the gallery space and its design help accommodate it seamlessly.

READ MORE BY Vrushali Anil Dhage

Chester Arnold enters his sixth decade as an artist with a solo exhibition called A Brief History of My So-Called Life at Catharine Clark Gallery that feels markedly more inward-looking. The large canvases and small studies on display draw on memory and imagination rather than the expansive worldviews that often define his work.

READ MORE By Bill Russell

Ward Schumaker enjoys banks of letters, readable or not, and the accidents that happen while stenciling and painting them. He has a trickster sensibility and has a curious magpie intelligence. A lot of Schumaker’s artwork is based on chance, and on fragments of poetry, dreams, songs, music, memories, and nonsense. He still owns a battered copy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Collected Lyrics from his youth, 65 years later, held together with a rubber band. He is not sure why he paints the way he does, but it feels meaningful. Walking through Schumakers’ show at Modernism’s venerable gallery in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin neighborhood is deeply satisfying, the work of a witty, mature, supremely confident artist.

READ MORE By Lani Asher

A dramatic series in this expansive exhibition is “Dear America” (2002), (the inspiration for the show’s title) by Tom Jones, Ho-Chunk Nation. The series contains enlarged postcard scans featuring white Americans, along with Indigenous people. Each panel displays handwritten lyrics from the song, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” (1832).

READ MORE By Liz Goldner

Kevin Keaney’s recent pop-up exhibition, At Home, which opened May 28, occupies an intimate venue: a collector’s 5th-floor apartment in the historic Bank of Italy building overlooking the Powell Street cable car turnaround. Installed by Michael Snyder at the Lofts at One Powell , the 15-foot ceilings showcase twenty-one mixed media paintings incorporating paint and college, the largest ones being 72 x 60 inches. The clean and luxurious setting is both perfectly suited to present works featuring urban environments while also offering a stark contrast to many of the grittier paintings which seem to highlight San Francisco’s street life.

READ MORE By Mike Hinckley

“Traditional society is, for an artist, something like a battery, an accumulator of energy gathered over thousands of years of cultural change.” — Faig Ahmed

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“It’s the very best life anybody could ask for if you get to create visual art for a living. But you still have to remain free. You still have to be able to create whatever you want, whenever you want. Why do this for a living unless you’re a thousand percent free?”

— Dave Eggers. READ OR LISTEN

The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco is, according to its website, “nomadic by design and non-collecting by choice,” meaning that rather than maintaining a permanent collection, it presents and commissions public art, then moves on. Both terms imply a certain relationship to impermanence: nothing owned, nothing held, nothing meant to last. This spring and summer, Tara Donovan’s Stratagems and Lily Kwong’s Earthseed Dome take that relationship into the works themselves. Installed in the glass annex gallery of the Transamerica Pyramid Center and the adjacent Redwood Park, the two works share not only a neighborhood but a material logic: both are made, in different ways, of impermanence itself.

READ MORE by Hantian Zhang

This Must Be the Place, an exhibition of Jeff Dikio’s collage work on display at the Transmission Gallery, in Oakland, offers a beautiful array of works created from repurposed paint chips; the kind of small rectangular swatches that get distributed free at hardware stores to help homeowners choose a wall color. The exhibition showcases Didio’s skill at creating vibrant, colorful images that represent well-known places in the Bay Area. Small boats in Golden Gate Park’s Stowe Lake, a life guard station on Stinson Beach in Marin, a Victorian home in San Francisco’s Mission neighborhood, and Doelger homes common in the Sunset District and in Daly City – all connect the viewer to places and memories from the Bay Area, past and present.

READ MORE by Doug Welch

Ports are like the varieties of Mexico that Jacobo Roa got to know as a child and teen-ager who accompanied his father, from the Geologic Institute of Mexico City, in lengthy explorations . Jacobo’s father relished company, cuisine and cultures of Mexico’s deeply different indigena. These same years of childhood and adolesence, Jacobo’s mother fed him the latter 20th-century literature of Latin America that’s called ‘Magical Realism’.

READ MORE by Don Paul

Olin Marcus Johanssen (Upper Market Gallery; May 29-June 7) is a father of three. It’s something we discussed and that I can relate to. I’m always trying to see fatherhood less as a limitation and more as an opening. It’s complex and can lead to an instance of creative dumbness. I'm imagining Johanssen walking up to one of those big green electrical boxes, opening the door, and pulling all the wires free.

What now, Who’s wires do I connect first? Always, our children come to mind. They are hungry, they need a nap, a hug; their needs come first. Don’t get the wires crossed and if you do…

READ MORE by Rod Roland

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There are few privileges greater than reaching one hundred years of age, and fewer still than arriving there with one’s creative faculties not diminished but actively engaged with pertinent aesthetic questions related to form and color. To stand before Roland Petersen’s paintings at Studio Shop Gallery during the celebration of his centennial is therefore to encounter more than a retrospective. It is to share, however briefly, in the rare continuity of a life still in dialogue with art. One leaves not only aware of Petersen’s longevity, but quietly grateful to witness a body of work that remains unfinished in spirit and alive in its sustained art making.

READ MORE BY: Kelly Jean Egan

You, my daughter, who was born in the 100th bloom of the cherry blossoms on the tidal basin in Washington, D.C., loves to return to the city of your birth. It’s a natural instinct, a homing instinct, nostalgia and memory and what we label “Predator pride,” homage to the samurai codes of the science fiction film series and its “Yautja” species. These are the waters from which you emerged, red-hued and laughing/screaming into the Americas, our America, one nation, under G-d, with liberty and justice for all - though not all at the same time.

READ MORE BY: N Stern

“As Native peoples, we’ve endured a lot — systemic racism, colonization. Being in museum spaces is an opportunity to reverse some of those injustices, and to Indigenize spaces.” - Will Riding In

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Memento Vivere, Remember to Live, is an exhibition of Sonia Gill’s collage work currently being shown at the Transmission Gallery, in Oakland California. The show is open through June 6. A graduate of California College of the Arts where she studied painting and earned a BFA, Gill utilizes paper to make her works. Repudiating brush and oil based paints in making these collages, they nevertheless retain the language of painting; Gill’s brush strokes come in the form of pieces of paper. Instead of mixing paint to find the right color, she searches her trove of materials for the right hue and value. Gill’s process can be slow and painstaking, she layers instead of mixing, she experiments and replaces until her piece is complete.

READ MORE BY: Doug Welch

Two profoundly engaging California-based artists, Carlos Ramirez and Emilio Villalba, have been pertinently paired together in the current show, Redacted, on view at Ivester Contemporary in Austin, Texas. Both are first-generation, Mexican-American artists addressing the crises of living under authoritarian surveillance in the United States today. They are staged in an opposite dialogue with each other. Deploying a mixed-media methodology to collaged images and assembled sculpture, Ramirez interrogates the double standards between U.S. democratic ideologies and the brutal systemic inequalities played out daily across our country.

READ MORE BY: Grey Dey

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s tribute to their storied Henri Matisse portrait of his wife, Amélie, signaling the launch of the Fauvist movement, is meaty yet enigmatic, and the show’s appearance at this moment in time is intriguing. Locally, tourism is down, the commercial gallery scene is gloomy after a series of closures, and a telling reminder of the numerous art school disappearances is the San Francisco Art Institute’s elegiac memorial show, also on view at the museum.

READ MORE BY: Robert Brokl

Narrative painting promises to convey a story – or at minimum, a pivotal scene that celebrates a virtue or value worthy of honor. In his practice, painter Grey Dey presents a variation: instead of asserting a universal truth, he invites viewers to assemble a chronicle from the fragments that resonate with their own experience. Because Dey doesn’t insist on a single account, he needn’t make his paintings overly accessible. He invites the audience to collaborate, offering only an eccentric set of intentions and icons as a point of departure.

READ MORE BY: Matt Gonzalez

To see Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903 – Now, the exhibition organized by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) and the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) Photo Department & Archive, you enter City Hall, pass crowds of newlyweds waiting for photos beneath the grand staircase, then descend to the ground floor. In the hushed quiet, a hundred photographs, most of them black-and-white, line the long corridor there, guiding visitors deeper into the building and also the city’s past.

READ MORE BY: Hantian Zhang

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The giant disco ball has crushed a woman to death. Or is that a girl? It's hard to tell since we only see the figure's legs and striped stockings. And it's hard to tell because the macabre scene has unfolded outdoors — amid vegetation that artist Gonzalo Fuenmayor has painstakingly drawn to contrast the disco ball's sea of refracting tiles. Then there's Fuenmayor's trademark veneer of charcoal-induced grays, whites, blacks, and in-between shades, which produces a kind of dark-humored X-ray of murder — a freeze-frame of fantastical layers that's entirely appropriate for a canvas with the title, "The Innocence of Savages."

READ MORE BY JONATHAN CURIEL

The current exhibition of work by Shelley Niro at the Gorman Museum of Native American Art beckons visitors to enter her world through deeply personal and meditative photographs. One begins the journey into her work and life even before stepping foot into the building, strolling through a garden filled with herbs historically used in Indigenous and Native American ceremonies. Crystalline panes of glass serve as the only separation between the entryway with the small shop and the exhibition space itself. With no admission fee, it is only too easy to be instantly drawn to the special exhibition gallery.

READ MORE BY SARAH POISNER

Inframundo, Miguel Novelo’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, is at once an underworld, a cenote, and a dreamscape. An underworld, as the exhibition unfolds entirely in darkness, immersing viewers in blacked-out galleries where scattered lights glimmer intermittently, some stable, some moving. A cenote, because the exhibition takes inspiration from the sinkholes that scatter across the artist’s home region, the Yucatán Peninsula, which the Maya regarded as portals to the underworld. And a dreamscape because the machine-assisted visual effects render the exhibition spaces strangely oneiric: color patches flicker through the dark, reflected grids glow faintly across the floor, and a constellation of lights drawing viewers in.

READ MORE BY HANTIAN ZHANG

Compared to major art spaces in Paris, London, New York, and San Francisco, the art scene in Prague is — at least architecturally speaking — beholden to the past. The city’s most prominent museum, the Trade Fair Palace, which houses the National Gallery Prague’s modern art collection, is a minimalist, 100-year-old hulk of often-windowless gallery spaces that stack upwards for eight floors. The art itself? World class. The structure itself? A sometimes-foreboding example of “Czech Functionalist architecture” that — except for the central atrium/courtyard that offers the building some breathing room and natural light — corrals visitors into galleries that make you feel sequestered within the hull of a giant, submerged battleship.

READ MORE BY JONATHAN CURIEL

“Real success is being able to support my community and the people I love, and lift the stories that matter. I want people to leave my gallery feeling like positive value has been added to their life.” — KEVIN IVESTER

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To see KAWS is to see nothing at all. Of it I can say this much to be true: It is an exhibition. There are objects. They are large. Many of them are round. Something vulgar has happened. I feel as though I shouldn’t bear witness to it. Thought is lost between sight and sound. Sign and symbol recognition enter stop and go traffic. There is a crash. I say to myself: Think of KAWS. Think of KAWS. Of it I find only void. Everything else becomes more real. The woman next to me. Where her scarf might be from. How she feels about her husband…

READ MORE By Mary Kate Tankard

Plants, unlike animals, continue to add new organs (roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds) throughout their lives. Although they lack a final, fixed form, plants do not come in infinite shapes; instead, their morphology is circumscribed by a stereotyped growth pattern in which a small set of defined modules are added in sequence. An identical process facilitates the creation of giant redwoods, ornamental roses, crops like corn and wheat, and the scrubby weeds that grow out of cracks in the sidewalk.

READ MORE BY S Anne Steinberg

The following is a transcript of Ken Feingold speaking inside the permanent collection galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, March 1, 1988. Transcript (2026) courtesy of the artist. This talk sat on cassettes in MoMA’s archives until now. Ken Feingold’s artwork is in MoMA’s permanent collection. He is a licensed Freudian Psychoanalyst. Here, he analyzes the artwork of Giorgio De Chirico and Marcel Duchamp.

It's a very unusual thing to speak in this interval. This is the place that we often consider one of the great reserves of silence and to move across this interval and to move across it in language and speaking is in a way very similar to the act of making art and bringing art into existence…

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The impulse to collect is a deeply rooted drive. What propels someone to collect Meissen porcelain or Tiffany lamps or cookie jars (as did Warhol who collected nearly everything), may not be easily or succinctly explained. Attraction is highly individual, personal — yet holds a terrific charge. It excites, stimulates associations, and can satisfy with an intensity of a hunter capturing their prey.

READ MORE By Jan Wurm

…my understanding of the book made me feel like I have the right to look at it, to potentially dismantle it, and to see how it’s created. In doing so, I’m reshaping the Bible. I don’t seek to destroy or desecrate it… I hold all the contradiction of the text, every bit of the story.” - Mario Laplante

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In this conversation, Amaka reflects on her childhood in southeastern Nigeria, her migration to the United States, and major works including Cleanse, Ije | Ézè, Anarcha, and Corpse & Mirror. She discusses intergenerational trauma, the violent loss of her mother, the emotional force of performance art, and how confronting death can become a path toward presence, empathy, and renewal.

San Francisco's art ecosystem is in freefall. CCA, SFAI, Mills College, and dozens of galleries have closed in rapid succession — and gallerist Griff Williams says we haven't even begun to feel the fallout. In this conversation with Hugh Leeman, Williams traces the collapse from the first dot-com bubble to today, confronts the myth of trickle-down cultural investment, and shares what happened when Mayor Daniel Lurie called him out of the blue after a Chronicle op-ed ignited the city. With 32 years running Gallery Sixteen, Williams offers a clear-eyed view of what's been lost, what still survives, and what it actually takes to build a creative community from the ground up — permits or no permits.