This list is a testament to my love for Bay Area art. This fall, exhibition trawlers can catch dried squid on massage tables, a Korean artist who sometimes torches their canvases, a celebration of Black local artists, two very different shows on the art of books and publishing, an updated exhibition of a 1969 craft show, and three decades of an artist’s multimedia caricatures of Trump. Here are eight shows to which to set sail. Watch our lively Art coverage and Big Week event picks for more into the season, and don’t forget to vote for Best of the Bay! See more great Fall Arts Preview coverage all week here.
THROUGH SEPTEMBER 27: ALL THIS EVERY DAY: BOLINAS COMMUNITY PUBLISHING IN THE SEVENTIES AT BOLINAS MUSEUM
Kriston Lighttowler, registrar and special collections archivist at the Bolinas Museum, was going through the archives of the West Marin institution when she noticed all the publications writers and artists from the town had created. She and colleague Noelle Hiam decided to build a show about them, which led to All This Every Day: Bolinas Community Publishing in the Seventies, an exhibition exploring community publishing as activism and art. Among work from a variety of minds, issues of the Bolinas Hearsay News are also on display, including mention of the creative measures Bolinas turned to in funding the publication—spaghetti feeds, jam sessions, and bakesales. More info here.
THROUGH OCTOBER 23: CLOSER READING AT THE CALIFORNIA COLLEGE OF ARTS
The three artists in Closer Reading at the California College of Arts Campus Gallery—Macy Chadwick, Kate Laster, and Vivian Sming, all make work exploring what the book can be in terms of art, activism and collaboration. The exhibition is Northern California’s contribution to National Museum of Women in the Arts’ Women to Watch 2027 initiative, and Sming, who has published Sming Sming Books for a decade, will represent the region in Washington, D. C. More than 70 titles from the Sming Sming library will be on view at CCA, available to be handled and read. Through October 23, CCA Campus Gallery, SF, more info here.
THROUGH NOVEMBER 7: SANDOW BIRK: AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE PRESENT AT CATHARINE CLARK GALLERY
A survey of artist Sandow Birk’s work from his 35 years with gallerist Catharine Clark is now on view at the latter’s eponymous gallery. The show includes both work the wide-ranging creative did with a graffiti artist, and his most recent project with San Francisco’s Arion Press, Declare: A Civic Gospel, which reflects on the Declaration of Independence via engraved art on medallions Birk and collaborators made out of wood culled from Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Here too, American Qur’an, Birk’s series of monuments to the Constitution that take the shape of 19th-century landscape paintings in which prisons (the de Young has exhibited one featuring San Quentin) can be glimpsed. The show also includes two of his movies in the media room. More info here.
THROUGH JANUARY 17: OBJECTS: USA AT THE MUSEUM OF CRAFT AND DESIGN
In 1969, the Smithsonian held the exhibition OBJECTS: USA, featuring works by more than 300 artists. It toured the States and Europe, and helped to question the line between craft and fine arts. San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, in partnership with New York design gallery R & Company, is revisiting that exhibition—a retread made relevant by the fact that Northern California artists were key in the development of studio craft, with Bay Area makers from the original show like JB Blunk and Kay Sekimachi included. Locals like Woody de Othello and Ashwini Bhat are some of the contemporary artists who contributed to its more-than-70 sculptures, pieces of furniture, jewelry, fiber arts, and experimental works. More info here.
SEPTEMBER 17-FEBRUARY 8: PATTY CHANG: SURFACING AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY’S ANDERSON COLLECTION
In a yearlong residency at Stanford University, Patty Chang made 11 new works that will be shown as the first solo exhibition for the university’s Asian American Art Initiative. An art professor at the University of Southern California, Chang has no interest in making people comfortable. Instead, her work delves into grief, rage, gendered violence, and unseen labor.
Surfacing includes a curtain made of tiny pieces of pottery from a Chinese fishing village on the Monterey Peninsula where a 1906 fire (possibly caused by arson) displaced 200 people— it’s accompanied by video of village’s resistance, with descendants returning to reenact the labor of their relatives. Chang ties the tragedy to the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, which she depicts through squid draped over porcelain massage tables. More info here.
SEPTEMBER 18-FEBRUARY 21: GREG ITO: TO GIVE AND TAKE AT THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART SAN JOSÉ
The Institute of Contemporary Art San José has been—and maybe always is—on a roll. Coming up right after Anoushka Mirchandani’s haunting and lovely My Body Was A River Once and Miguel Novelo’s innovative trip through Mayan cosmology, INFRAMUNDO, is Greg Ito’s show inspired by Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s book The Giving Tree, and how it changed his outlook after becoming a parent. (Where once he had seen himself as the book’s child protagonist, he is now the tree.) In video installations, sculpture, and painting, Ito examines how our idea of family and care shifts over generations. ICA San José, more info here.
SEPTEMBER 25-JANUARY 25: HA CHONG-HYUN: RETROSPECTIVE AT THE ASIAN ART MUSEUM
Soyoung Lee, the director of the Asian Art Museum, says South Korean painter Ha Chong-Hyun has redefined the medium over his six-decade career with his method of pushing the paint through from the back of the canvas to the front. Ha is one of the most influential artists in Korea, with work in the 2015 Venice Biennale and in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art.
Bay Area residents and visitors have a chance to see it at his first 1museum exhibition in North America, and will note that his work focuses on the material, using torches and utensils to create distinct textures on huge canvases. For those craving something real and physical in an unreal world, this is a perfect choice. More info here.
SEPTEMBER 30-OCTOBER 4: NEXUS BLACK ART WEEK AT VARIOUS LOCATIONS
The third edition of Nexus is stunning in both breadth and depth. A few of week’s highlights: Dewey Crumpler’s first solo museum exhibition in San Francisco, Sonic Lineages at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum’s retrospective of Oakland artist Mildred Howard Poetics of Memory, Nengi Omuku: The Gathering at the de Young Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Dread Scott: The Body Politic, and O. Smith: Artivist at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Gallery shows include Jessica Silverman’s solo exhibitions of local artists Lava Thomas and Sadie Barnette, David C. Driskell at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, and Antwoine Washington at COL Gallery. Attend a celebration of the five years of the Black (Space) Residency at Minnesota Street Project, curated by Erica Deeman and Trina Michelle Robinson, and head to Headlands Center for the Arts for a dinner and performance with Salimatu Amabebe, in partnership with MoAD. Phew. More info here.
