Earlier than summer time ends, go to the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SFMOMA — even when it isn’t your first time. “To anyone looking to create a rich and ethical life in the arts,” Alex Paik writes in his latest evaluation, “Ruth Asawa showed us the way.” It was among the best reveals of the summer time, a long-overdue celebration of probably the most vital artists and activists in San Francisco’s historical past, and so sprawling that you simply’re sure to see one thing new every time. Nonetheless, there are a handful of different reveals to see within the canine days of summer time earlier than the autumn season kicks off, full of lots extra native historical past, in addition to modern artists working on the intersection of artwork and activism.
Service Rigidity
San Francisco Arts Fee, 401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 325, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough August 23
Xandra Ibarra, “Libidinal Mark-Making (Hickey Series)” (2025–ongoing), leather-based, rubber, paper, metal, aluminum ({photograph} by Aaron Wojack, courtesy the artist)
Service Rigidity bristles with the erotic vitality of friction between flesh. The group present, on the San Francisco Arts Fee’s Major Gallery, options artists interrogating the complexities of queer sexuality, masculinity, and the physique. The viewer assumes the function of the voyeur, implicated on this negotiation of energy and positionality that pushes the boundaries of artwork and intercourse.
Nonetheless Burning, Celebrating the fiftieth Anniversary of Ant Farm’s Media Burn
500 Capp Road, 500 Capp Road, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough August 23
Ant Farm, photograph of influence (1975) (photograph courtesy John F. Turner and 500 Capp Road)
On July 4, 1975, the experimental artwork collective Ant Farm drove a automobile embellished to appear like an airplane right into a stack of tv units. The efficiency, titled “Media Burn,” was a satirical critique of mainstream media and politics. Fifty years later, Nonetheless Burning, at 500 Capp Road, delves into the documentation and ephemera surrounding the efficiency, reminding us that points round media’s function in politics are as pertinent as ever.
Tiffany Sia: No Place
Cantor Arts Middle at Stanford, 328 Lomita Drive, Stanford, CaliforniaThrough August 24
Movie nonetheless of Tiffany Sia, “Journey From North to South” (2024) (courtesy the artist; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Maxwell Graham, New York)
The time period “liminal space” will get thrown round rather a lot within the artwork world. I choose “no place,” artist Tiffany Sia’s time period for areas that grow to be forgotten or intangible by their troubled histories. The 2 movies on view in Sia’s modest solo present on the Cantor Arts Middle inform the story of her childhood journey by such “no places,” from Chilly Battle-era Shanghai to Hong Kong, discovering solidity in her passage.
Stunning, Bountiful, Boisterous Birds
Asian Artwork Museum, 200 Larkin Road, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough September 15
Unknown artist, “Egrets, willows, and autumn plants” (c. 1700–1800), pair of six-panel folding screens, ink and colours on paper (photograph courtesy Asian Artwork Museum)
Fowl-watching takes on new that means on this present on the Asian Artwork Museum. The choice of brush work on view within the Tateuchi Japanese Galleries ranges from display screen work to hanging scrolls, incorporating birds as each ornamental and symbolic components. With most of the birds representing seasonal change, that is the proper present for a foggy summer time day in San Francisco.
10 × 10 for 10: Ten years of
Letterform Archive, 2325 third Road Ground 4R, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough October 12
Design Motion Collective (designer) and Inkworks Press (printer), “Ain’t No Border High Enough” (undated) (courtesy Letterform Archive)
Learn all about it! Letterform Archive celebrates a decade of preserving the historical past of typographic design with this exhibition drawn from its assortment. Rising from 15,000 to 100,000 objects over the past decade, the Archive boasts no scarcity of textual delights, from cuneiform to calligraphy to political posters and far more.
Leilah Babirye: We Have a Historical past
de Younger Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Backyard Drive, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough October 26
Set up view of Leilah Babirye, “We Have a History” (2024) ({photograph} by Gary Sexton, courtesy the High quality Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Leilah Babirye’s first solo museum present in america is a celebration of the LGBTQ+ group and the African craft practices that encourage her. Produced from ceramic and carved wooden, the sculptures are monuments to Black love. Reinterpreting custom by a up to date lens, Babirye reveals us honor the place we got here from with out shedding sight of the place we’re going.
Black Gold: Tales Untold
Fort Mason Middle for Arts & Tradition, 2 Marina Boulevard, Constructing C, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough November 2
Nonetheless from Trina Michelle Robinson, “Transposing Landscapes: A Requiem for Charles Young” (2025) (picture courtesy the artist)
Organized by FOR-SITE at San Francisco’s Fort Level, Black Gold delves into the historical past of Black California by artwork. The group present contains 17 modern artists, many native to the Bay Space. That includes a number of particular commissions, equivalent to Trina Michelle Robinson’s “Requiem for Charles Young” (2025), which honors the captain of an organization of Black troopers stationed at San Francisco’s Presidio in 1903, the present traces the tales of Black Californians from the Gold Rush by Reconstruction, highlighting their lasting influence.
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
Berkeley Artwork Museum and Pacific Movie Archive, 2155 Middle Road, Berkeley, CaliforniaThrough November 30
Set up view of Routed West ({photograph} by Chris Grunder, courtesy Berkeley Artwork Museum)
That includes over 100 quilts by 80 artists, Routed West is the primary exhibition showcasing the foremost bequest of African-American quilts the Berkeley Artwork Museum obtained in 2019. The present reveals the significance of quilt-making to the story of the Second Nice Migration, by which Black People resettled from Southern states to city areas within the Northeast, Midwest, and West from 1940 to 1970. The quilts on view come from each the South and California, tracing household threads throughout the nation.
Bay Space Then
Yerba Buena Middle for the Arts, 701 Mission Road, San Francisco, CaliforniaThrough January 25, 2026
Set up view of Margaret Kilgallen, “Main Drag” (2001) (photograph by Robbie Sweeny, courtesy Yerba Buena Middle for the Arts)
Who doesn’t love a throwback? The group present Bay Space Then spotlights artists who got here of age between the Eighties and early 2000s in and round San Francisco. From artists grappling with the AIDS disaster to the Mission Faculty’s twist on graffiti to the various artist collectives that fueled the group, Bay Space Then presents a glimpse into the previous and steerage for the longer term.
College students on Strike
Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Road, Oakland, CaliforniaThrough Could 31, 2026
Lonnie Wilson, “Illegal speaker near AD building” (1968), replica of gelatin silver print (courtesy the Oakland Museum of California)
Starting with the scholar strikes of 1968–69 at San Francisco State College and drawing a line to the current, College students on Strike on the Oakland Museum of California paints a vivid image of Bay Space pupil activism. The present is full of posters and images documenting pupil dissent and organizing, from the demand for an Ethnic Research program within the ’60s to opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Go away impressed with new methods to point out up in your group.
