Earlier than summer season 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 finest exhibits of the summer season, a long-overdue celebration of one of the crucial vital artists and activists in San Francisco’s historical past, and so sprawling that you just’re sure to see one thing new every time. Nonetheless, there are a handful of different exhibits to see within the canine days of summer season earlier than the autumn season kicks off, filled with loads extra native historical past, in addition to modern artists working on the intersection of artwork and activism.
Service Pressure
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 Pressure bristles with the erotic vitality of friction between flesh. The group present, on the San Francisco Arts Fee’s Principal Gallery, options artists interrogating the complexities of queer sexuality, masculinity, and the physique. The viewer assumes the position 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 automotive embellished to seem 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 position 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 lots within the artwork world. I favor “no place,” artist Tiffany Sia’s time period for places that turn out to be forgotten or intangible via 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 via such “no places,” from Chilly Conflict-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)
Chook-watching takes on new that means on this present on the Asian Artwork Museum. The collection 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 lots of the birds representing seasonal change, that is the right present for a foggy summer season day in San Francisco.
10 × 10 for 10: Ten years of
Letterform Archive, 2325 third Road Flooring 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 during the last decade, the Archive boasts no scarcity of textual delights, from cuneiform to calligraphy to political posters and rather 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 Fantastic Arts Museums of San Francisco)
Leilah Babirye’s first solo museum present in the US 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 via a up to date lens, Babirye exhibits us how one can 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 via artwork. The group present consists of 17 modern artists, many native to the Bay Space. That includes a number of particular commissions, similar 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 via 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 most important bequest of African-American quilts the Berkeley Artwork Museum acquired in 2019. The present reveals the significance of quilt-making to the story of the Second Nice Migration, during 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 Nineteen Eighties and early 2000s in and round San Francisco. From artists grappling with the AIDS disaster to the Mission College’s twist on graffiti to the numerous artist collectives that fueled the group, Bay Space Then affords a glimpse into the previous and steerage for the long run.
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 scholar activism. The present is filled with posters and pictures documenting scholar 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.
