In San Francisco for this year’s FOG Design + Art Fair? Check out a few of these can’t-miss shows off the fairgrounds. Search #cultured on See Saw Gallery Guide anytime to add CULTURED’s picks to your custom map.
“Stratagems” by Tara Donovan
Where: Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco
When: Through July 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: Tara Donovan accumulates new fodder for her work in everyday, mass-produced objects—paper plates, buttons, rubber bands—and constructs surreal topographies. Her latest collection, an assortment of helical figures shooting upwards like skyscrapers, are made of recycled CDs, iridescent in the light.
Know Before You Go: Three months ago, the ICA announced that it would depart from its 30,000 square foot glass and concrete campus on Montgomery Street (nicknamed the Cube). Instead, the non-collecting museum has adopted a pop-up model; “Stratagems,” the first in this new experiment, will debut at the Transamerica Pyramid Annex Gallery.
“Kinetic Paintings” by Samia Halaby
Where: SFMOMA
When: January 24 – May 19
Why It’s Worth a Look: Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American abstractionist who has been making work for over six decades, had a show at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art abruptly cancelled in 2024, presumably amidst heightened tensions over the war in Gaza. In the aftermath, she’s seen an explosion of interest in her pioneering work and taken her oeuvre to SFMOMA.
Know Before You Go: Halaby began experimenting with digital art back in 1986 after buying a Commodore Amiga 1000 and learning BASIC. She will also participate in the Whitney Biennial later this year.
“Lexicon” by Rose B. Simpson
Where: De Young
When: Through February 7, 2027
Why It’s Worth a Look: If Pueblo pottery and muscle cars don’t sound like they’d exactly go together to you, think again. Rose B. Simpson customized her first car in 2014, a 1985 Chevy El Camino, with a black-on-black paint job like Tewa pottery. Ten years later, she’s back with another, a 1964 Buick Riviera.
Know Before You Go: While the vintage cars are a nod to a rich history of car modification in California Chicano culture, it’s also a reference to Simpson’s personal history: She studied automotive technology at Northern New Mexico College.
“Blue Distance” by Heather Day
Where: Berggruen
When: Through March 5
Why It’s Worth a Look: The Mojave Desert-based artist presents a series of new works using her signature cut-and-stitch method, tearing apart old canvases, rearranging them, and then sewing them back together to create new abstractions.
Know Before You Go: The show takes its title from a Rebecca Solnit essay meditating on the color blue as a metaphor for the limits of what humans can see: An extreme end of the color spectrum, it’s the hue of things seen from afar.
“Christian Marclay”
Where: Fraenkel Gallery
When: Through March 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: Christian Marclay’s latest collection of prints, collages, and videos riffs on the iconography of the vinyl record. Presenting a wave of monotypes in black, grey, and white, Marclay explores the variability of each print, no two ever the same. He also presents a new video piece, inspired by a 1960 work by Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth, discovered unseen in the basement of the Sohm Archive at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in Germany.
Know Before You Go: Marclay, an accidental innovator in DJing for his pioneering use of turntables in his art from the late ’70s, returns to the record as a site of visual, rather than sonic, invention.
“Time You Must Be Laughing” by Rebecca Manson
Where: Jessica Silverman
When: Through February 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: San Francisco mainstay Jessica Silverman is kicking off the new year with a debut show from their new artist, the New York-based Rebecca Manson. The artist’s sculptures, rendered in polychromatic porcelain and glass, exude a tattered surrealism like wings that have been plucked from a moth. At the center of the show is a recreated swing set coated in lichen and moss.
Know Before You Go: You can also spot Manson’s artwork at Tribeca Park in New York, although you’d be forgiven if you didn’t recognize it as hers. Unlike the fragile, colorful butterfly wings in her gallery show, her public work is a pale, hulking, eight-foot sphere.
“Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Garden = Grid = City”
Where: Anthony Meier
When: Through February 27
Why It’s Worth a Look: The late Barbara Stauffacher Solomon’s singular colored pencil drawings, which informed her work as a graphic designer and landscape architect, will be the center of this show. Specifically, it focuses on the garden, rendered as a verdant rectangle, as a meditation on constructed spaces and paradise.
Know Before You Go: As a pioneer of supergraphics, Stauffacher Solomon collaborated with SFMOMA and is perhaps best known for designing the entrance signage for the utopian Bay Area artist’s retreat, Sea Ranch.
“What’s Left, Never Left” by Auudi Dorsey
Where: Jonathan Carver Moore
When: Through January 31
Why It’s Worth a Look: Presenting new work from Auudi Dorsey’s six-week residency at the gallery, this show sees a swimming pool rendered in as a space for Black leisure and recreation.
Know Before You Go: Dorsey was inspired by Lincoln Beach in his home of New Orleans, which was a haven for the city’s Black community during the era of segregation. Although the park is now long shuttered, the show offers an homage to the enduring, joyful aspects of Southern culture.
“i dreamt of this and there will be more” by Guanyu Xu
Where: Re.riddle
When: Through February 28
Why It’s Worth a Look: In this series, Guanyu Xu takes on borders, external and internal. Using photographs and collages, Xu begins with a room—a teenage bedroom, a U.S. Customs and Immigration Services counter, a massage parlor—and pastes windows onto the canvas, peering into the desires that prompt people to move across the globe.
Know Before You Go: As an immigrant himself, Xu appears as a subject in his own work, especially in his “Resident Alien” series, which showed at Yancey Richardson in New York last year.
“Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors”
Where: Galerie Wendi Norris
When: January 20 – March 14
Why It’s Worth a Look: Mentored by British Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and Greek artist Jean Varda, Marie Wilson became a great chronicler of a cultural and spiritual Bay Area now long gone. In 18 paintings and seven works on paper, spanning three decades, from the 1950s to the 1980s, she presents a rich visual world inspired by occultism and the subconscious.
Know Before You Go: This show marks the first major exhibition of Wilson’s work in San Francisco since way back in 1984 when beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti organized a solo show for her at the City Lights Bookstore.
“From Here to Eternity, Five Decades of Art Making” by Masami Teraoka
Where: Catharine Clark Gallery
When: Through March 7
Why It’s Worth a Look: Drawing from a rich history of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Japan’s Edo Period, Masami Teraoka updates the form for modern times. Teraoka explores the Bay Area’s free love movement of the 1970s as well as the tragic impact of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. In the ’90s, he turned his attention to abuses of power in the Catholic Church, the American government, and Russian political corruption.
Know Before You Go: The show arrives just in time for Masami Teraoka’s 90th birthday as well as the 35th anniversary of Catharine Clark Gallery.
“Alchemies of Place”
Where: COL Gallery
When: Opening January 23
Why It’s Worth a Look: Once upon a time, the landscape was a representational form in art, reflecting people’s lived environments at a time when there were no photographs to do so. This group showing questions the precise moment when landscape became a site for metaphor and abstraction instead.
Know Before You Go: The show includes work from painter Lynne Drexler, sculptor Claire Falkenstein, Suzanne Jackson, Blackfoot artist Terran Last Gun, painter Joan Snyder, assemblage artist Vivian Springford, LA’s Jonas Wood, and more.
“Sonic Transmissions” by Sky Hopinka
Where: SLASH
When: Through April 18
Why It’s Worth a Look: Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is a videographer and musician, merging archival footage with home videos and language lessons. He primarily circles Indigenous life in the present, rather than the past. This show spans a tribute to Native poet Diana Burns, Irish and South American folk songs, and powwows.
Know Before You Go: Hopinka’s scholarship on Indigenous life extends beyond art; for years he taught chinuk wawa, a language native to the Lower Columbia River Basin, where he’s from.
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