Arts & Culture » Art
Identity & the language of attire
"You are what you wear" might be a colloquial, less scholarly way to frame the premise of "Veiled Meanings: Fashioning Jewish Dress," a new touring show at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
"Painting is My Everything," an entrancing new fall exhibition at the Asian Art Museum, is an unmitigated delight. Though not large in scale, the show, featuring 30 modern ink-and-color works on paper, is big and zestful in spirit.
Since the gallery scene began to decentralize in the city, there has been a proliferation of new venues in addition to a plenitude of established ones. Below, find a microcosm of what's in store this fall.
Fall arrives with a bounty of museum exhibitions.
It's a particularly disillusioning time to take America's temperature, an assumption borne out by "This Land," the latest photography exhibition at Pier 24.
We're swinging into the final round of summer, which means it's time for the California Academy of Sciences' annual "BigPicture" show, where a cavalcade of eye-popping color photographs is now on view.
The atmosphere over the Sierra Nevada was brown and smoky last month, a result of the many horrific wildfires raging all over the region. It felt apocalyptic and thus very much of the historical moment.
Any show that has the balls to call itself "Lew the Jew" has a leg up on the competition in my book.
It's remarkable but not altogether surprising that over 3,000 people attended the opening of "The World of Frida," an expansive new exhibition now at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek.
"Pop Trash: The Amazing Art of Jason Mecier," a coffee-table book with full-page pictures of meticulously crafted celebrity portraits, rolled off the presses this month.
Peter Hujar, now considered one of the greatest American photographers of the late 20th century, was living in poverty at the time of his death in 1987 from complications of AIDS.
The 1886 Edwardian-style Italianate home at 500 Capp Street in the Mission District, where the late San Francisco conceptual artist David Ireland lived for three decades until several years before his death in 2009, is possibly his greatest achievement.
Though the cumulative effect of the Legion of Honor's "Truth and Beauty: The Pre-Raphaelites and the Old Masters" can be overwhelming, seeing its assembled paintings at close range is a natural high.
June is the official start of the summer gallery season. Here are a few outstanding choices to check out this month.
The San Francisco International Arts Festival (SFIAF) will present more than 40 different dance, cirque, musical, comedy, theatre, and performance art pieces in its upcoming festival at Fort Mason Center, May 24-June 3.
Wonderful and amazing is the way to describe "Rene Magritte: The Fifth Season," a fab new show at SFMOMA that kicks off the summer art season with panache.
Ask anyone who has ever tried improvisational theatre: a cardinal rule is always to say "yes" to whatever your improv partner has come up with during a scene.
"Weapons of Mass Seduction: The Art of Propaganda" is a new show at the de Young Museum.
Packing a helluva title, the Asian Art Museum's "A Guided Tour of Hell" proves that good and sometimes wicked cosmic things come in small packages.
Julian Schnabel brought his celebrity, a sextet of specially created, jumbo-sized artworks, and a titanic ego to the Legion of Honor's courtyard last week.
SFMOMA's "The Train: RFK's Last Journey," a slim but thought-provoking exhibition, assembles the work of three artists from different eras and parts of the world.
Since first seeing "Maggie Smoking," a frank, implicitly carnal picture shot in 1970 by Berkeley-based photographer Judy Dater, it has been impossible to get it out of mind.
Launched in 2008, the Chinese Culture Center's "XianRui" ("Fresh and Sharp") initiative is led by CCC's dynamic artistic director Abby Chen.
"Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art," a wearing, overly large show at the de Young Museum, surveys a breadth of responses by American artists to the Industrial Revolution.
Renowned local photographer Gooch, who prefers to be called by a single name, unveiled his latest photos in a new show at Ravot Gallery in the Richmond District.
Issues of identity, personae and gender mutability are among those raised in "Selves and Others," a provocative, artfully constructed show of 120 portraits from the 19th century onward, now at SFMOMA's Pritzker Center for Photography.
An award-winning, self-taught artist; a punch line; a canny social satirist and raconteur: The many facets of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, a man whose name is synonymous with wacky, chain-reaction contraptions, are explored in the Contemporary Jewish Museu.
Tangible forms of deities found in Buddhist and Hindu cultures constitute "Divine Bodies," an interesting if somewhat esoteric, narrowly focused new exhibition at the Asian Art Museum.
Two thoughtful gallery shows address female presence - and its absence - through different prisms.
Swedish figurative painter Pernilla Andersson and Brazilian photographer and screen printer Paula Pereira were working independently and had already claimed their respective aliases when they joined forces - and their pseudonyms - in 2009 to form t.w.five
As if being known as the most notorious libertine in history weren't enough, Giacomo Casanova was also a gambler, a social climber and a spy.