Unlike in NYC, San Francisco gallery owners don't pack up and head for the Hamptons when July hits. Summer in the city here means galleries �" and special programs at select museums �" hopping with edgy work by emerging and veteran talent, from downtown and the South Bay to the Mission and SoMa.
Frey Norris Visitor Center: Since Frey Norris moved into their new digs, a dramatic, ultra-modern, architecturally renovated space in the Yerba Buena arts district, the works shown there �" and visitors �" have benefited from the stripped-down yet theatrical setting. It's an ideal backdrop for Mary Anne Kluth's latest project: a re-creation/fantasy hybrid, which draws on dioramas, theme parks and taxonomy for a faux natural history museum whose fabricated props, fog machines, fake cactus, painted geologic specimens, and gauzy landscape displays are supported by totally unreliable information. Kluth utilizes photographs, painting, sculptures and the rock collection of her geologist father for an imaginary trek through earth history, and a meditation on our unknowable immediate families. Through August 27. www.freynorris.com
Ratio 3 Margaret Kilgallen: Unheralded Bay Area artist Margaret Kilgallen, who died at age 33 of breast cancer a decade ago, excelled at personal, handmade art. Influenced by American folk art, letter-press printing and mural and sign painting, Kilgallen, along with her husband and collaborator Barry McGee and Chris Johanson, was part of the Mission School that emerged in the late 1990s. (She was also a graffiti artist who went by the tags "Meta" and "Matokie Slaughter.") Working by hand in gouache and acrylic on discarded papers like brown bags and book pages, she was partial to the imperfection �" and the humanity �" of the results. On view are paintings on canvas that are cut and stitched together, and works on paper of trees, leaves, full lips, female figures and at least one airplane. Through August 5. www.ratio3.org
Chandler Fine Art Closed Patterns: The untamed wilderness, mythical beasts, a palette of intensely vibrant colors and the golden light of his native Kenya inform Jesse Allen's multifaceted watercolors and prints. Before his breakthrough exhibition at Stanford in the 1960s, Allen, a self-taught artist, sketched rural areas and the East African flora and fauna of his youth. Those motifs prevail in detailed, maze-like landscapes teeming with life. One enters a magical kingdom of circuitous trails, multiple scorching suns hanging in endless skies, lush palms and blood-red trees, splendid creatures, predatory birds cruising in packs and exotic imagery distilled in the artist's mind. They're visions of a prehistoric Eden promising beauty and terror, death and innocence before the fall, safely enclosed within the borders of a picture frame. Through July 30. www.chandlersf.com
Fraenkel Gallery Irving Penn: Radical Beauty (1946-2007): Brother of film director Arthur Penn, Irving, a notorious perfectionist, is best known for the stark simplicity and minimalist elegance of his insightful portraiture, and his mesmerizing fashion photography for Vogue. The 30some photographs in this show represent six decades of a less-explored aspect of his career: his investigation into the nature of beauty in a society where media images have proliferated while the definition and standards of physical perfection have narrowed. Though he toiled in the upper reaches of the cultural and fashion elite, these transfixing images, including pierced tribal warriors of New Guinea regarding the camera with penetrating stares, or faces decorated and obscured, sometimes completely, in disturbing yet hypnotic ways �" aping the guises of fashion �" reflect an embrace of the human form in its many permutations. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the power still belongs to whoever is wielding the camera. Through August 20. www.fraenkelgallery.com
SFMOMA In New Work, two contemporary artists move the medium of ceramic sculpture well beyond the mug and ashtray conventions. Czech-born Swedish artist Klara Kristalova mines the unsettling, often sinister realm of childhood, Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and stuffed animals for stoneware artworks such as "The Owlchild," a piece with malevolent undertones (inspired by an image of a child suffocated by a bag over its head) that stands as tall as a three-year-old, and is dressed in a haunting owl costume covering its face and upper body; "She's Got a Good Head," in which a small child sits cross-legged on a chair clutching a face mask; and "Game," a disturbing bust of a blindfolded, ivory-skinned, long-haired girl that implies a scenario more threatening than playful. The work of Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, who, in his teens, was an underground comix artist in Brazil, is infused with native folklore and adventure stories, as well as subject matter that tilts toward the violent and the sexual. "Garganua Rex," for instance, is a vile, fleshy, decadent figure with crown and scepter, reminiscent of the slug-like creature Jabba the Hutt, while "Nietzschean Anthropomorphism Scratching His Balls" is a grotesque, savage take on Titian's reclining Venus, the Renaissance ideal of beauty. Through October 30. www.sfmoma.org
Cantor Arts Center You can sample a bit �" actually a large chunk �" of art al fresco on the Stanford University campus, where you'd be forgiven if you mistook the solemn congregation of tormented souls on Memorial Court to be a gathering of flesh-and-blood men rather than Rodin's "The Burghers of Calais," the self-sacrificing heroes on their way to slaughter. The latest addition to the Center's great outdoors is the installation of "Sequence," a monumental sculpture made from 200 tons of contoured steel, by the Bay Area king of the gigantic, Richard Serra. Regarded as one of his finest achievements, it's on display for the first time since its birth in 2006, and will remain until 2016. www.museum.stanford.edu