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.

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.

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.

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.

Californians believe that most of the great new ideas, innovations and trends are generated and nurtured in our free-thinking, unconventional state, then emanate outward to the rest of the world, which has to catch up.

BAMPFA's "Way Bay," a rangy, ambitious, historical survey of the Bay Area's legacy of art and cinema, mines the institution's eclectic holdings.