To enter the realm of prolific African American artist Romare Bearden is to surrender to the rhapsody of color, an exuberant concert enlivening "Romare Bearden: Storyteller," a show at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery.

Last June, when Colin Bailey came on board as the new director of the Fine Arts Museums, it was a tough time for the institution. Diplomatic and well-spoken, the London native appears to have a mix of steely determination and wry humor.

Everybody had an opinion when we told them we were spending Christmas in Reno, Nevada.

The biggest news of the coming year concerns the Anderson family, South Bay collectors who gave 121 postwar modern and abstract expressionist artworks to Stanford University.

The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus is now a well-established mainstream city institution with an international reputation, but 35 years ago it was quite another story.

Absent habitation, care and tending, even the greatest architectural achievements can degenerate into deserted shrines to human aspiration and crumbling grandeur.

We now live in a 24/7 world, but in days of yore, August was when art dealers shuttered their doors and left for summer vacation. Based on empirical evidence (see below), however, local galleries are in full swing this month.

Currently on show at the National Gallery of Art, the large exhibition Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, "1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music" is a celebration of the Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev.

"The Berkeley Years, 1953-1966," at the de Young Museum, is a definitive survey and the first to focus on the fertile 13-year period the artist spent in Berkeley when "Diebenkorn really became Diebenkorn."

For Ramekon O’Arwisters, a San Francisco-based, gay African American artist, racial and gender politics are realities, not abstract constructs, and they are never far from his mind or his work, where he merges his identities.

"Sometimes you have to please your own sweet self" could be the tagline for Annie Leibovitz’s latest show "Pilgrimage," now at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Still cool after all these years, the Beat Generation of the 1950s exerts a powerful hold on the romantic cultural imagination a half-century later. One need look no further than "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg."

It may be a coincidence or simply "good timing," but artists have ol’ father time on the mind this month, as evidenced by work at three city venues.

Its 25,000 LED lights strung along suspension cables along a 1.8 mile span of the bridge make this the biggest public artwork we can think of.