In stark contrast to his verbal stream-of-consciousness and stoner delivery, photographer Danny Lyon’s pictures have a bracing clarity and intensity that gets you in the gut.

To experience this exhibition is to partake of a very personal collection of hand-picked works selected with an eye for beauty and technical brilliance.

Combining Pop, Conceptual, performance art and cinema, she has distilled her own art form, one made no less original because she’s grown influential and spawned a legion of imitators.

Even as the fog surges into the city, things are heating up at local galleries, where there’s no such thing as summer vacation. Here is a quartet of exhibitions around town worth taking a look at.

Memorial Day weekend is the official launch of summer, and though the same might not be said for the local galleries, there’s plenty to check out around town.

Phantoms of Asia: Contemporary Awakens the Past, the big summer show that opened at the Asian Art Museum last weekend, does no less than ponder the nature and origins of the universe and the invisible forces that shape our lives.

Check out these must-see exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay area.

The Dick Show brushes against ideas of gender. The show has been curated by Jack Davis, a long-time Radical Faerie well known for crocheting and exhibiting penis covers.

The exhibition, now at the San Francisco Main Library Gallery, brings its subject to life on the centennial of his birth, and illuminates the intersection of activism and personal biography, political conscience and humanity.

Underground commix bad boy R. Crumb, the big daddy of 1960s San Francisco counterculture, is having his very first comprehensive museum show - in Paris, no less.

If you’re interested in uncovering a wealth of photography, Mexico might not be the first place you’d look.

Bali, a Southeast Asian mecca for Western tourists seeking the promise of paradise, a tropical tan and the sort of spiritual awakening glamorized by the pop culture phenomenon Eat, Pray, Love, gets a thorough and rather fine art-historical treatment

Well, 2010 is nearly out the door, and the time has come to reflect on the year that was. An eclectic year at the museums, 2010 was also a year of milestones.

A new exhibit Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H.A. Rey, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum explores the world of the children’s book icon.