What a difference a few weeks makes. Synergistically speaking, the more upbeat national political landscape can't help but invigorate the local culture scene, too. The major museums have offerings galore, from SFMOMA embracing sports, to the more traditional show of American masterpieces from the Osher Collection at the de Young.
The Oakland Museum of California melds popular culture and politics in the "Calli Americas" extravaganza. Alternative spaces and commercial galleries also inaugurate the fall season with new shows. Here's a roundup of notable exhibits.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hopes to recover pre-pandemic attendance levels with "Get in the Game: Sports, Arts, Culture," featuring six sports-themed exhibits, and an ample catalog, from October 19, 2024 to February 18, 2025.
Celebrated sports stars like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Colin Kaepernick, and Diane Nyad (her profile raised after Annette Benning's movie portrayal of her) are depicted in artwork, and big-name artists like Mathew Barney and Catherine Opie show their sports-themed work.
Photographer Opie and long-distance swimmer Nyad, both lesbians, are among the dialogues featured in the catalog. Local well-known artists also are feted, including David Huffman, whose wall-sized mural mingles images of basketballs with abstraction.
"Unity Through Skateboarding" (August 17, 2024—April 27, 2025), focuses on the history of LGBTQ+, people of color, and women skateboarders, guest curated by Jeffrey Cheung and Gabriel Ramirez, artists and founders of Unity, the Oakland-based queer collective that introduces participants to skateboarding and art-making.
SFMOMA will put out the welcome mat with Family Free Days and invitations to submit artwork and video games on the sports theme. Also not to be missed: Kara Walker's grand sculptural installation, "Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)," whose fabrication involved the use of Artificial Intelligence. Oakland-based painter Mary Lovelace O'Neal has work on display through Oct. 20. www.sfmoma.org
Across town and light years away, there's still time to catch time-tested masterpieces in "American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art" at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, through Oct. 20. The 61 pieces on view, including work by Georgia O'Keefe, Wiliiam Merritt Chase, and John Singer Sargent, are some of the collection highlights of these longtime benefactors, who've gifted the work to the museum. With a mix of crowd-pleasing and more erudite exhibitions, the FAMSF have successfully regained pre-pandemic attendance levels www.deyoung.famsf.org
Across the Bay, the Oakland Museum of California offers the must-see Great Hall extravaganza, "Calli: The Art of Xicanx Peoples: an Exhibition that Navigates the Intergenerational, Feminist, and Queer Stories of Xicanx-Indigenous Communities." (Xicanx is a gender-neutral term for people of Mexican descent, a substitute for Chicana/Chicano.)
Viewers enter the exhibit, on view until Jan. 26, 2025, through an impressive "adobe Mesoamerican stylized temple," with mud and straw tiles, by rafa esparza. Inside, the posters, installations, paintings, sculpture, and photographs are just as compelling.
The beating heart of the show is OMCA's recently acquired poster collection, "Calli Americas," assembled by activist/professor Margaret Terrazas Santos, who chose the name "Calli" from the Nahuati language to refer to "home" in an expansive way. The exhibit contains artwork reflecting "queer kinship and AIDS activism," including paintings by Joey Terrill and Manuel Paul, and photographs by the late celebrated photographer Laura Aguilar, who used her body as subject. www.museumca.org
"Tiger in the Looking Glass," at Wendi Norris Gallery, San Francisco, offers new paintings by Chitra Ganesh, Indian New York-based artist honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship and Joan Mitchell Foundation award. Her paintings, "rooted in literature, queer theory, and historical texts," with shout-outs to Keith Haring and Bollywood posters, envision a "future of possibility and abundance" (Sept. 13—Oct. 26). www.gallerywendinorris.com
Prominent East Bay artist Mildred Howard, whose public sculpture has just been installed at the Ashby Bart station in Berkeley, is showing work from her "Collaboration with the Muses" series, at 500 Capp Street, in San Francisco and at other venues, including Anglim/Trimble Gallery at the Minnesota Street complex in San Francisco (Sept. 7—Oct. 26).
At Capp Street, the house museum of the late David Ireland, she will show her film "The Time and Space of Now," and an installation (Sept.—Oct.) Also at Capp St., Annie Abagli has an installation dealing with intangibles like time and space, rooted in the domestic interiors of the Ireland house (Sept.—Nov.). Yetunde olagbaju, working as part of a collective, will reflect upon the election and its aftermath (Nov.—Jan.). www.500CappStreet.org www.anglimtrimble.com
"Liberatory Living: Protective Interior and Radical Black Joy" at The San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, runs Oct. 2—March 2, 2025. MOAD is devoting all three floors of their SoMa museum to designers, artists, and furniture makers, breaking barriers between functional and decorative art, design and interiors, and "high" art, imbuing them with social and political implications.
Chuma Maweni exhibits ceramic furniture, Michael Bennett (designer and former NFL football player) contributes "Pews," constructed of leather and wood. Other participants include Sheila Bridges and Kapwani Kiwanga. www.moadsf.org
"Hallyu: The Korean Wave," arrives in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum Sept. 27, from London's Victoria and Albert Museum, its first stop. The exhibit, featuring contemporary South Korean art and culture, including film and fashion, will be on view through Jan. 6, 2025.
The AAM has mounted important shows of neglected local, modern Asian artists like Bernice Bing and Carlos Villa. Its outstanding permanent collection, housed in the repurposed former Main Library, doesn't get the crowds and attention it deserves. www.asianart.org
"Erotic Resistance: Performance, Art, and Activism in San Francisco Strip Clubs (1960s—1990s)," at the San Francisco GLBT History Museum through Nov., highlights the role San Francisco played in the "development of American adult entertainment and the contributions of queer women, trans women, and women of color...instrumental in the city's labor history, as well as its LGBT and sex workers' rights movements.
In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in the city...and in the 1990s, stripper-artist-activists led the first successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize." www.glbthistory.org
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