A year of tumult and talent

Bay Area’s artistic scene saw great turnover in 2018, but as always, inspiration abounded

Is there any way of tidily encapsulating all the myriad goings-on in the cultural life of a region over the course of an entire year? The critics and arts writers of The Chronicle have looked back on the events of 2018 and beheld a vibrant, elusive, wonderful tumult of high points and lows, comings and goings, predictable triumphs and unexpected moments of transcendence and beauty.

It was a year, in other words, not unlike other years.

In 2018, there were highprofile appointments. We saw a switcheroo in museum leadership, as Thomas P. Campbell was named to lead the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco — the former province of Max Hollein, his successor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Esa-Pekka Salonen was named the next music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and three local theater companies — American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Rep and the Cutting Ball Theater — all got new female leadership.

It was a year in which festivals took on new urgency, from the artistic splendor of “Unbound,” the San Francisco Ballet’s celebration of new work, to the political ferment of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, to Petaluma’s new Pet-A-Llama Comedy Festival.

And it was a year in which little miracles of artistic achievement sprang up all over the region, in venues large and small — an exhibition of painter Wayne Thiebaud’s early work, an orchestral masterpiece from composer John Luther Adams, a final visit with W. Kamau Bell and the late Anthony Bourdain, or Mona Mansour’s play “We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War” at Golden Thread.

Follow along as The Chronicle Datebook arts writers lay out the ups and downs of the year in further detail.

Goldberg (Scott Wentworth, right) and McCann (Marco Barricelli) interrogate Stanley (Firdous Bamji) in “The Birthday Party.”