San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Visual arts sizzle with epic exhibits and installations
This summer the Bay Area’s visual art scene is loaded with a diverse range of offerings. Solo shows and group exhibitions abound while the debut of an original new installation by an acclaimed Bay Area-born artist has been highly anticipated. Here are eight exhibitions to help your summer sizzle with visual stimulation. ‘Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs’
This solo show for the Guyana-born, Indian artist Suchitra Mattai will be her largest exhibition to date and feature a number of her wall tapestries, found furniture works and anthropomorphic sculptures created from repurposed saris. Mattai’s family history as Indian immigrants brought to work in Guyana as indentured laborers informs the central installation of the show: a suspended house structure reminiscent of her grandfather’s home in the tropical country.
Noon-5 p.m. Wednesday; noon-7 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. June 6-Sept. 15. Free. Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 901 Minnesota St., S.F. www.icasanfrancisco.org
‘Nick Dong: 11-88’
Oakland artist Nick Dong has had a longtime interest in the Chinese intellectual lineage Wen-ren, a philosophy that values creation as a quest for self-evolution. The centerpiece of the exhibition will be a series of interconnected, interactive sculptures and immersive illuminated rooms, all executed with scientific precision. Dong’s works incorporate elements including sound, light and
mirrors that are all activated in some way by the visitor.
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday; 11 a.m.-8 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month. June 6Aug. 25. $9. Free admission Wednesdays and second Sundays of the month. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission St., S.F. 415-9782700. www.ybca.org
‘The California Jewish Open’
The California Jewish Open, the museum’s first open-call exhibition presenting work by contemporary Jewish-identifying artists throughout California, will ask the question, “How are artists looking to the many aspects of Jewish culture, identity, and community to foster, reimagine, hold, or discover connection?” The exhibition will no doubt be a talker as the Jewish community continues to grapple with the Israel-Gaza war and the range of feelings brought on by the conflict.
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. June 6-Oct. 20. $14-16. Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F. 415-655-7800. www.thecjm.org
‘Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)’
Stockton-born artist Kara Walker has been globally acclaimed for her work which addresses themes of race and
gender in surprising ways, often reinterpreting aesthetics of dominant culture. Her new installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first site-specific commission to be presented the free first floor gallery, uses sources including Octavia Butler’s novel “Parable of the Sower” to tropes within
museum display practices and includes mechanized sculptures moving in elaborate settings.
The work’s full title is: “The complete title for the presentation is Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence
Carried out by The Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker.”
1-8 p.m. Thursday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday-Monday. July 1-May 2026. $19-$25. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third St., S.F. 415-357-4000. www.sfmoma.org
‘Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures’
Los Angeles photographer Christina Fernandez’s work has explored migration, labor, gender and her Mexican American identity for three decades. Now, she’s getting a major new show bringing together some of her most important work for the first time, including the installation “Untitled Farmworkers” (1989/1994/2024), which connects the agricultural history of Silicon Valley to Cesar Chavez’s organizing with the United Farm Workers and “María’s Great Expedition” (1995–96), which re-creates moments in the life of Fernandez’s maternal
great-grandmother, María Gonzales.
4-9 p.m. Thursday. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday. 11 a.m.-6 p.m. SaturdaySunday. June 7-Sept. 22. $8-$10. San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose. 408-2716840. www.sjmusart.org
‘Calli The Art of the Xicanx Peoples’
This exhibition focuses on intergenerational, feminist, queer, and Xicanx-Indigenous art, and includes installations, sculpture, painting, photography and poetry that showcase stories of Xicanx artists (a term referring to people of Mexican descent in the United States). Posters from late queer Chicana activist and professor Margaret “Margie” Terrazas Santos’ collection will also be in conversation with contemporary works by Xicanx artists, including a site-specific installation related to issues of the U.S.-Mexico border by Cupertino artist Consuelo Jimenez Underwood.
11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday. June 14-Jan. 26, 2025. Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak St., Oakland. 510318-8400. www.museumca.org
‘Leilah Babirye: We Have a History’
Uganda-born New York artist Leilah Babirye uses media ranging from wood, ceramic to discarded objects to create her expressive, ambiguously gendered sculptures. In the initial construction, Babirye utilizes craft-making traditions from western and central Africa and then adorns them with wire, bicycle chains, inner tubes, and other found metals and materials.
The works range in scale from tall, totemic forms to smaller busts, talismans, and masks, and are intended as portraits of her LGBTQ+ community. Her art shines a light on their existence in Uganda where they face brutal legal and social discrimination. The exhibition is Bibirye’s first solo museum show in the United States and the second show in the de Young Museum’s Contemporary African Art program.
9:30 a.m.-5:15 p.m. TuesdaySunday. June 22-June 22, 2025. $15-$30. De Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, S.F. 415-750-3600. www.famsf.org
Matrix 285 / Young Joon Kwak: Resistance Pleasure
Los Angeles artist Young Joon Kwak will present a newly commissioned installation at the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive. Using a mixture of resin, metal, and other synthetic and organic materials, Kwak creates sculptures from casts of the human form which then show the body as fragmented, installed throughout the gallery to suggest a sense of movements and gestures. Kwak’s vision is to emphasize details of the human body and posture in new ways through the work.
11 a.m.-7 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday, Aug. 7- Dec. 8. $10-14. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley. 510-642-0808. www.bampfa.org