10 Exhibitions Not to Miss During San Francisco Art Week

San Francisco and the Bay Area sit at the epicenter of one of the world’s largest pockets of tech wealth, with Silicon Valley just down the road and giants like Google on prime space along the waterfront. And yet the art world has long struggled to court this audience, let alone convert it into the kind of committed buyers who once fueled the early-2000s contemporary boom, when hedge fund managers played an outsized role in shaping the market. The money is here. The question is whether the cultural circuitry knows how to plug into it.

Now in its 12th edition, FOG Design+Art has become a critical proving ground for testing that connection. Beyond its annual, tightly curated international showcase, the fair has cultivated a local collector base while amplifying the strength of the city’s existing cultural ecosystem. That ecosystem spans the ambitious programming of major institutions—from SFMOMA and the de Young to the now-nomadic ICA San Francisco and the recently opened Museum of the African Diaspora—alongside a gallery scene that is both resilient and increasingly self-assured, with established woman-led spaces like Jessica Silverman, Wendi Norris and Catherine Clark to newer, dynamic players such as Rebecca Camacho, Jonathan Carver Moore’s gallery and residency and the future-forward design gallery Future Perfect.

To navigate—or simply discover—the latest artistic energies of Golden Gate City, we’ve compiled a list of must-see exhibitions and installations on view during San Francisco Art Week.

Observer’s must-see SF Art Week shows

• Susanne Jackson, “What Is Love
• “Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors”
• “Masami Teraoka: From Here to Eternity, Five Decades of Art Making”
• “Manet & Morisot”
• “The Horizon Waved, and Nothing Was Certain”
• Lily Kwong and Tara Donovan for ICA SF
• Auudi Dorsey, “What’s Left, Never Left”
• “1-800 Happy Birthday”
• Christy Matson, “Even So”
• “Art of Manga”

Susanne Jackson, “What Is Love

• SFMOMA, through March 1, 2026

Inspired by a profound, holistic belief in a symbiotic energetic connection between all living beings, Jackson has spent more than six decades creating vibrantly dynamic abstractions that move through space like choreographies. Her works defy gravity and formal fixation, evoking a continuous morphing of color, energy and form animated by the alchemical pulse that drives all evolution. Her life and practice have been guided by a relentless pursuit of creative freedom and a bohemian spirit indebted to the San Francisco ethos of the 1950s and 1960s in which she was raised.

Now, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is staging the first retrospective devoted to the full breadth of her career, presenting more than 80 paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that foreground her innovative use of color, light and structure to expand the parameters of painting while articulating ideals of beauty, peace and love. Organized chronologically, the exhibition traces a clear evolution from early, nature-inflected canvases layered with ethereal washes and dream imagery toward an increasingly liberated exploration of color and the imaginative realms of the psyche, untethered from direct representation. Throughout, her practice reveals a visceral, largely intuitive engagement with materials, in which color moves across surfaces with a physical, almost sensual intensity.

“Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors”

• Wendi Norris, through March 14, 2026

Wendi Norris is known for her acute eye and uncommon sensitivity in identifying and championing visionary artists whose work taps into the depths of the collective subconscious and the mythical and mystical realms, reviving archetypal and universal truths. She was among the first to foreground figures such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, well before the market’s current fascination with artists moving fluidly between worlds to produce works of revelatory imaginative power. On the occasion of San Francisco Art Week, Norris turns her attention to another receptive mind and singular creative spirit, presenting the first solo exhibition in the city of Marie Wilson’s work since Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1984 exhibition “Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson” at City Lights Bookstore. Spanning five decades of Wilson’s career, the show reintroduces her revelatory and highly individual oeuvre through sixteen paintings and seven works on paper, tracing her evolution from the intuitively charged hazy landscapes, cosmic imagery and biomorphic forms of her early period to the meticulously executed symmetrical inner cosmologies and diagrammatic structures that defined her mature work.

Wilson grew up with a conviction that she had “been born an artist,” likely always feeling a call to be a vessel through which these timeless universal structures could reemerge. Her practice is rooted equally in the cultural and spiritual milieu of Northern California and the Bay Area of her youth and in the intellectual currents of European Surrealism, shaped in part by André Breton’s introduction to the mediumistic practices of Fleury Joseph Crépin and Augustin Lesage. Through this synthesis, Wilson expanded Surrealism’s horizons, forging a mystical engagement with universal structures articulated through ancestral and archetypal symbolic language as much as through a connection with nature and its circles.

“Masami Teraoka: From Here to Eternity, Five Decades of Art Making”

• Catherine Clark Gallery, through March 7, 2026

To celebrate the artist’s 90th birthday, established San Francisco dealer Catherine Clark—who also marks 35 years of operation this year—is staging an extensive exhibition of Japan-born, U.S.-based artist Masami Teraoka. Spanning five decades of the artist’s oeuvre, the show highlights his ability to adapt traditional Japanese illustration—particularly Edo-period woodblock conventions such as flattened space, calligraphic line and theatrical gesture—to address Western consumer culture, eroticism and the collision between East and West. Blending the surreal and the humorous with sharp social commentary, Teraoka’s work offers an unusually visceral, at times intimate yet deeply resonant reflection on how ideas of sexuality, gender, the body, love and affection have evolved alongside the accelerated societal shifts of recent decades. While his work in the 1970s often embraced a more optimistic vision of free love, it took a darker and more urgent turn in the late 1980s and 1990s, with searing responses to the AIDS crisis, religious hypocrisy and moral panic.

This survey tracks that evolution, offering a rare opportunity to see watercolors, drawings and multiples from Teraoka’s AIDS Series and Waves Series in conversation with projects ranging from 1974 to the present, including his later shift toward large-scale, theatrically staged works that grapple with globalization, environmental disaster and the fragility of belief systems. Together, they form a relentless critical effort to read, decode and mythologically reimagine the demons of our time. The exhibition also follows a spotlight on the artist presented by the gallery at Art Basel Miami Beach and inaugurates a year of programming celebrating Catherine Clark Gallery’s 35th anniversary and BOXBLUR’s 10th anniversary.

“Manet & Morisot”

• Legion of Honor, through March 1, 2026

Working during the transitional years of the Second Empire and early Third Republic, and at the hinge between Realism and modern painting, Édouard Manet is often described as the father of Impressionism—or, more precisely, as the artist who first laid the groundwork for it. Berthe Morisot is one of many women artists who were not only overlooked but also long overshadowed by their proximity to more established male figures like Manet. Their relationship has frequently been narrated through Manet’s portraits of Morisot, while her own work was treated as a derivative extension of his practice. Although Manet often retouched Morisot’s canvases—sometimes to her frustration—the exchange was far from one-sided. Morisot’s lighter palette, freer brushwork and commitment to plein-air painting exerted a tangible influence on Manet’s work in the late 1860s and early 1870s, subtly reshaping his approach at a critical moment.

Rich in new research, the exhibition at the Legion of Honor aims to recast, for the first time, one of the most complex and consequential relationships in 19th-century French art—at once artistic, intellectual and deeply personal. Framed as a dialogue between equals, the exhibition highlights how their exchange helped shape the emergence of modern painting while foregrounding the gendered constraints Morisot navigated through her work and her central role in challenging and ultimately breaking free from academic standards.

“The Horizon Waved, and Nothing Was Certain”

• Jessica Silverman, through February 28, 2026

A timely and ominously resonant title frames this exhibition by artist, geographer and writer Trevor Paglen, whose practice interrogates the hidden infrastructures of power and technology that shape, monitor and control contemporary life—and increasingly, our visions of the future. Since the early 2000s, Paglen’s work has focused on mapping the visual culture of surveillance and secrecy, examining how images operate within regimes of control, governance and algorithmic decision-making. This inquiry has since evolved into a sustained investigation of machine vision and A.I., raising critical questions about how images are produced, interpreted and potentially weaponized by non-human observers.

Having recently joined the roster of established yet consistently forward-looking San Francisco gallerist Jessica Silverman, Paglen presents new prints from four award-winning series that probe the outer limits of visual perception. These works reveal landscapes and skyscapes unseen by human eyes, generated instead through computer vision systems, drone surveillance technologies and imaging of secret military sites. As philosopher Brian Holmes has noted, these works operate at “a crossroads of critical analysis and cosmic experience… creating encounters with currently invisible realities.” Paglen will participate in a panel discussion during FOG Design+Art, titled “A.I., Art & the Future of Creativity,” which explores how artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping artistic production while raising urgent questions around authorship and responsibility.

Lily Kwong and Tara Donovan for ICA SF

• ICA San Francisco at Transamerica Pyramid Center, through July 31, 2026

Beginning this year, ICA San Francisco has embraced a fully nomadic model, expanding its impact within the city’s cultural ecology while extending its reach to a broader public. The inaugural interventions of this new chapter include an exhibition by Tara Donovan at the Transamerica Pyramid Center Annex, presented alongside Lily Kwong’s EARTHSEED DOME, a newly commissioned 3D-printed living sculpture installed in Transamerica Redwood Park. Set in dialogue with the surrounding architecture, Donovan’s large-scale sculptures from her Stratagems series—five of which have never been shown publicly—crystallize her long-standing investigation into how simple, mass-produced materials can be transformed through accumulation, repetition and process. Composed of thousands of recycled CDs, the works remain in constant flux, shifting in response to changes in light and weather beyond the gallery walls. Donovan has long explored how sculpture can transform space and perception, and this intervention offered a compelling opportunity to test how her constructions from urban remnants can engage architectural contexts and reveal moments of beauty within apparent chaos.

Running in tandem and animated by a similar spirit, Kwong’s site-specific living installation reimagines public space as a blooming ecosystem, inviting the local community to participate as pollinators in the work’s organic growth over time. Through seed gathering, wellness programming and collective rituals, the project activates civic engagement while foregrounding care and ecological awareness. Kwong, who grew up in the city, describes her creative and ecological sensibility as having been shaped entirely by the Bay Area. After more than 15 years of producing installations worldwide, she approached this commission as a full-circle moment and a profound affirmation of the place and community that gave her artistic purpose.

Auudi Dorsey, “What’s Left, Never Left”

• Jonathan Carver Moore, through January 31, 2026

Since 2016, Jonathan Carver Moore has operated as a hybrid gallery combining exhibition space and residency, evolving into a community-driven platform that foregrounds artists engaging questions of identity, history, power and collective memory. On view during San Francisco Art Week is a solo exhibition by New Orleans–based artist Auudi Dorsey, presenting a new body of work developed during his six-week residency at the gallery and extending research he began in 2022 into the cultural relationship between African American communities and water.

Drawing on archival photographs and historical records, Dorsey revisits the once-vibrant leisure spaces that fostered joy, community and resilience within Black communities, many of which have since been erased through systemic neglect, environmental change and redevelopment. Centering the experiences of African women in particular, his paintings challenge persistent narratives of distance between African Americans and aquatic life while addressing the generational loss of swimming knowledge that has contributed to disproportionate drowning rates. Through this reframing, Dorsey reimagines water as a site of connection and memory, ownership and belonging. Bodies of water become memorial vessels and emotional sites, bridging past and present in a broader vision of reclamation and empowerment.

“1-800 Happy Birthday”

• The Guardhouse, at the main entrance of Fort Mason Center, through February 14, 2026

Coinciding with San Francisco Art Week, filmmaker and artist Mohammad Gorjestani presents a multi-format project and living memorial at The Guardhouse, located at the main entrance of Fort Mason Center, where FOG Design+Art also takes place. Conceived as an ongoing initiative unfolding across multiple contexts and sites and produced by Even/Odd and the New York–based arts nonprofit WORTHLESSSTUDIOS in partnership with the social justice organization Campaign Zero, the installation honors the lives of Black and Brown people lost to police violence by returning to what is most human: the act of celebration. Through voice, image and shared ritual, the work creates space to speak names, tell stories and mark birthdays that continue even after loss. The installation is free and fully open to the public, viewable through the Fort Mason Center windows day and night.

Christy Matson, “Even So”

• Rebecca Camacho Presents, through February 28, 2026

Founded in 2011, Rebecca Camacho Presents has built a reputation for a tightly curated program that foregrounds artists working at the intersection of abstraction, material experimentation and perceptual inquiry, often in relation to memory and identity. This approach is evident in the current exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Christy Matson, which presents “Even So,” her most personal and self-reflective body of work to date, initiated in early 2025 amid wildfires and a pervasive sense of social and political instability.

What began as small, improvised and cathartic sketches—made from studio remnants such as leftover watercolors, diluted acrylics, half-dried brushes and reused paper—gradually became the conceptual and emotional anchor of the exhibition. Yet rather than functioning as preparatory studies, these works emerged as a way of moving through paralysis by remaining close to the act of making itself: a personal ritual through which to access more universal truths beyond the anxieties of a time-bound experience. Through repetition, Matson enters a meditative and revelatory state, developing a luminous visual language of atmospheric diagrams—occluded suns, silhouetted hills and drifting dots—rendered in a smoke-muted palette of gray, teal, sage and rust. Translated through her hybrid practice combining analog weaving with digital Jacquard technology, these imagined and seemingly transcendent landscapes regain material weight, with a quiet emotional intensity grounded in the sensuality of texture and materials.

“Art of Manga”

• de Young Museum, through January 25, 2026

At a moment when manga has been fully recognized for its role in shaping contemporary visual culture, the de Young presents its first major exhibition dedicated to the genre—treating manga not as ephemera but as an art form in its own right. Featuring more than 600 original drawings, the show traces the evolution of manga from its origins to the present through the work of defining figures—including Akatsuka Fujio, Araki Hirohiko, Chiba Tetsuya, Oda Eiichiro, Tagame Gengoroh, Takahashi Rumiko, Tanaami Keiichi, Taniguchi Jiro, Yamashita Kazumi, Yamazaki Mari and Yoshinaga Fumi—offering a rare opportunity to encounter original works by some of the most influential manga artists in history, many of which have never before been publicly shown.

“We are living in a time when the narrative shift from text to images is increasingly becoming a reality,” noted organizing curator Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, research director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures at the University of East Anglia. In this sense, the exhibition explores manga not only as a once-underground culture that expanded from Japan to a global audience, but also as a powerful form of visual storytelling—capable of shaping values, identities and worldviews for entire generations. In many ways, it anticipates the image-driven dynamics that define contemporary social media and digital culture today.