Isaac Julien, “Maiden of Silence (Ten Thousand Waves)”, 2010, Endura Ultra photograph. Image courtesy of de Young Museum.
Ongoing to July 13 – Isaac Julien: I Dream a World at de Young Museum: Over the last 25 years, artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien has created immersive, multichannel video installations exploring power, politics, and personal experience through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside select early single-channel films including Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum and his first retrospective in the U.S. Shot across Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, and Asia, Julien’s works untangle the web of post-colonial conditions that shaped the lives of individuals and societies across the globe. de Young Museum is located at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr in San Francisco.
Alec Soth, “Lee”, 2023, pigment print, edition of 9 + 4 APs. Image courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery.
Ongoing to May 23 – Alec Soth: Advice for Young Artists at Fraenkel Gallery: Advice for Young Artists explores the cultivation of creativity through playful and surprising photographs made at undergraduate art programs. Rather than offering the guidance promised by the show’s title, the series presents reflections on artmaking at different stages of life, exploring the connections between photography, time, and aging. Inspired by Walker Evans’s Polaroids of young people, the photographs range from bright still lifes made from art department props to enigmatic images of students and oblique self-portraits. Fraenkel Gallery is located at 49 Geary St #450 in San Francisco.
Mattea Perrotta, “Letters Never Sent”, 2024, oil stick and plaster on canvas. Nick Gorham, “Passage”, 2025, oil on canvas. Images courtesy of Et al. Gallery.
Ongoing to May 31 – Mattea Perrotta: The Forgetting of Air and Nick Gorham: Sun Turn at Et al. Gallery: In The Forgetting of Air, Rome-based artist Mattea Perrotta presents compositions that fuse monumentality with delicacy. Drawing from personal memory and the art historical lineages of the many cities she has inhabited, Perrotta crafts a painterly language of abstract forms and tonal gestures. Her works invite viewers into a meditative space shaped by cultural observation and emotional resonance. In Sun Turn, Nick Gorham explores the liminal space between landscape and abstraction. Rooted in his deep connection to Northern California, Gorham’s paintings balance intuitive mark-making with careful observation. The resulting works evoke internal landscapes as much as external ones, reflecting a search for meaning through painterly process. Et al. Gallery is located at 2831a Mission St in San Francisco.
Val Britton, “Transit”, 2025, acrylic, ink, collage, monoprint, and colored pencil on paper. Isca Greenfield-Sanders, “Pink Lake”, 2024, mixed media oil on canvas. Vanessa Marsh, “Grand Teton 8, mid day from Jenny Lake, Grand Teton National Park WY”, from the series “The Sun Beneath the Sky”, 2020, unique silver gelatin lumen photogram. Joni Sternbach, “13.08.30 #4-5 Yuko-Milo”, from the series “Surfland”, 2013, tintype diptych. Images courtesy of Berggruen Gallery.
May 1 to June 19 – Val Britton: Ghost Coast, Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Cut From A Dream, and Western Wave: Vanessa Marsh & Joni Sternbach at Berggruen Gallery: Portland-based artist Val Britton’s newest mixed media works form invented psycho-geographic terrains that explore themes of memory, care, and transformation. Combining painting, collage, ink, watercolor, drawing, and cut paper, Britton’s abstract compositions mimic and evoke the intertwining of spatial networks–cosmological, symbolic, emotional, topographic–that we inhabit at each given moment. In Cut From A Dream, New York-based painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders features idyllic landscape paintings and works on paper depicting the fleeting moments of found and collected memories. Western Wave is a photography exhibition by American artists Vanessa Marsh and Joni Sternbach exploring themes of memory, landscape, and the passage of time through historical techniques. Through various photographic processes, Marsh and Sternbach emphasize the tactile, ephemeral nature of their materials—where hand-poured emulsions, exposure times, and environmental factors leave visible traces of the artist’s hand. Berggruen Gallery is located at 10 Hawthorne St in San Francisco.
Martin Machado, “My Wake Series 15”, 2024, oil on linen. Image courtesy of Eleanor Harwood Gallery.
May 3 to June 21 – Martin Machado: Fine Dine the Demons at Eleanor Harwood Gallery: In this recent group of works, Martin Machado continues several ongoing series relating to the natural world’s cycles and his experience working on the water as a commercial fisherman and merchant mariner. Machado’s works are painted in oil, both on linen, and on nautical charts collected from international containerships Machado worked on. With equal parts gallows humor and optimism, the moodiness of these new works is also reflected in the show’s title “Fine Dine the Demons” borrowed from the lyrics of musician Adrienne Lenker’s song titled “Once A Bunch.” Eleanor Harwood Gallery is located at Minnesota Street Project at 1275 Minnesota St #206 in San Francisco.
Top: David Antonio Cruz, Detail of “thesecretofremainingyoung isnevertohaveanemotion, thatisunbecoming; thosebarriokids”, 2022; Bottom: Masako Miki Detail of painting. Images courtesy of ICA San Francisco.
May 16 to December 7 – Masako Miki: Midnight March and David Antonio Cruz: stay, take your time, my love at ICA SF: As Japanese artist Masako Miki’s largest presentation to date, Midnight March is also the first fully site-responsive exhibition at ICA SF’s new location at The Cube. The exhibition will collapse Miki’s two-dimensional and three-dimensional practices, bringing her paintings known as “Night Parades” to life in experiential form. David Antonio Cruz’s site-specific solo exhibition, stay, take your time, my love, acts as a “love letter” to the Bay Area queer community, layering references to art history, the handkerchief code, leather culture, and iconic sites around the San Francisco landscape. ICA SF is located at The Cube at 345 Montgomery St in San Francisco.
Tiona Nekkia McClodden “NEVER LET ME GO XII” 2024, Black jute rope, leather, leather dye and Saphir shoe polish. Image courtesy of SFAC Main Gallery.
May 29 to August 23 – Service Tension curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur at SFAC Main Gallery: Service Tension is a group exhibition curated by Elena Gross and Leila Weefur featuring work by Salimatu Amabebe, Ricki Dwyer, Xandra Ibarra, Sasha Kelley, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Autumn Wallace. The exhibition will explore the messiness and complexity of the queer body. The title, Service Tension, is an interpolation of “surface tension,” a phrase that signifies a resistant relationship between two surfaces and the title of the exhibition suggests a playful interrogation of sex, penetration, and power. The works in the exhibition trouble notions of masculinity within queer dynamics as well as sexual desire. The SFAC Main Gallery is located at 401 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.