Carrie Mae Weems, “Painting the Town #4”, 2021, pigment print, edition of 5 + 2APs. Image courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery.
Ongoing to February 22 – Carrie Mae Weems at Fraenkel Gallery: Carrie Mae Weem’s latest exhibition features new work and highlights from several key series in her four-decade career, all exploring questions about power, history, and identity. Photographs from Weems’s ongoing Museum Series depicting the Legion of Honor will be on view for the first time, along with other selections from the project. Her large-scale photography series Painting the Town captures boarded-up storefronts in Portland, Oregon following protests against the murder of George Floyd. Other works on display feature historical moments in the struggle for racial justice, including imagery from 1960s Civil Rights protests. Fraenkel Gallery is located at 49 Geary St #450 in San Francisco.
Kija Lucas, “Untitled (Magnolia)”, 2021, archival pigment print. Image courtesy of Mills College Art Museum.
Ongoing to April 27 – Kija Lucas: Hidden Histories at Mills College Art Museum: In Hidden Histories, Kija Lucas uses the seemingly neutral lens of scientific photography to explore home, heritage, and memory. By emphasizing the beauty of botanical subjects highlighted through photographic scans, Lucas delves into embedded layers of history that invite us to reconsider the environments that shape us and the generations before our time. Her specimens oppose eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus’ system of taxonomy and are found at sites essential to her personal Bay Area history. Mills College Art Museum is located at 5000 MacArthur Blvd in Oakland.
Ming Smith, “Brown Girl Dreaming (Transcendence Series), Columbus, Ohio”, 1991, archival pigment print, edition of 7. Image courtesy of Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
Ongoing to March 1 – Infinite Hope at Jenkins Johnson Gallery: Infinite Hope features historical photographs by internationally renowned artists Kwame Brathwaite, Renée Cox, Gordon Parks, and Ming Smith. On view through Black History Month, this exhibition spans the late-twentieth-century discourses surrounding philosophical, social, and aesthetic developments for African Americans. These multigenerational artists address the distinct social circumstances of their lives and times, emphasizing the endurance of hope alongside the disquiet and friction that hope dispels. Jenkins Johnson Gallery is located at 1275 Minnesota St #200 at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco.
Rex Ray, “Centraria”, collage with mixed media over canvas. Bill Ward, “Buena Vista Dog Fight”, 2019, oil on canvas. Images courtesy of Gallery 16.
Ongoing to March 21 – Rex Ray: Eternal and Bill Ward: Paintings at Gallery 16: In two solo exhibitions, artworks by Rex Ray and Bill Ward incorporate distinct compositions and experiments with color and pattern. This February marks ten years since Bay Area graphic designer and collage artist Rex Ray passed away at the age of fifty-eight. In memory of his life, Rex Ray: Eternal highlights a selection of original works spanning Ray’s career. Additionally, Bill Ward’s first solo exhibition showcases richly colored paintings and fantasy observations of his daily life living in Oakland for nearly twenty-five years. Gallery 16 is located at 501 3rd St in San Francisco.
Jutta Haeckel, “Swarm”, 2024, acrylic on jute. Image courtesy of Hosfelt Gallery.
February 1 to March 15 – Jutta Haeckel: Skin in the Game at Hosfelt Gallery: German artist Jutta Haeckel paints on jute–the coarse, natural fiber that burlap is made of–and utilizes a series of techniques to undermine and expand traditional painting. Haeckel applies pigments to the “backside” of paintings, then pushes it through gaps created in the fabric onto the “front”, therefore subverting the two-dimensional space associated with paintings. In this latest exhibition, she experiments with the concept of the canvas as a permeable membrane, or skin. Haeckel ultimately balances between dynamic creation and ultimate destruction of canvas as she plays with the limits of painting. Hosfelt Gallery is located at 260 Utah St in San Francisco.
Chelsea Ryoko Wong, “Chasing Dreams”, 2024, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of OMCA.
February 7 to February 1, 2026 – Chelsea Ryoko Wong: Ancestral Visions at OMCA: Fashion, family histories, and personal identity intersect in Bay Area artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong’s newest installation at OMCA. For this project, Wong’s paintings take inspiration from dresses owned by seven twentieth-century Chinese American women, whose clothing and legacies live on in OMCA’s collection. Ancestral Visions features paintings along with a selection of the fashions that belonged to Rose Setzo, Sophia Chang Wong, Grace Dea, Lei Kim Lim, Chop Chin Chum, and Sun Fung Lee Wong, re-envisioned in the abstract narratives of Wong’s colorful paintings. Viewers are invited into the world of the dresses and the women who wore them, exploring clothing as an expression of identity for past, present, and future generations. OMCA is located at 1000 Oak St in Oakland.
Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola, “Yolanda”, 2022, 35 mm photographs and archival assemblage using flatbed scanner. Image courtesy of Berkeley Art Center.
February 8 to May 4 – Archives Yet to Come at Berkeley Art Center: Archives Yet to Come features seven artists working across various media and historical contexts through familial and imagined archives. These archives were born out of artistic strategy and action, investigating preservation’s history and creative uses. For Lynse Cooper, Charles Lee, and Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola, archival imagination artistically demonstrates issues of care, erasure, displaced memories, marginalized archives, Black American memory, and visual culture. Mary Graham and Qadir Parris’ works are grounded in histories of Black American education and ways of knowing, offering an approach to historical, imagined, and family narratives in the Jim Crow South and at Black universities. Lindsey Filowitz and Nneka Kai’s artwork are situated within expression, performance, and preservation working with materials such as Black hair. These artworks of collective memory reflect the histories of the Bay Area. Berkeley Art Center is located at 1275 Walnut St in Berkeley.