Contemporary Painting in Papua New Guinea: Mathias Kauage and His Family
2024-03-30 - 2026-03-15 | de Young – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park | 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA, 94118, United States
Mathias Kauage (ca. 1944–2003) is acclaimed for his boldly colorful paintings of a world radically changing around him in the late 20th century. This exhibition features four paintings from our collection by Mathias and his family, on view for the first time. During his lifetime, Mathias experienced dramatic societal shifts — not only during the decades under colonial Australian administration but also after Papua New Guinea achieved independence in 1975.
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Leilah Babirye: We Have a History
2024-06-22 - 2026-05-03 | de Young – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park | 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA, 94118, United States
Born in Kampala, Uganda, and based in New York, Leilah Babirye is known for her highly expressive, ambiguously gendered sculptures in ceramic, wood, and discarded objects. Reclaiming ceramic and wood-carving traditions from western and central Africa, she hand builds her ceramics, firing them with expressive glazes, while she whittles, scorches, and burnishes her wood sculptures. As a final touch, she adorns them with wire, bicycle chains, inner tubes, and other found metals and materials. The sculptures, which range in scale from towering totemic forms to busts, talismans, and masks, are portraits of her LGBTQ+ community. Babirye’s work speaks to the power of reclaiming personal and cultural identity through artistic practices, historical narratives, and cultural traditions.
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About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift
2024-08-10 - 2026-07-05 | de Young – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Golden Gate Park | 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA, 94118, United States
This exhibition is the second in a series highlighting contemporary Bay Area artists in our collection. The installation explores how artists relate to their environments through place: place as the physical land, place as heritage, place as the imaginary, and place as belonging.
Several artists examine climate change and its local impact. In Saif Azzuz’s Lo’op’ (It burns) (2021), he draws the color palette from maps of the 2021 droughts and fires in California. Other artists use found materials not only to address ecological issues but also to add layers of meaning, such as in Guillermo Galindo’s Listo (Ready to Go) (2015), made from a broken bicycle and chair he found along the US-Mexico border. And others play with figure and ground: Clare Rojas’s Walking in Rainbow Rain (2021) is a meditation on disappearing into one’s environment.
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Celebrating 100 Years at the Legion of Honor
2024-11-09 - 2025-11-02 | Legion of Honor, 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
This exhibition looks back to the museum’s 1924 opening through its 1990s expansion and into the present day, as well as forward toward a new vision for the future. The museum’s close ties to the communities of San Francisco are brought into focus through collection highlights, rediscovered materials from the museum’s archives, and an expansive timeline. Featuring some of the first additions to the collection, such as an ancient ceramic vase gifted by the queen of Greece and an Auguste Rodin sculpture donated by museum cofounder Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, the exhibition also highlights the museum’s early exhibitions, including one devoted to Diego Rivera.
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Ancestral Visions: An Installation by Chelsea Ryoko Wong
2025-02-07 - 2026-02-01 | OMCA | Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
Fashion, family histories, and personal identity intersect in a new installation at OMCA by Bay Area artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong. Wong’s energetic and colorful paintings, drawn from both real-life events and her imagination, depict busy, rhythmic scenes of people going about their daily lives. For this project, Wong’s paintings take inspiration from dresses owned by six 20th 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 inspired them.
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Students on Strike: A New Installation in OMCA’s Gallery of California History
2025-04-09 - 2026-05-31 | OMCA | Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
Students on Strike is a new installation opening in the OMCA Gallery of California History. The installation explores the enduring legacy of student activism at San Francisco State University by comparing the 1968-1969 student strike that established the nation’s first Black Studies Department and first College of Ethnic Studies to the recent campus protests against the war in Gaza. Through historical and contemporary posters and photographs, the intimate feature shows how students have consistently demanded justice and accountability from institutions, then and now.
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Golden Gate Bandshell
2025-04-18 - 2025-09-28 | Golden Gate Bandshell, 75 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, 94118
The Golden Gate Bandshell is the oldest structure in Golden Gate Park’s Music Concourse. The original bandstand was built in 1882, with the current structure being built in 1900. Also called the Spreckels Temple of Music, the current Bandshell was a gift to San Franciscans from sugar magnate Claus Spreckels.
The Golden Gate Park Band has presented free concerts in Golden Gate Park since 1882. It is one of the oldest professional Concert Bands in the United States. The season runs from late-April to early-October.
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Bubble Planet: An Immersive Experience
2025-05-08 - 2025-09-28 | Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, 10 10th Street, Oakland, 94607, United States
Bubble Planet is an immersive experience in which you’ll surround yourself with bubbles like never before! Step into a planet beyond your imagination with VR technology, themed rooms and fantastical landscapes. Jump from one immersive space to the next and explore them all with your five senses!
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Women of Afrofuturism
2025-05-17 - 2026-09-27 | Harvey Milk Terminal 1, San Francisco International Airport, SFO), Terminal 1,, San Francisco, 94128
Afrofuturism, an artistic and sociopolitical liberation movement, examines the past, questions the present, and reimagines the futures of Black people. The term was first coined in the 1993 essay “Black to the Future” by writer Mark Dery. Afrofuturism explores the Black experience through a combination of science fiction, magical realism, mythology, history, and technology in genres ranging from literature and music to fashion, film, and visual arts. Afrofuturism may incorporate a range of components—from outer space to the natural world and popular culture.
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Herd Happy Hour
2025-05-23 - 2025-11-28 | Amber Lounge, 1517 Franklin Street, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
The Howard University Alumni Club of the Bay Area is hosting its monthly happy hour at Amber Lounge on May 23rd. We will provide light bites and games. There’s also music and a dance floor. See you fourth Friday!
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Black Gold: Stories Untold
2025-06-06 - 2025-11-02 | Fort Point National Historic Site, Building 999, Marine Drive, San Francisco, 94129
Now on view at Fort Point, FOR-SITE’s highly anticipated exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold invites 17 contemporary artists and collectives to reflect on the resilience, struggles, and triumphs of African Americans who lived in California from the Gold Rush to the Reconstruction period following the Civil War (c. 1849–1877). Through newly commissioned and recent artworks, the exhibition highlights important but lesser-known figures and narratives from California’s history, exploring the presence of slavery and the struggle for legal rights within this “free” state, the successes of Black entrepreneurs, and the experiences of African American Army regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers. More broadly, Black Gold illuminates the role that Black communities played in the state’s cultural, social, and political environs of the time.
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Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
2025-06-08 - 2025-11-30 | BAMPFA, 2155 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind. Simultaneously, the quiltmaking skills that many migrants brought with them—ones frequently learned from mothers, grandmothers, and other kin—spurred the creation of a new wave of African American quiltmaking in the later part of the twentieth century, effectively extending its roots in the western United States. Taken together, the quilts in Routed West explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and space, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and ingenuity.
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Sample Installation Views…
Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina. Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina. Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina. Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina. Installation view: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, June 8–November 30, 2025. Photo by Daria Lugina. View more images in Event Photo Galleries and Videos

Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
2025-06-08 - 2025-11-30 | BAMPFA, 2155 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind.
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Live 2025: Live on the Avenue
2025-06-20 - 2025-09-27 | Downtown San Anselmo, 638 San Anselmo Ave, San Anselmo, 94960
Welcome to Marin County’s #1 Summer Concert Series and Community Celebration, LIVE ON THE AVENUE in Downtown San Anselmo. All shows (except July 19th’s Beatles in the Park fundraiser) are totally free. Live music on two stages every Friday and Saturday night from 6PM to 8:30PM. The Avenue is closed to vehicle traffic, creating a pedestrian-safe family-friendly strolling experience.
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MINTED SF: A Weekly Celebration of Bay Area Sound & Soul
2025-07-04 - 2025-09-19 | Mint Plaza, Mint Plaza, San Francisco, 94103
MINTED SF is San Francisco’s new Friday night Happy Hour experience – a free, all-ages celebration of music, food, and community lighting up Downtown San Francisco’s historic Mint Plaza all Summer long. From July 4 to September 19, 2025, the Bay Area’s top DJs and music culture makers are partnering with local restaurants to transform the plaza into a vibrant open-air dance floor and culinary hotspot.
Presented by Make It Mariko and powered by the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) and Mayor Daniel Lurie, MINTED SF is on a mission to re-energize downtown, support small businesses, and showcase the creative heartbeat of The City. Each event is a tribute to the sounds, flavors, and spirit that make San Francisco unique.
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Millbrae's Summer Concert Series
2025-07-04 12:00 - 2025-10-16 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Central Park, 477 Lincoln Circle, Millbrae, 94030
Beats, Brews, & Vines is the City of Millbrae’s Summer Concert Series that brings the community together for live musical entertainment!
We are excited to announce this year’s concerts! We will kick off this year’s concerts with a major Fourth of July Celebration in Central Park. The remainder of the concerts will then be in Downtown Millbrae on Broadway!
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Cookout Concert Series
2025-07-06 - 2025-10-28 | HopMonk Sebastopol, 230 Petaluma Ave, Sebastopol, 95472
Residing in San Francisco, California, KC Turner keeps himself busy by running KC Turner Presents LLC, through which he offers and promotes live music throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
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Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain
2025-07-18 - 2026-03-01 | OMCA | Oakland Museum of California, 1000 Oak Street, Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain navigates the braided histories of displacement, resistance, and resilience within Black American communities in Oakland and the East Bay. Through new commissions in art, architecture, and archival research, the exhibition traces how these communities have creatively resisted dispossession and reimagined spaces of home and belonging.
Drawing inspiration from the legacies of West Oakland and Russell City, Black Spaces: Reclaim & Remain pulls from both OMCA’s permanent collection and loans from local repositories to trace the rise of these communities and their subsequent displacement. In response to this history, the exhibition presents three unique perspectives from an artist, Adrian Burrell; an architect, June Grant with blinkLAB architecture; and an archive, the Archive of Urban Futures and Moms 4 Housing. These installations reflect the ongoing struggle and success in reclaiming and reshaping self-determined spaces in the face of systemic violence, erasure, and urban renewal.
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Virtual | AllMachines
2025-07-20 - 2025-12-30 | [ Virtual ], CA
AllMachines simplifies choosing heavy machinery with its comprehensive and reliable resource hub. Covering all models and brands of tractors, forklifts, harvesting, hay and forage equipment like combines, headers, balers, rakes, and tedders across the US, our platform provides extensive details on dealers, specifications, and features. With downloadable manuals, expert user reviews, and in-depth model insights, AllMachines gives you everything you need to make informed decisions and select the right equipment for your needs.
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Bay Area Then
2025-08-01 - 2026-01-25 | YBCA | Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street) , San Francisco, CA, 94103-3138, United States
What does it mean to live with possibility? To live in a moment when artists and citizens reject fear and find power in discovery? For those who came of age in the Bay Area with the apocalyptic uncertainty of nuclear proliferation and the AIDS crisis; the devastation of the Loma Prieta earthquake and the Oakland firestorm; the audacious acquittal of LAPD officers Koon, Wind, and Briseno and the disembodied destruction of the first Gulf War; the road was bleak. And yet the energy in the cultural sector at the time was electrified.
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MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy
2025-08-01 - 2026-01-04 | YBCA | Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street (at 3rd Street) , San Francisco, CA, 94103-3138, United States
MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy boldly celebrates the culture, contributions, and presence of the Filipino community in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood and Bay Area. Presented by SOMA Pilipinas in collaboration with YBCA, and inspired by the Filipino term for collective resistance, MAKIBAKA brings together contemporary artworks alongside community-held objects, memories, and movements.
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Intermediate Painting for Adults: Exploring Techniques and Media
2025-08-05 - 2025-12-02 | Livermore Valley Arts, 2400 First St, Livermore, CA, 94550, United States
Take your painting skills to the next level in this dynamic class designed for artists with some previous experience. Explore a variety of media, including watercolor, acrylic, oil, gouache, and mixed media, while building on fundamental techniques like composition, color theory, layering, and brushwork. Each session offers guided instruction, creative challenges, and time for personal exploration. Whether you’re refining your style or experimenting with new materials, this class provides the tools, support, and inspiration to grow your artistic voice.
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Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread
2025-08-06 - 2026-02-01 | BAMPFA, 2155 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
“Without any formal training in embroidery or weaving, I often became the subject of ridicule, with people jokingly asking whether I stitched my works with my toes instead of my fingers.” —Lee ShinJa
Lee ShinJa: Drawing with Thread is the first North American survey of the work of the historically under-recognized Korean artist Lee ShinJa (b. 1930, Uljin, South Korea; lives and works in Seoul).
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Spices & Stories
2025-08-09 - 2025-10-11 | New Delhi Restaurant & Bar, 160 Ellis St, San Francisco, 94102
This unique two-hour workshop is a collaboration between culinary storyteller Chef Ranjan Dey and interdisciplinary artist-educator Dr. Nandita Dinesh. Using spices and creative writing as the mediums for engagement this workshop invites audiences in the Bay Area to practically explore how culinary and literary ingredients from the Indian subcontinent can catalyze new forms of storytelling.
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New Work: Sheila Hicks
2025-08-09 - 2026-08-09 | SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
For nearly seven decades, Sheila Hicks has created groundbreaking works that redefine the expressive possibilities of fiber as a sculptural form. Based in Paris since 1964, she incorporates natural and synthetic materials at a range of scales from intimate weavings made on handheld frames to monumental installations that inhabit architecture.
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Endless Summer Market
2025-08-09 11:00 - 2025-10-11 16:00 | Fourth Street Makers Row, 1901 Fourth St, Berkeley, 94710, United States
Celebrate the season’s sunny finale at the Endless Summer Market! Join us for a vibrant day filled with live music, local makers, and a festive atmosphere that’s family- and pet-friendly. Hosted by Creative Communal at Makers Row, this open-air market is your chance to shop small, connect with the community, and soak up the last golden rays of summer. Don’t miss out on the fun!
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Art Wall / Stephanie Syjuco: Present Tense (Roll Call)
2025-08-13 - 2026-06-28 | BAMPFA, 2155 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Debuting her largest wall installation to date, artist Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila, Philippines; lives and works in Oakland) presents Present Tense (Roll Call). Referencing the classroom routine of announcing one’s presence, the exhibition explores radical pedagogy in the politics of education. Syjuco’s practice spans from handcrafted textiles to archival excavations, interrogating how photography and archives shape racialized narratives of being and belonging.
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MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai
2025-08-13 - 2025-11-23 | BAMPFA, 2155 Center St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
MATRIX 287 / Berenice Olmedo: To ti ên einai is the first US museum exhibition of the work of artist Berenice Olmedo (b. 1987, Oaxaca, Mexico; lives and works in Mexico City). Working across sculpture, performance, and kinetic installation, Olmedo is known for her anthropomorphic assemblages with fused prostheses and orthotics. Her intimate yet commanding freestanding figures and wall-based installations urge a reconsideration of standardized expectations of bodies.
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Financial Wellness Series - Identity Theft & Credit
2025-08-21 - 2025-10-23 | ULBA Office, 1221 Broadway, Lower Level #48, Oakland, 94612
Join the Urban League of Greater San Francisco Bay Area for our Financial Wellness Series, a five-part workshop designed to help you take control of your finances and build long-term security. Each session covers essential topics—from budgeting basics and managing credit to preparing for retirement. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to strengthen your financial future, this series offers tools, resources, and expert guidance to support your journey.
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Paul Klee + Ray Johnson: Typofacture
2025-08-23 - 2026-04-01 | SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Writing functions not only as language, but also as a visual and even tactile form. Famed artist and educator Josef Albers imparted this idea to his students at Black Mountain College, a former liberal arts school in North Carolina, where artist Ray Johnson studied from 1945 to 1948. In an exercise called “typofacture,” Albers asked students in his design course to create drawings mimicking printed or handwritten text. After observing textures on surfaces — like speckles on a wall or patterns in a raked garden path — they applied the concept to printed text, which bears the imprint of its production, whether by hand or machine.
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