Past Exhibitions

Sowing Worlds is a group exhibition featuring works by five artists based in the Bay Area alongside five artists based in South Korea. The exhibition brings together artists who are thinking expansively and critically about living with climate change. The works in the exhibition explore sustainable agriculture, the intertwining legacies of colonialism and its effects on the land, and ancestral connection to a place in flux. 

Carlos Villa: Roots and Reinvention, curated by Mark Dean Johnson and Trisha Lagaso Goldberg, will highlight Carlos Villa’s art from the 1980s and 1990s, a period of reinvention for Villa, presenting Villa’s practice at a turning point as he began to shift away from the large abstract paintings and feather-based works that he became known for, to pieces that delve into the history of Filipinos in the U.S., what it means to be a part of a diaspora, and his own family archives.  

This multi-venue exhibition will celebrate Villa’s legacy, featuring renowned works that explore his Filipino ancestry, profound connection with non-Western cultures and rituals, and impact on the art world today, giving viewers the opportunity to experience the work of an artist with deep ties to the City and who was an influential thinker, community organizer and dedicated educator. 

The San Francisco Arts Commission Main Gallery in the Veterans Building is set to open its doors for the first time since March 2020. 

How do shifts in the land use of cities and neighborhoods impact populations, and in turn, how do the people that live or work in a place influence or control change? Taking Place: Untold Stories of the City unearths histories, legacies and points of erasure in the Civic Center, Bayview-Hunters Point and the Presidio. The exhibition features new work by Mansur Nurullah, the 2020-21 SFAC Artist in Residence at SF Planning, artist and storyteller Trina Michelle Robinson, and Hannah Waiters, an artist, researcher and current Collections Cataloging Fellow at the de Young. 

San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries and CatchLight, in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library, present a new two-part exhibition at San Francisco City Hall featuring photography and illustration documenting disaster service workers, COVID-19 response and prevention efforts, and life in some of San Francisco's neighborhoods over the past two years. Care in the Time of COVID-19 also tells stories of care and mutual aid—neighbor to neighbor—and those that relied and continue to rely on organized and spontaneous acts of compassion to survive. This exhibition celebrates those that served to heal our residents and communities while also calls for everyone to participate in our collective recovery.