On Grove Street, across from the gilded, Beaux-Arts exterior of City Hall, the San Francisco Arts Commission has a space that it is no longer allowed to use as a gallery – quite. 155 Grove has been deemed seismically unsafe, which means the general public is not allowed inside, but the city does allow SFAC to put the space’s large front window to use: A rotation of artists fill the cube with site-specific installations that the public can view from outside. It is a fishbowl rife with apparent limitations that, as current resident artist Val Britton has found, give rise to unexpected possibilities.

While at the core of a thriving creative community in the 1950s, Beat-era artist Jay DeFeo lived in relative obscurity. For eight years, she holed up in her Pacific Heights studio, adding layer after layer of oil paint, wood, and mica to a single canvas.

Halloween art: Usually questionable, we’ll admit. Still, we can’t help getting in the spirit of the season, and there are a few SF galleries right there with us. Look forward to not one but two exhibitions paying homage to cult film directors, a virtual masquerade ball, and a few other must-sees that, while probably not devised with the holiday in mind, we think are thematically dark enough to fit the bill.

Two seemingly dissimilar museum exhibitions opened this week. Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy at the Asian Art Museum marks the first major U.S. exhibition since 1999 of China’s most revered art form. Rudolph Nureyev: A Life in Dance at the De Young pays homage to a legendary ballet dancer and choreographer. Both, interestingly enough, put dance front and center.

Calligraphy does not open up to the Western viewer by itself. At least half of its impact, as poetry, is bound to be lost on those who cannot read Chinese. The other half, as a formally beautiful and astoundingly meticulous form of abstract painting, has the potential for more universal appreciation. A good curator, though, is required to pave the paths of entry.