Midday Wednesday, a team of synchronized skywriters will encircle the Bay Area’s airspace with what, to most viewers, will appear a random string of rapidly fading digits. A select few, however, will recognize it as pi: 3.14159, and so forth a thousand places.

Naoya Hatakeyama produces austere, almost impossibly beautiful photographs of landscapes that have been touched by human industry: Remote snow capped mountains studded with observation decks, massive limestone quarries, colossal heaps of slag (a mineral mining byproduct). In these stark works, well over one hundred of which are now on view at SFMOMA, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in the U.S., Hatakeyama manages to coolly capture those moments of humbling, fall-to-your-knees awe that mother nature is known to produce. Gasps could be heard throughout the galleries.

This week, a number of promising exhibitions meander, to varying degrees, away from the conceptual gravitas that often accompanies contemporary art. Barcelona-based Max Rippon and Oakland couple (and resident Facebook muralists) Jet Martinez and Kelly Ording reflect on the textures of urban environments and organic life. Re-appropriationist sculptor Charles Linder promises “electric pork,” whatever that may entail. And there’s more.

Anyone who’s taken a contemporary art history course in the past thirty years has probably seen a sampling of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills – they have become as much a fixture in the artistic canon as Manet’s Olympia. For the first time ever, all sixty-nine of them are in California. They compose roughly half of a critically acclaimed Sherman retrospective that has just arrived from New York at SFMOMA. People are seriously excited. Half of them have no idea what they are in for.