Modern-day Mexico is troubled, to speak mildly. Riddled with inequality and corruption, awash in drug violence and poverty, our southern neighbor’s urban centers at times seem to border on dystopian. One has to ask, just how did such a state of affairs come to be? SFMOMA’s Photography in Mexico addresses an intimately related question. In showing where generations of Mexican photographers aimed their lenses, the exhibition traces not so much how Mexico got here, but what it has been like along the way.

If there is an ideal Friday this month to hop across the Bay and explore the thriving Downtown Oakland neighborhoods your friends have been prattling on about, it is this one – always the first one. From 6 – 9pm, a slew of galleries will open their doors for Oakland Art Murmur’s monthly art walk. Full of dogged self-starters and no home for the risk-averse, the Oakland gallery scene routinely welcomes work that the more cosmopolitan corners of the SF circuit are prone to overlook. Here are four picks from the East Bay’s ever-growing frontier.

SFMOMA’s collection of Francesca Woodman prints is on its way out (if you missed them, go this weekend), but the museum’s jet stream of excellent photography will not be abating any time soon. Two new exhibitions, one a retrospective of L.A. artist Mark Bradford’s colossal painting/collages, the other a modest but rich slice of conceptual art, flank a major retrospective of Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s photographic and video portraiture. Monumental, yet intensely compassionate, Dijkstra’s work alone requires a visit – maybe a few.

This week, three SF galleries take up three of art’s most timeless, fundamental pursuits: the rendering of landscape, the investigation of color, and the tropicalismo of 1960s Rio. —Okay, so the last one has yet to be officially inducted into the art historical canon.