This spring brings a fantastic new season of arts to San Francisco with groundbreaking new exhibitions and performances in every genre.
From U.S. debuts like Hong Kong political cartoonist and illustrator Justin Wong at the Chinese Culture Center to creative retellings of Shakespearean classics Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream, the tickets to the Bay Area's best visual art, theater, music, and dance are red hot.
Exhibits at Museums + Galleries
Alejandro Cartagena, 'Fragmented Cities, Escobedo,' from the series 'Suburbia Mexicana,' 2005–10
(Courtesy of SFMOMA)
Carry On
The Chinese Culture Center, a nonprofit in San Francisco’s Chinatown offering arts and educational programs since 1965, has moved from the fourth floor of the Hilton Hotel on Kearny to a permanent space on Grant Avenue. Their inaugural exhibition presents the first U.S. show of Justin Wong, a Hong Kong-based political cartoonist and illustrator who had to move to London after being reported on in 2021 under the National Security Law.
Carry On has new digital illustrations, as well as handmade books and outdoor works exploring exile and everyday resistance with humor. Wong is a visiting professor at UC Berkeley this semester offering the course, Laughter as Resistance: Humor, Art, and the Everyday Politics of Hong Kong—something he can speak to with authority.
// Through June 29th; Chinese Culture Center, 667 Grant St. (Chinatown), chinesecultrecenter.com
Monet and Venice
More than a century ago, Claude Monet’s paintings of Venice debuted in Paris. Beginning March 21st, they’ll be exhibited for the first time since at the de Young Museum. The French Impressionist is known for how he painted water and light, and in this exhibition those preoccupations are on display with his renditions of canals, haze, and mist, along with the stone buildings of Venice. Monet once remarked he found the city too beautiful to be painted, but he managed to do it anyway, highlighting that beauty.
Monet was not the only artist to find Venice inspiring, and the show will feature other painters of the Italian city, including Canaletto, John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and J. M. W. Turner. The exhibition will also feature Monet’s beloved water lilies paintings made at the same time in his career.
// March 21st through July 26th; de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, (Golden Gate Park), famsf.org
Emory Douglas: In Our Lifetime
Emory Douglas, who studied graphic art at City College of San Francisco, pretty much singlehandedly invented the imagery for the Black Panther Party. The party’s Minister of Culture, he met with co-founders Bobby Seale and Huey Newton to work on The Black Panther Party Newspaper in the San Francisco studio apartment of Eldridge Cleaver (Minister of Information). What they created became the most widely read Black newspaper in the United States, with a weekly circulation of more than 300,000. Douglas moved to the Fillmore from Michigan when he was a child, and he returns to the neighborhood with this show of his work, which spans three floors at the African American Culture Center. After the paper stopped being published in the early ‘80s, Douglas continued making art, utilizing digital media and collaborating with movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Zapatistas in Mexico.
In Our Lifetime is framed around Douglas’ 12-point Political Artist Manifesto. Douglas’ message was always “all power to the people,” and his recognizable style—often featuring figures outlined in black set against brightly colored backgrounds—is perfectly suited to express it.
// Through October; African American Arts & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street, (Fillmore), aaacc.org
Open Your Eyes to Water
Years ago, after her mother discovered some old photo albums, Trina Michelle Robinson wanted to tell a story about a relative who passed for white for The Moth. When someone at the popular live storytelling event and podcast told her it wasn’t quite there yet, Robinson decided to make a video about it. That allowed her to tell the story in a way that resonated with others, and The Moth called her back to tell her story about her ancestors onstage, including at Lincoln Center. Robinson, who went to California College of the Arts, has been using film, photos, and installations ever since to tell stories about personal and community history.
In this dual solo exhibition, Robinson has an expanded version of a video she made about her oldest known relative, Elegy for Nancy, along with altars made by Black Bay Area women artists at Root Division. At 500 Capp Street, she has created installations that trace her family’s travels from Senegal to Kentucky to Chicago (where she grew up) to California, reclaiming the humanity of her ancestors and putting them at the center of her stories.
// Through May 16th at 500 Capp Street (Mission) and Root Division, 1131 Mission St. (Civic Center), 500cappstreet.org
Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules
Rather than searching for the “decisive moment,” as some photographers do, Cartagena is known for his photobooks and series. In this mid-career retrospective, you see the care he puts into works like Suburbia Mexicana, in which Cartagena spent more than a dozen years documenting suburban sprawl and its consequences in northern Mexico.
The series led to Cartagena’s perhaps best-known work, Carpoolers, of construction workers, contractors, and landscapers on their way to their jobs. He photographed them several mornings a week from a pedestrian overpass riding in the backs of pickup trucks, their means of transportation when public buses didn’t keep up with development. Cartagena’s photos are, of course, specific to Mexico, but the issues of development, housing, and migration into which he digs are relevant in the Bay Area and in most of the world.
// Through April 19th; SFMOMA, 151 3rd St. (Downtown), sfmoma.org
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive curator Victoria Sung says it’s hard to categorize Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “radically interdisciplinary practice.” The conceptual artist, who worked in video, installation, poetry, and performance to explore memory and the diaspora, was born in South Korea in 1951. She and her family came to the Bay Area in 1964, and between 1969 and 1978, Cha attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned four undergraduate and graduate degrees in comparative literature and art. Cha was preoccupied with language. Along with Korean and English, she spoke French and read French poetry. Cha worked as a writer and editor for Tanam Press, producing Dictée, a book that included poetry, found text, and images, and edited Apparatus, an anthology of film writers.
BAMPFA houses Cha’s archives, and the current exhibition features more than 100 objects and ephemera. The largest exhibition yet dedicated to Cha’s art, Multiple Offerings includes her early ceramic and fiber works, which have never before been on view in a museum. The show also includes art by Cha’s contemporaries, as well as artists today responding to her legacy.
// Through April 16; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (downtown Berkeley) bampfa.org
San Francisco Art Fair
The 14th edition of the San Francisco Art Fair will focus on Asian American and Pacific Islander voices, reflecting the immigrants who have shaped the Bay Area. Partners include the Asian Art Museum and the Cantor Arts Center’s Asian American Art Initiative. The Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and Edge on the Square, both in Chinatown, will be on site at the Bay Area’s oldest art fair.
The fair has more than 80 galleries, including beloved local returnees like Catharine Clark Gallery, Scott Richards Contemporary Art, and Jonathan Carver Moore. Some are at the fair for the first time, including Col Gallery, with a solo booth of geometric abstractions by Piikani (Blackfeet) artist Terran Last Gun; South Africa’s Melrose Gallery, which is opening a location in San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Projects in the spring; and the Tint Gallery, which will curate a booth for the San Francisco Art Dealers Association.
// April 16-19; Fort Mason Festival Pavilion (Marina), sanfranciscoartfair.com
Bay Area Theater Performances
'La Belle et la Bête'
(Courtesy of Opera Parallèle)La Belle et la Bête
Opera Parallèle is always up to something interesting. In La Belle et la Bête, it fuses film and opera in a “surrealist fairy tale” that includes live performances of a 1994 score and libretto by Philip Glass, along with Jean Cocteau’s silenced black-and-white 1946 film.
Opera Parallèle has responded to the dreamlike nature of the story, interweaving its own new film and stage direction into Cocteau’s film to ask big questions about true beauty, good and evil, and going beyond appearances.
// March 13-14, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley campus, 101 Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, calperformances.org
Macbeth
Whether they are staging new plays or classics, The Magic Theatre consistently puts on exciting, thought-provoking productions and is known for its support of writers (like Sam Shepard, Octavio Solis, and Mfoniso Udofia). For Macbeth, Migdalia Cruz worked with Play On Shakespeare, which offers modern verse “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays by established playwrights. Cruz, an alumna of the New Dramatists, has written more than 50 plays, as well as musicals and opera. The Magic Theatre bills this show as a Macbeth like never before, with Cruz setting Shakespeare’s tale of murderous ambition and greed in 1970s New York. Sarah Nina Hayon plays Lady Macbeth and Catherine Castellanos is Macbeth. Other ridiculously talented actors in the cast include Nora el Samahy, Juan Amador, Kina Kantor, Danny Scheie, and Brian Rivera—many of them members of the fabulous artist collective Campo Santo.
// March 18th through April 5th; Magic Theatre, 2 Marina Boulevard, Landmark Building D (Fort Mason), magictheatre.org
Hamnet
Maybe you’ve read Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel Hamnet. Maybe you’ve seen the Oscar-nominated movie, starring Jesse Buckley and Paul Mescal, and directed by Chloé Zhao. Now you can see the play in the U.S. premiere of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s stage adaptation.
The story, adapted by playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, tells of a natural healer meeting a Latin tutor. The two get married and have a son, who dies of the plague at 11 years old. The original production in 2023 broke box office records and had sold-out audiences in Stratford-upon-Avon before moving to London, where it opened with the biggest box office advance in the theater’s history.
// April 22nd through May 24th, A.C.T.’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary, (Union Square) act-sf.org
Dance on Stage This Spring
'Midsummer Night's Dream'
(Courtesy of Joffrey Ballet)
Lines Ballet + esperanza spalding
Any time I see the Lines Ballet perform, I am so grateful they are in this area. This spring, Grammy Award-winning bassist, vocalist, and composer esperanza spalding will perform live with choreographer Alonzo King’s incredible company for a program highlighting another visionary woman: Alice Coltrane.
Coltrane had a profound influence on many musicians including Radiohead, Paul Weller of the Jam, and Doja Cat, who spent time at her ashram as a child. King set his first ballet decades ago to music by the jazz pianist, harpist, and spiritual leader. Two years ago, he returned to her music when choreographing Ode to Alice Coltrane.
// April 11-19, the Blue Shield Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard Street, (Downtown), linesballet.org
Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Joffrey Ballet’s take on Shakespeare’s comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream calls it a “fully immersive theatrical experience” in which a Swedish choreographer and composer take the story down the road of the Scandinavian Midsommar. Onstage, the dancers will be joined by a Swedish indie singer-songwriter whose music is described as post-metal and art pop. Reviewers of the piece have thrown around words like “audacious,” “compelling,” “striking,” and “engaging.” It’s also been described as a “mind-bending trip;” it sure sounds like it.
// Apr 17-April 19, 101 Zellerbach Hall (Berkeley), calperformances.org
Classical Music + More
Soundbox: 'Urban Forest'
(Courtesy of SF Symphony)
The Ravi Shankar Ensemble
In the first year of an annual concert series in honor of tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussein, a six-piece ensemble led by the sitar player Shubhendra Rao will perform pieces curated by Shankar’s wife and daughter, focusing on Shankar’s devotion to creativity and discipline. Along with compositions by the musician—who was at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock with his decades-long collaborator Ustad Allah Rakha, Zakir Hussein’s father—the collective will present visual elements inspired by Shankar’s archives. Shankar is considered the first Indian musician to make a profound impact on the West. The ensemble’s debut tour starts in Albany in March and will stop in Chicago and New York City before ending at SFJazz.
// April 4th, Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness, (Hayes Valley), sfjazz.org
Orozco-Estrada Conducts Dvořák 7
Dvořák wrote to a friend about his Symphony No. 7, “wherever I go I think of nothing but this new work [that] must be capable of stirring the world—may God grant that it will!”
It did. In this program, it’s conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s music director. Many say that you can hear Brahms’ influence on this work. According to the story, when Dvořák, who was born in Bohemia, visited Brahms, he told him his work would be great if he could get the Czech folk melodies out of it. Also on the program is Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9, which stands out for the depth of expression and technical skill it demands. Canadian soloist Jan Lisiecki, who will perform the concerto, calls it a “singular masterpiece.”
// March 20-22; Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave. (Civic Center), sfsymphony.org
SoundBox: Urban Forest
Inside SoundBox: Urban Forest—an underground, multisensory experience curated by composer Gabriella Smith and performed by musicians from the San Francisco Symphony—cacti, sea shells, and even a bicycle become instruments that create vivid sonic landscapes. Inspired by forests, cliffs, and desert plants, this late night adventure invites you to hear nature in a whole new way. Arrive early for craft cocktails and small bites.
// April 11–12 at 8:30pm; Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave. (Civic Center), sfsymphony.org
Thank you to our partners.
