The Bay Area art scene has had a year of ups and downs. California College of the Arts was bought and rebranded by NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun (Jensen) Huang in what feels like a hostile tech-money takeover. SF Camerawork, the region’s storied photography non-profit, abruptly closed, though later fortuitously reopened.
The fall season — with the third annual Nexus: SF / Bay Area Black Art Week at its nucleus — sees institutions leaning on the region’s strengths, from local legends like Dewey Crumpler to activist artists working across comics and book arts, including one at California College of the Arts itself. The fall also boasts a few blockbuster shows, including a mighty Dread Scott survey and a lavish Azzedine Alaïa retrospective, offering something for everybody. This slew of upcoming excitement is sure to set the tone for a comeback in 2027. San Francisco’s art scene is ready.
Ha Chong-Hyun: Retrospective
Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, California
September 25 – January 25, 2027
Ninety-one-year-old Korean artist Ha Chong-Hyun’s first museum exhibition in North America goes big, featuring canvases up to eight feet tall (~2.4 meters). The retrospective surveys over 60 years of the seminal abstract painter’s career, bringing many of his large-scale material experiments into conversation for the first time. Each painting offers a different exploration into the relationship of surface, color, and negative space, from “Urban Planning” (1968) to the newest works in the ongoing Conjunction series he began in the mid-1970s.
—Max Blue
