It was a real eye-opener last year when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled its long-term installation of Diego Rivera’s huge mural Pan American Unity. The 10-panel, 74-foot-wide fresco — with a staggering collection of subjects ranging from ancient Aztecs to chic 1940s San Franciscans to fascist dictators — made clear how ambitious an …
The de Young Museum in San Francisco has just opened a terrific new exhibition, Alice Neel: People Come First, the latest in a group of Bay Area shows focusing on the work of important but relatively unknown 20th-century American women artists. First there was a retrospective of the prolific feminist Judy Chicago last fall at …
Alice Neel: The Radical Honesty of Her Portraits Read More »
Pastel drawings have always been considered a secondary art form, not as versatile or durable as oil paintings or frescoes, not as “important,” something more suitable perhaps for the amusement of women of leisure. Now an elegant new exhibition at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco seeks to change those perceptions. Color Into …
How does an art museum pay tribute to a musician? In the case of Experience Leonard Cohen, a new exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, the answer is it’s trickier than you might think. Cohen (1934-2016) wasn’t your typical folk-rock star of the 1960s and beyond. Born to a prosperous Orthodox Jewish …
Two major exhibitions of feminist art have just opened in the San Francisco Bay Area: a sweeping look at the 50-year career of painter, sculptor, and activist Judy Chicago at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and a lively survey of 21st-century work by women artists at the Berkeley Art Museum. Judy Chicago: A …
The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has just opened a major expansion of its gallery space, after five years of planning and construction and a year’s delay because of the pandemic. It’s a welcome addition. The museum, housed in a grand beaux-arts building that used to be the city’s central library, features an outstanding …
Seeking Nirvana? Immersive Video Stars at Expanded S.F. Asian Art Museum Read More »
It’s an astonishing image, both creepy and endearing: A grinning skeleton, standing erect and holding two pitchers of wine, stares directly at the viewer as if to say, “It’s party time!” The mosaic portrait, made of thousands of tiny black and white stones in the first century A.D., is one of the stars of “Last …
Pompeii Show Recalls How Food and Drink Ruled in Roman Era Read More »
San Francisco museums are starting to reopen after the virus pandemic shut down everything for seven months, and one of the first new exhibitions is Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving at the de Young Museum. Originally scheduled for a March debut, the show is as much a portrait of the artist as a conventional …
Frida Kahlo: Portrait of the Artist as a Fashionista Read More »
Meet Ani, Dean, and Kendra, editorial assistants at a weekly magazine in New York. They’re ambitious yet frustrated, smart yet not very hard-working, and they’re at the center of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sharp-edged dramedy Gloria. The play, which premiered last week at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, opens with Dean (Jeremy Kahn) dragging himself into …
Visiting an art exhibition can be an uplifting experience, but the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco takes the idea to a new level with its latest show, Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment. The exhibition is structured as a journey from the chaos of contemporary life through several stages of growing awareness, illustrated …
An ambitious exhibition of African-American art from the 1960s and 1970s, now on view in San Francisco, shines a fresh light on the powerful work that grew out of the turmoil of the period. The social influences are familiar: the Vietnam War, the civil rights and black power movements, the assassinations (two Kennedys, Martin Luther …
James Tissot was one of the most successful French painters of the late 19th century, a contemporary of Manet and Degas, yet most people now have never heard of him. The Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco has just opened a major retrospective of Tissot’s work, and it’s an eye-opening show. “Tissot: Fashion & …
Jordan Casteel has been called a rising star in American art, and it’s clear why from a visit to her first solo museum show, which just opened at Stanford University after its debut in Denver. “Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze” features 29 large paintings made in the past five years, almost all of them portraits …
Photographers created a visual revolution in the 19th century by describing the world accurately, almost scientifically. They forced other artists such as painters to move in new directions, to impressionistic views of the world, to slicing it up in Cubism, to the entirely non-pictorial work of Abstract Impressionism. Yet photographers, perhaps insecure about their status …
It’s summer in San Francisco, time to head to the park, demonstrate your hipness, and show off your tattoos. The de Young Museum’s big new exhibition for the season, “Ed Hardy: Deeper Than Skin,” does just that. The sprawling show features more than 300 works, including early drawings from Hardy’s student days, cartoonish designs for …
Copyright © 2010-2023 by Next Echo Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish