San Francisco

Diego Rivera's Blossoming Almond Treesd

Diego Rivera Shines in Sprawling Bay Area Show

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 …

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Giving Pastels the Respect They Deserve

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 …

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Seeking Nirvana? Immersive Video Stars at Expanded S.F. Asian Art Museum

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 …

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Pompeii Show Recalls How Food and Drink Ruled in Roman Era

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 …

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Frida Kahlo: Portrait of the Artist as a Fashionista

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 …

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Angst Among the Worker Bees in Gloria

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 …

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Exploring Photography’s Bag of Tricks

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 …

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Tattoos Get Respect in San Francisco Shows

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 …

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