Fall Museum Round-Up & This Week’s Editors’ Picks
Is summer already over? Not yet, but almost. Parking in SF is a little gentler this week with that thing in the desert. But for those not shivering next to speakers in the dust, there's plenty to see.
Here's the best of the fall at an institution near you.
Raven Chacon, The Naming of Names, 2026 (still) © Raven Chacon
Opening Soon
September 5, 2026–January 17, 2027
In 1969, OBJECTS: USA landed at the Smithsonian with more than 500 objects by 308 artists and helped make American studio craft impossible to dismiss as mere decoration. It traveled widely and shimmered with myth. Now, New York design gallery R & Company has revived it as both proposition and update. At MCD, more than seventy works put Peter Voulkos, Toshiko Takaezu, JB Blunk, Doyle Lane, June Schwarcz, and Kay Sekimachi from the original exhibition into conversation with Woody De Othello, Ashwini Bhat, Roberto Lugo, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Jolie Ngo.
Minnesota Street Project Foundation & KADIST
A year after it closed its Mission space at 20th and Folsom after fourteen years, insisting all the while that it was shuttering a venue and not itself. Six video installations fill MSP's Exhibition Warehouse and Screening Gallery at 1201 Minnesota — Sophia Al-Maria, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Beatrice Gibson, Martine Syms — each artist onscreen in a different guise, citing and dismantling film history as they go.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
September 25, 2026–January 31, 2027
One of our favorite works spotted recently in the wild was Dread Scott’s 2019 Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a sharp riposte to Civil War reenactments, restaging the 1811 German Coast uprising from the side of the people doing the revolting. Scott has spent decades worrying at the raw nerves of American patriotism, race, policing, and state power. The Body Politic brings that practice to YBCA with new commissions, among them a monumental field of ghostly body prints and a durational performance in which a uniformed guard protects an American flag.
Museum of the African Diaspora
Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week
MoAD has been closed since mid-August for a little nip-and-tuck, but on September 30 the doors swing open again with Nexus, five days of exhibitions and events across the Bay Area. At home, three shows debut at once: Dewey Crumpler’s Sonic Lineages, his first institutional solo in San Francisco; After the Island, on ceramics, ornament, and the Jamaican diaspora; and Dorian Reid’s Calling All Cats!, through MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program. Nexus then spills outward, linking the museum to projects at YBCA, OMCA, and Minnesota Street Project.
October 24, 2026–November 7, 2027
Pulitzer-winning Diné composer and artist Raven Chacon gets his first West Coast solo exhibition with The Naming of Names, a five-channel video installation built from 1950s and ’60s tourist footage of the Navajo Nation. Chacon recasts those home movies as visits to another planet, threading them through Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, field recordings, electronic music, and the gorgeous old colonial fantasy of discovering somewhere nobody was waiting to be discovered.
RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me
October 3, 2026–February 7, 2027
So how much do you like K-pop? SFMOMA has been slipping some curious pop whatevers into its program of late, but yes, that RM. The leader of BTS is an art collector, apparently, and SFMOMA is arraying his collection of Korean modernists including Yun Hyong-keun, Park Rehyun, Kim Yun Shin, and Chang Ucchin alongside works from its own collection. A little sus for a major museum to hand this much real estate to a 32-year-old celeb, perhaps. Judgment pending.
Sarah Sze, Forever is Composed of Nows (rendering)
Sarah Sze: Forever is Composed of Nows
Opening November 21, 2026 | Ongoing
Sarah Sze gets SFMOMA’s cavernous ground-floor atrium for what the museum calls her most ambitious commission yet. Three monumental paintings, two of them 27 feet tall, collide with projections, sound, light, and movement spilling up several floors, with Emily Dickinson lending the title. Sze has always been marvelous at making enormous systems look as though one stray breeze might undo them, elaborate little cosmologies held together by wire, light, paint, paper, and nerve. Bonus: it’s free.
Already Open, and Still Totally Worth Seeing
Maren Hassinger: Living Moving Growing
One of the strongest shows already open this fall is also the most extensive Maren Hassinger retrospective yet: more than fifty years of sculpture, performance, installation, and video by an artist who emerged from the extraordinary 1970s Los Angeles orbit of Studio Z, Senga Nengudi, and David Hammons. Wire rope behaves like grass, newspaper becomes collective material, bodies enter landscapes, and ordinary things begin gently refusing the categories assigned to them.
Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces
The first U.S. retrospective of Chilean artist and Latin American feminist icon Lotty Rosenfeld follows her through dictatorship, resistance, and the long afterlife of both. Rosenfeld's signature gesture was almost absurdly simple: lay a short strip across a painted road line and turn a minus into a plus. From that tiny act of disobedience she built a body of work in which public space is never neutral or fixed, but something whose rules, symbols, and meanings can always be fucked with. While you're there, don't miss BAMPFA's consistently excellent collection newly remixed around utopia in Some Particular Heaven: Ideas of Utopia in the BAMPFA Collection.
Justin Caguiat and Rafael Delacruz send a bowler-hatted wanderer through Oakland and Half Moon Bay in a new film loosely shadowed by Charlie Chaplin's The Tramp, the 1915 movie made at the Niles Essanay Studio in present-day Fremont. Around it, the Wattis becomes part movie set, part aftermath: production furniture, storyboards, costumes, paintings, prints, and stray evidence of collaboration. Funny and melancholic, it looks at how to keep wandering when both the city and the world angles you towards optimization.
Christine Howard Sandoval: Move the Plot
San José-raised artist Christine Howard Sandoval returns home with a show about what California did to its wetlands. Working with adobe, steel, drawings, and medicinal plant dyes, the Chalon Nation artist traces Bay Area and Central Valley marshes shaped by centuries of Indigenous stewardship, then radically remade through colonization and engineering. The materials themselves resist behaving like monuments: adobe cracks, sheds, and changes, leaving the land’s history literally unsettled.
Installation photo of Christine Howard Sandoval: Move the Plot on view April 10-October 18, 2026 at the San José Museum of Art. Photo by Glen Cheriton