Sat March 22nd Open 11 AM–5 PM
Enjoy this digital journey through our history with the launch of our first online archive. Please reach out if you have intel to share that can help us build this archive!
Exhibitions
Art, Action, Change: YBCA Creative Corps Initiative
Presented by YBCA
August 16–September 15, 2024
Discover the intersection of art, action, and community empowerment.
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Exhibitions
Nick Dong: 11 to 88
Presented by YBCA
June 6–August 25, 2024
A distinctive world of levitating symbols, illuminated rooms, and cyclical transformations.
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Exhibitions
Bay Area Now 9
Presented by YBCA
October 6, 2023–May 5, 2024
The ninth iteration of YBCA’s signature triennial exhibition highlighting 30 artists working throughout the Bay Area’s nine counties.
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Exhibitions
طراوت | TARAVAT
Presented by YBCA
May 13–July 23, 2023
A record of one Iranian-American woman’s attempts to grapple with the difficult legacy of women’s freedoms and Muslim identity—to transform it visually, to make something both beautiful and uncomfortable.
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Exhibitions
Future Resonance
Presented by California College of the Arts' Studio Forward
April 1–30, 2023
Designers imagine, prototype, and build possibilities for the present moment and for what’s to come.
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Exhibitions
Alex Strada and Tali Keren: Proposal for a 28th Amendment? Is it Possible to Amend an Unequal System?
Presented by YBCA
October 20, 2022–March 19, 2023
This incomplete participatory exhibition asks visitors to critically engage with the U.S. Constitution.
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Exhibitions
Brett Cook & Liz Lerman: Reflection & Action
Presented by YBCA
October 20, 2022–June 11, 2023
This exhibition asks the public to consider the role of an artist within an institution—and in the public sphere—as urgent and responsive.
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Exhibitions
dreamseeds
Presented by YBCA
May 14–September 4, 2022
You are invited to play, move, question, contribute and dream your way through the space. These artists have been waiting for you.
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Exhibitions
The Healing Project
Presented by Samora Pinderhughes & YBCA
March 24–September 4, 2022
A digital archive, music album, and exhibition from composer and artist Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes.
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Exhibitions
Pedagogy of Hope: Uncage, Reunify, Heal
Presented by Galería de la Raza
March 10–July 3, 2022
A textile and photographic based exhibition that surveys the Caravan for the Children Campaign.
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Exhibitions
Echo Location: The Cultural Geopolitics in South of Market
Presented by SF Urban Film Fest & YBCA
August 5-October 23, 2021
A new exhibition exploring the complicated history and celebrating the future of the South of Market.
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Exhibitions
AFTER LIFE (we survive)
Presented by YBCA
November 9, 2020–February 7, 2021
A new multimedia public art experience that brings artists together to explore speculative and real modes of survival.
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Art & Civic Experience
Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?
Presented by YBCA
April 1–October 1, 2020
A digital art and civic experience that examines the issues around the 2020 Census and its direct impact on each individual living in America.
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Exhibitions
The Body Electric
Presented by YBCA
September 6, 2019–February 23, 2020
Works by an intergenerational and international group of artists who have seized upon the screen as a place to rethink the body and identity.
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Exhibitions
Art of Peace
Presented by YBCA
July 23—August 25, 2019
Art and artists raising awareness about the continued escalation of death due to gun violence in our country.
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Exhibitions
Identity & Pride
Presented by YBCA
June 18—July 14, 2019
A show exploring broad themes of identity, including gender, ethnicity, culture, community, and love.
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Exhibitions
Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here
Presented by YBCA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
April 20–August 4, 2019
The first full retrospective of the Los Angeles–based artist, co-organized by YBCA and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Exhibitions
Bay Area Now 8
Presented by YBCA
September 8, 2018–March 24, 2019
An exhibition that focuses on what is being created in studios across the region is not just desirable, but vital.
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Public Art
Andrea Bowers: Climate Change is Real
Presented by YBCA
September 7–18, 2018
A public art project commissioned for the Global Climate Action Summit.
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Exhibitions
Futurefarmers: Out Of Place, In Place
Presented by YBCA
April 20—August 12, 2018
A collective, playful, inquiry-based approach to art making that spans multiple disciplines and ways of inhabiting the world..
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Exhibitions
The Open Workshop: New Investigations in Collective Form
Presented by YBCA
March 9—July 29, 2018
A group of design experiments by Bay Area design-research studio The Open Workshop.
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Exhibitions
Edgar Arceneaux
Presented by YBCA
December 1, 2017—March 25, 2018
Edgar Arceneaux explores historical patterns around race and representation through drawings, installations, and theater.
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Exhibitions
Yishai Jusidman: Prussian Blue
Presented by YBCA
December 1, 2017–March 25, 2018
A series of paintings rendered almost exclusively in one of the earliest artificially developed pigments used by European painters—Prussian Blue.
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Exhibitions
Space Brainz–Yerba Buena 3000: Damon Rich & Jae Shin
Presented by YBCA
June 30, 2017–January 28, 2018
Where the art center becomes a laboratory for dissecting how power works through built space.
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Exhibitions
Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Hablándole al Poder
Presented by YBCA
June 16–October 28, 2017
A survey exhibition that presents all of Bruguera’s long-term, socially engaged art projects to date.
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Exhibitions
Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman – Visualizing Citizenship: Seeking a New Public Imagination
Presented by YBCA
March 10–June 18, 2017
Presenting case studies for more expansive and inclusive ways of thinking of the relationships between the United States and its neighbors
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Exhibitions
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Civic Radar
Presented by YBCA
February 10–May 21, 2017
An acclaimed retrospective of Bay Area artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s revolutionary career from the 1960s to the present day.
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Exhibitions
Erick Meyenberg: The wheel bears no resemblance to a leg
Presented by YBCA
October 14, 2016–February19, 2017
An intricate case study of participation and coproduction between an artist and a specific community.
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Exhibitions
Tom Sachs — Space Program: Europa
Presented by YBCA
September 18, 2016—January 15, 2017
Tom Sachs and his team of astronauts set their sights on the next frontier of space exploration.
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Exhibitions
The Ocean After Nature
Presented by YBCA
June 17–August 28, 2016
An exhibition that considers the ocean as a site reflecting the ecological, cultural, political, and economic realities of a globalized world.
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Exhibitions
Slow Dialogues: Time, Space, and Scale
Presented by YBCA
April 22–July 10, 2016
A site-specific dialogue with social, cultural, and environmental conditions of the Bay Area.
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Exhibitions
Samara Golden: A Trap in Soft Division
Presented by YBCA
March 11–May 29, 2016
Golden attempts to stage the sixth dimension–a place where the future, present, and past exist simultaneously.
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Exhibitions
Take This Hammer: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area
Presented by YBCA
March 11–August 14, 2016
Who is an activist? What role does art play in social change?
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Exhibitions
Metahaven: The Sprawl
Presented by YBCA
December 17, 2015–April 3, 2016
The project explores the mutation of propaganda in the age of social media.
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Exhibitions
Kevin Cooley: Golden Prospects
Presented by YBCA
December 17, 2015–April 3, 2016
Cooley blurs the lines between the natural and the environmentally harmful.
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Exhibitions
Work in Progress: Investigations South of Market
Presented by YBCA
November 7, 2015–February 16, 2016
New works on site that delve into the layered history of the South of Market neighborhood.
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Exhibitions
Office Space
Presented by YBCA
November 7, 2015–February 14, 2016
The exhibition cleverly subverts contemporary office culture to explore labor practices in the 21st century post-industrial economy.
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Exhibitions
Won Ju Lim: Raycraft is Dead
Presented by YBCA
August 14–December 6, 2015
Lim presents a new iteration of an ongoing body of work that considers our relationships to the spaces we occupy and own.
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Exhibitions
Earth Machines
Presented by YBCA
August 14–December 6, 2015
This exhibition considers the relentless stream of new technological products in light of their underlying material precariousness and profound ecological impact.
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Exhibitions
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
Presented by YBCA
June 13–October 11, 2015
The first comprehensive survey of performance art by visual artists of African descent from the United States and the Caribbean.
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Exhibitions
Shana Moulton: Picture Puzzle Pattern Door
Presented by YBCA
April 16–August 2, 2015
A multimedia installation featuring a humorous, playful, and sometimes painful world where kitsch, mysticism, pop culture, and spirituality collide.
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Exhibitions
A Special Curatorial Project with Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Way Things Go
Presented by YBCA
February 13–June 21, 2015
This exhibition uncovers narratives, reveals personal stories, and shares vignettes that lead to a larger understanding of migration in the production of material culture.
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Exhibitions
Nate Boyce: Polyscroll
Presented by YBCA
January 23–April 5, 2015
A body of work that emphasizes the hand drawn and painterly representation, in order to forefront how our tools create the semblance of space and depth in 2D and 3D within the longer history of painting and sculpture
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Exhibitions
Lucy Raven: Hollywood Chop Riding
Presented by YBCA
November 14, 2014–January 11, 2015
Lucy Raven uncovers the complexities at play in technology.
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Exhibitions
Alien She
Presented by YBCA
October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015
A view into the passion and diversity of Riot Grrrl, a pioneering punk feminist movement that emerged in the early 1990s.
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Public Art
Future Cities Lab: Lightswarm
Presented by YBCA
October 24, 2014–October 31, 2016
A stunning facade installation of 430 individual modules, employing sound sensors and LED lights to produce a spectacular light show in a state of perpetual flux.
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Exhibitions
Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?
Presented by YBCA
October 24, 2014–January 25, 2015
The exhibition considers visual, perceptual, and conceptual systems that have become increasingly unstable, both physically and metaphorically.
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Public Art
Future Cities Lab: Murmur Wall
Presented by YBCA
May 21, 2014–May 31, 2017
An extraordinary combination of sculpture, light installation and data collector.
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Exhibitions
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: It Only Happens All of the Time
Presented by YBCA
March 7–June 15, 2014
Gordon explores sound’s ability to establish different levels of intimacy.
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Exhibitions
Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa
Presented by YBCA
February 14–June 8, 2014
An exhibition that brings together twenty-five artists and collectives who disrupt expected images of a country known largely through its apartheid history.
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Exhibitions
Dissident Futures
Presented by YBCA
October 18, 2013–February 2, 2014
An investigation into possible alternative futures, particularly those that question or overturn conventional notions of innovation in biological, social, environmental, and technological structures.
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Exhibitions
Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 30th Anniversary Exhibition
Presented by YBCA
September 20–November 3, 2013
Significant works by visual artists and designers that have played integral roles in works by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company since the early 1980s.
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Exhibitions
Brenna Murphy: Liquid Vehicle Transmitter
Presented by YBCA
July 19–September 8, 2013
Working in sculpture, game design, installation, performance, sound and the internet, Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy is interested in digital technology’s capacity to connect and expand human consciousness.
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Public Art
Kota Ezawa: Boardwalk
Presented by YBCA
June 28, 2013–November 30, 2015
Kota Ezawa rebuilds in YBCA’s Sculpture Court a side view of the Seaside Heights boardwalk on the New Jersey shore, which was devastated during Hurricane Sandy.
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Exhibitions
Migrating Identities
Presented by YBCA
June 28–September 29, 2013
Artists reveal the ways in which their identities have been transformed by the confluence of mobility, cultural retention, and personal history.
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Exhibitions
Erin Shirreff: Lake
Presented by YBCA
March 1–June 30, 2013
Erin Shirreff, informed by her training in sculpture, explores the physical and technical aspects of image production in an effort to extend and examine the act of looking.
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Exhibitions
Shih Chieh Huang: Synthetic Seduction
Presented by YBCA
March 1–July 7, 2013
Shih Chieh Huang creates sculptural ecosystems using computer parts and common objects, such as plastic bags and bottles, which he animates in installations that mix a machine aesthetic with an organic impulse.
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Exhibitions
smoke signals: viviendo pa’ la ciudad
Presented by YBCA
October 26, 2012–February 17, 2013
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Exhibitions
Nathalie Talec: The One Who Sees Blindly
Presented by YBCA
April 21–July 8, 2012
Talec brings together elements representative of her ongoing artistic concerns.
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