Thu April 25th 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
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?
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
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
SF Urban Film Fest
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?
A Digital Art & Civic Experience
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
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
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
Youth Exploration of Self
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
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
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
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
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
March 9—July 29, 2018
A group of design experiments by Bay Area design-research studio The Open Workshop.
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Exhibitions
Yishai Jusidman: Prussian Blue
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
Edgar Arceneaux
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
Space Brainz–Yerba Buena 3000: Damon Rich & Jae Shin
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Earth Machines
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
Won Ju Lim: Raycraft is Dead
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
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
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
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
Nate Boyce: Polyscroll
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
November 14, 2014–January 11, 2015
Lucy Raven uncovers the complexities at play in technology.
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Exhibitions
Landscape: the virtual, the actual, the possible?
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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Exhibitions
Alien She
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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Exhibitions
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon: It Only Happens All of the Time
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
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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