Exhibitions

MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy

Presented by SOMA Pilipinas in collaboration with YBCA

August 1, 2025–January 4, 2026

Celebrating the culture, contributions, and presence of the Filipino community in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood and Bay Area.

Exhibitions

Bay Area Then

August 1, 2025–January 25, 2026

Work by 21 artists who forged a new creative legacy for the Bay Area in the 1990s—including Barry McGee, Alicia McCarthy, Chris Johanson, and Margaret Kilgallen.

Exhibitions

The Only Door I Can Open

Co-presented with Empowerment Avenue

February 1–June 22, 2025

Curated from within prison, this exhibition explores truths about women and incarceration.

Exhibitions

Nicky Nodjoumi & Nahid Hagigat

October 6, 2024–March 23, 2025

The exhibitions tell the story of a family of artists shaped by revolution. 

Exhibitions

Art, Action, Change: YBCA Creative Corps Initiative

August 16–September 15, 2024

Discover the intersection of art, action, and community empowerment.

Exhibitions

Nick Dong: 11 to 88

June 6–August 25, 2024

A distinctive world of levitating symbols, illuminated rooms, and cyclical transformations.

Exhibitions

Bay Area Now 9

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.

Exhibitions

طراوت | TARAVAT

May 13–July 23, 2023

Talepasand explores how women navigate the geographic and physiological boundaries between East and West.

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.

Exhibitions

Brett Cook & Liz Lerman: Reflection & Action

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.

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.

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.

Exhibitions

The Healing Project

Co-presented with Samora Pinderhughes

March 24–September 4, 2022

A digital archive, music album, and exhibition from composer and artist Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes.

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.

Exhibitions

Echo Location: The Cultural Geopolitics in South of Market

Co-presented with 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.

Exhibitions

AFTER LIFE (we survive)

November 9, 2020–February 7, 2021

A new multimedia public art experience that brings artists together to explore speculative and real modes of survival.

Art & Civic Experience

Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America?

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.

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.

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.

Exhibitions

Identity & Pride

June 18—July 14, 2019

A show exploring broad themes of identity, including gender, ethnicity, culture, community, and love.

Exhibitions

Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here

Co-presented with SFMOMA

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.

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.

Public Art

Andrea Bowers: Climate Change is Real

September 7–18, 2018

A public art project commissioned for the Global Climate Action Summit.

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..

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.

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.

Exhibitions

Edgar Arceneaux

December 1, 2017—March 25, 2018

Edgar Arceneaux explores historical patterns around race and representation through drawings, installations, and theater.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Exhibitions

Metahaven: The Sprawl

December 17, 2015–April 3, 2016

The project explores the mutation of propaganda in the age of social media.

Exhibitions

Kevin Cooley: Golden Prospects

December 17, 2015–April 3, 2016

Cooley blurs the lines between the natural and the environmentally harmful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Exhibitions

A Special Curatorial Project with Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Way Things Go

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.

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

Exhibitions

Lucy Raven: Hollywood Chop Riding

November 14, 2014–January 11, 2015

Lucy Raven uncovers the complexities at play in technology.

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.

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.

Public Art

Future Cities Lab: Lightswarm

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.

Exhibitions

Bay Area Now 7

June 27–October 26, 2014

Bay Area Now 7 brings to life current perspectives for both this art center and the regional art scene.

Public Art

Future Cities Lab: Murmur Wall

May 21, 2014–May 31, 2017

An extraordinary combination of sculpture, light installation and data collector.

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.

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.

Exhibitions

Joachim Koester: HOWE

November 15, 2013–February 23, 2014

Koester shows his 16mm film about the American spiritualist and activist John Murray Spear.

Exhibitions

Dissident Futures

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.

Exhibitions

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 30th Anniversary Exhibition

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.

Exhibitions

Brenna Murphy: Liquid Vehicle Transmitter

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.

Public Art

Kota Ezawa: Boardwalk

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.

Exhibitions

Migrating Identities

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.

Exhibitions

Erin Shirreff: Lake

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.

Exhibitions

Shih Chieh Huang: Synthetic Seduction

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.

Exhibitions

Without Reality There Is No Utopia

February 15–June 9, 2013

Work by more than two-dozen international artists, and features works of photography, video, drawing, painting, collage, and more.

Exhibitions

smoke signals: viviendo pa’ la ciudad

October 26, 2012–February 17, 2013

William Cordova attempts to reconcile themes of displacement and transition through his use of urban ephemera to shape what he describes as our contemporary situation.

Exhibitions

David Shrigley: Brain Activity

June 22–September 23, 2012

Showcases the diversity of the artist’s work offering insightful and often surreal commentary on the absurdities of life, death and everything in between.

Exhibitions

Nathalie Talec: The One Who Sees Blindly

April 21–July 8, 2012

Talec brings together elements representative of her ongoing artistic concerns.

Exhibitions

Mark Bradford

Co-presented with SFMOMA

February 17–May 27, 2012

The artist’s first museum survey, introduces Bay Area viewers to a remarkable contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Exhibitions

John Mark Ikeda: What Suits Us

January 26–June 24, 2012

Ikeda deconstructs the iconic business suit in an attempt to reconstitute it as a symbol of power.

Exhibitions

Gina Osterloh: Anonymous Front

January 21–April 8, 2012

The artist addresses perception, the body as prop, identity, and sight and blindness through photographic works, sculptures and video.

Exhibitions

The Matter Within: New Contemporary Art of India

October 15, 2011–January 29, 2012

A major exhibition of contemporary art by artists living inside the country as well as in the diaspora inspired by material culture, literature, and spirituality as well as social and political aspects of India.

Exhibitions

Allan deSouza: Close Quarters and Far Pavilions

October 1, 2011–January 8, 2012

The exhibition connects and reveals an invented and phantasmagoric unfolding of time, space, and longing.

Exhibitions

castaneda/reiman: Portrait of the Ground

September 29, 2011–January 22, 2012

castaneda/reiman, create a minimalist installation using the landscape as their starting point.

Exhibitions

Bay Area Now 6

July 9–September 25, 2011

Artists in Bay Area Now 6 investigate such subjects as the relationship between humans and nature, contemporary culture, and the politics of marijuana in the Bay Area.

Exhibitions

Euan Macdonald: 9000 Pieces

April 9–June 12, 2011

Euan Macdonald uses video, drawing, and installation to develop evocative content out of ordinary subjects.

Exhibitions

Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well

February 26–June 12, 2011

A highly skilled artist, Song Dong’s works are especially powerful in articulating the effects of radical change and social transformation on members of his own family.

Exhibitions

Yoshua Okón: 2007-2010

October 30, 2010–February 6, 2011

A collection of five of the artist’s emotionally charged, multichannel video installations.

Exhibitions

Katya Bonnenfant

October 14, 2010–January 9, 2011

Katya Bonnenfant, who works under the artistic moniker the old boys’ club, approaches various subjects—including ideas around desire and judgement—with humor, whimsy, and a lightness of mood, even if the subjects themselves reject this levity.

Exhibitions

Nothing related, but something could be associated

September 25–November 28, 2010

Using banal objects in a playful way, Tanaka disrupts conventional relations between objects and challenges our preconceived notions about them to create a new and different aesthetic experience for the viewer.

Exhibitions

TechnoCRAFT

July 10–October 3, 2010

This exhibition explores how the boundary between the role of the designer and the consumer is disappearing.

Exhibitions

Death’s Boutique

March 20–April 25, 2010

Los Angeles-based artists Kara Tanaka and Marco Rios investigate death by delving into profound subject matter with both humor and sincerity.

Exhibitions

Renee Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams

February 20–June 20, 2010

Deeply moving works about the real and imagined histories of individual lives in our mobile contemporary world.

Exhibitions

Icons of Attention

January 30–March 7, 2010

Icons of Attention experiments with a new type of radio created by the local art community.

Exhibitions

When Lives Become Form: Contemporary Brazillian Art, 1960s to the Present

November 5, 2009–January 31, 2010

Celebrating Brazil’s creative vitality through the works of artists, fashion designers and architects.

Exhibitions

Wallworks

July 18–October 25, 2009

Local, regional and international artists use the literal aspects of YBCAs architectural space as a starting point to create new large-scale works directly on the walls of both its galleries and its public spaces.

Exhibitions

Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth

March 28–July 5, 2009

Featuring forty Soundsuits—multi-layered mixed-media, wearable sculptures named for the sounds made when the sculptures are worn.

Exhibitions

Irreverent: Contemporary Nordic Craft Art

January 22–April 12, 2009

Showcasing the surprising work of a new wave of craft artists from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden who challenge the aesthetics and principles of Scandinavian modernism.

Exhibitions

The Way We Rhyme: Women, Art & Politics

March 29–June 29, 2008

This exhibition showcases the politically charged work of a new generation of women who use creativity as a form of empowerment and a means for making social change.