Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Presents “Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night”

Diedrick Brackens, soft, dark, demigod, 2021. © Diedrick Brackens. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

First major Bay Area exhibition by acclaimed artist opens March 13, 2026, featuring new and recent woven tapestries exploring tenderness, migration, and the natural world

February 12, 2026 – San Francisco, CA: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) presents Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area, on view from March 13 through August 23, 2026. Organized by guest curator Eungie Joo, the exhibition features fifteen tapestries created since 2020, including three new works that consider tenderness, migration, and connections with the natural world.

Executed on the loom in hand-dyed, cotton fiber and acrylic yarn, Brackens’s works convey a masterful and meditative process of physical discovery and storytelling. Throughout the exhibition, single and paired figures exist in resplendent depictions of water, flora, and fauna, launching the viewer’s imagination. For Brackens, the outdoors is an important space where queer folks can be themselves and participate in spaces of desire and sensuality freely. 

“I came to San Francisco nearly 15 years ago to refine my nascent art practice,” said Diedrick Brackens. “I am excited to share this work at YBCA, and re-introduce my work to a community and city that I cherish.”

Central to the exhibition is a woven diptych comprised of the works commitments (2025) and help is available (2025). In commitments, angel’s trumpet envelops two figures sitting cross-legged, their arms lifted towards the sky in prayer or surrender. Soft gradient hues of pinks, purples, and blues, realized through an intentional and intuitive maneuvering of multicolored fibers, cast a magical spell amid intoxicating and deadly blossoms. In help is available, a single figure is captured in a bush of jimsonweed, or devil’s trumpet, arms reaching for rescue. For Brackens, characters in his works do not hold fixed meaning and instead act as “vehicles to register certain effects or ideas.”

In blood compass (2023), Bracken’s largest work to date, four geese thrust themselves towards a distant lighthouse. The monumental tapestry reminds us of the regal and religious history of the form, but here palette, scale, and allegory depart from such embellished instruction. Instead, the artist conjures the physiological homing device birds possess for their migration as a way to navigate the earth through blood, offering a hopeful metaphor for the history and future of Black migrations across the United States.
“The works assembled for this exhibition reveal robust and sensuous shifts in Diedrick’s dyeing and weaving processes–shifts marked by subtlety with precision,” said Eungie Joo, guest curator of the exhibition.

gather tender night also features three new works that elaborate on the artist’s return to the Bay Area. In the first, bay windows suggest a domestic space and the artist’s impulse to bring things inside to rest and ruminate, to settle and be cared for. A meditation on ritual togetherness, a second work calls upon Brackens’ Southern roots, where a bottle tree stands guard to ward off evil spirits framing two figures whose hands barely brush, reminding us that we are not alone. 

“Diedrick Brackens’s work embodies the kind of care and poetic urgency that YBCA is committed to championing,” said Mari Robles, CEO of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. “We are honored to present Brackens’s first solo exhibition in the Bay Area and to offer our community an experience that asks us to slow down and consider how care shapes the worlds we build together.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by public programs and community gatherings throughout its run, including an opening night celebration on March 13, 2026, featuring music by DJs La Femme Papi and Juanita MORE!. Tickets are free with RSVP at ybca.org/spring26onp.

YBCA programs are made possible in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Blue Shield of California, Bob A. Ross Foundation, City and County of San Francisco, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Malia Simonds, Mayor Daniel Lurie, The Ron Conway Family, Salesforce, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The Svane Family Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy, Yerba Buena Partnership, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Board of Directors and Members. 

For more information visit ybca.org.

About Diedrick Brackens:

Brackens received his Master of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas, Denton. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions and biennials and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Holburne Museum, Bath (2025); Savannah College of Art and Design (2025); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2023); Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2022); Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (2021); Blanton Museum (2020); and the New Museum, New York (2019). Brackens’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Studio Museum of Harlem, among others. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the Joyce Alexander Wein Prize (2018), Los Angeles Artadia Award (2019), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019), the American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award (2019), Art Matters Foundation Fellowship (2020), United States Artists Fellowship (2021).

About YBCA:

Opened to the public in 1993, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) was founded as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. Our work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the communities it serves. For more information, visit ybca.org.

YBCA is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11:00am to 5:00pm. General admission is $10, and $5 for students and seniors.  Admission is free every Wednesday. For tickets and information, visit ybca.org.

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For media inquiries:

Abby Margulies | (614) 827-5810 | [email protected]

Lauren Macmadu / (415) 350-1884 / [email protected]