It was a year that saw big moves, new campuses, noted acquisitions and significant anniversaries. Here are the Bay Area art world stories we’re still thinking about from 2024.

First official San Francisco Art Week 

The 10th anniversary of the Fog Design + Art fair helped cement the third week in January as the time of year the art world descends on the region. The fair debuted the new Fog Focus program highlighting emerging galleries and artists, an exciting addition to the programming and longtime dealers. In the fall, Fog announced Sydney Blumenkranz as its first fair director. This was also the year San Francisco Art Week became an official brand with a new centralized schedule on www.sfartweek.com, thanks to art consultant Emily Counihan who launched the hub.

Artists protest at YBCA 

On Feb. 15 during the “Love Letter to SOMA” program at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a group of eight artists featured in the “Bay Area Now 9” exhibition interrupted the event to demand the organization take a public stance for a ceasefire in Gaza. Several artists altered their work with pro-Palestine slogans, while other participants distributed flyers that alleged the organization’s leadership censored the artists’ positions. After closing the galleries in response, the organization’s interim CEO Sara Fenske Bahat resigned in March, citing “antisemitic backlash.”

In December, Maricelle Robles, the former executive director of the Headland Center for the Arts, was announced as the permanent CEO, and said she was looking forward to rebuilding trust the community’s trust with the organization. 

 William Scott, Kara Walker and Amy Sherald debut new work at SFMOMA

This year SFMOMA debuted several new works by significant American artists. In April William Scott’s “Praise Frisco: Peace and Love in the City” premiered as part of the exhibition “Creative Growth: The House That Art Build,” featuring work from the Oakland art center for artists with developmental disabilities. The mobile mural, part of the museum’s Bay Area Walls commission series, is the largest work by Scott to date. 

In July, “Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) / A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler. / Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by the Gardeners / Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious / by Kara E-Walker,” an installation featuring animatronic figures by the Stockton-born artist opened to the public in the free Roberts Family Gallery. The work, which is partly a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and racial reckonings of 2020, will be on view through May 2026. 

This November, the midcareer survey “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” included two recently completed works by the artist: “Trans Forming Liberty,” which depicts a transgender woman in the pose of the Statue of Liberty and “American Grit,” which shows a boxer born without legs posed in the ring.

A fine year for FAMSF 

The Fine Arts Museums celebrated a major anniversary this year with the Legion of Honor’s centenary in November, and marked the occasion with a special anniversary exhibition as well as the gorgeous “Mary Cassatt: At Work.” Up next: a year of programming highlighting the history of the building and the permanent collection. 

The museum also acquired Lavinia Fontana’s “Portrait of Bianca degli Utili Maselli and Her Children” in May, a rare and significant work by the Italian painter. The de Young Museum’s triumphs this year include the first costume exhibition from its permanent collection in more than 35 years, “Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style” and the first-ever retrospective in the United States of famed art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.   

Maria Manetti Shrem’s gift to art at UC Davis

In May, San Francisco philanthropist Maria Manetti Shrem promised UC Davis $20 million to create the multifaceted “Maria Manetti Shrem Arts Renaissance” program at the College of Letters and Science. The donation, which will come posthumously from Manetti Shrem’s estate, will fund eight endowments for arts and design and create three new faculty chairs. It is the largest gift in the school’s history and will bring Manetti Shrem’s total giving to the university to more than $43 million. In addition to the existing Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on the campus, the school has also named the new Maria Manetti Shrem Arts District.

Lava Thomas’ Maya Angelou monument

After a more than five-year process and substantial City Hall drama, Berkeley artist Lava Thomas’ monument to author Maya Angelou was finally installed in front of the San Francisco public library’s main branch in September. “Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman” features a bronze book sculpture with Thomas’ portrait of Angelou on one side and a quote by Angelou on the other. The inscription at the base of the work is the title of one of Angelou’s most famous poems, “Still I Rise” — a meaningful message that also seemed to reference the bureaucratic hoops Thomas endured to bring the sculpture to the public.

MoAD launches Nexus Black Art Week 

The Museum of the African Diaspora hosted its first-ever Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week in October, an event meant to celebrate the institutions, artists, exhibitions and leaders in the Bay Area’s Black art community. The week opened with the MoAD exhibition “Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy” and culminated with the museum’s Afropolitan Ball.

Contemporary Jewish Museum announces hibernation 

Citing a dramatic 50% fall in attendance and revenue, the Contemporary Jewish Museum announced in November that it would be closing for at least a year while it determines a new direction forward. The move came as the Yerba Buena Arts District and downtown as a whole continued to struggle in its recovery from the closures of the COVID-19 pandemic. The museum’s leadership said that all options were on the table in determining its future, including the sale of its iconic building.

On the move

On the real estate front, in September, Mayor London Breed announced that the GLBT Historical Society and Museum had acquired a building in the Castro district to be its new home after a yearslong search. Then in October, the California College for the Arts and its Wattis Institute moved into a years-in-the-making new campus in Potrero, while also announcing a $20 million operating deficit. That same month, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art debuted its new San Rafael campus with an exhibition dedicated to Mount Tam. 

Closing out the relocations, the two-year-old Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco moved from Dogpatch to the Cube in the Financial District. Vornado Realty, the majority owner of the 555 California complex where the Cube is located, is giving the museum two years of free rent and utilities. Notable given the ICA SF’s branding as a “different kind of museum” with progressive social values, the complex’s 30% minority owner is the Trump Organization. 

Reach Tony Bravo: [email protected]