What’s on now at San Francisco museums, April 2026

Closing soon

Coming soon

The gallery scene

Ashley Voss updates a local gallery guide weekly. Check out the guide’s Instagram account and website.

At the Museums

To artists: The city is launching its competition for the 2027 Art on Market Street Poster Series. Deadine is April 17. From the city’s website: “The 2027 Program will feature the work of four artists/artist teams with each series on view for a period of three months…” You can learn more here.

To art supporters, there are donations to be made and fêtes to attend:

• MOAD is having a Spring Affair luncheon Wednesday, April 8. The honorees include the Crankstart Foundation, Kaiser Permanente and the artist Mildred Howard. For more information, click here.
• SFMOMA is having its bash Wednesday, April 29, from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. Tickets and perks here.

It’s a difficult time for many of the city’s museums and cultural centers. The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts has suspended operations. City Hall promises action, but in the meantime, it’s a significant loss of children’s programming, exhibits, and events. You can donate here.

SFMOMA

Monday, Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m; Wednesday, closed; Thursday, noon to 8 p.m.

Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10, a rehanging and consideration of the collection. This online countdown leading up to the reopening on April 18 is fun to poke around in.  

It’s a spectacular collection and KQED has a good piece on the reinstallation.

Already two exhibitions–Alexander Calder and Claes Oldenburg + Coosje van Bruggen: Thinking Big have opened to the public.

Three more floors of the collection open on April 18:

Ways of Seeing: Fourteen Artists (on Floor 4)

Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form (on Floor 5)

Memory and Matter: Personal and Collective Histories (on Floor 6)

In all, the Fisher Collection will be highlighted in five exhibitions across four floors of the museum.

I will remind you later this month, but a lot of events are planned for the weekend of the 18th when all will be unveiled.

The museum’s finalists for the SECA awards: Sholeh Asgar, Windy Chien, CrossLypka, Soleé Darrell, Hughen/Starkweather, Xandra Ibarra, Em Kettner, Charles H. Lee, Yameng Lee Thorp, Aspen Mays, Adia Millett, Lorena Molina, Tricia Rainwater, Chanell Stone, Livien Yin, Jes Young.

The winners will be announced in April and a show of their work will go up in December. The award highlights Bay Area artists who have yet to receive “substantial recognition from a major institution.” It’s interesting to look at their work. Any favorites? I’m partial to Livien Yin and her big oils of everyday life.

“Rose B Simpson: Behold,” is on view on SFMOMA’s fourth-floor terrace a bronze sculpture visible from multiple locations. And good news! It has been extended through February 7, 2027.

Also new: “Samia Halaby: Kinetic paintings,” four new works in SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Atrium. 

“Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules” is on view until April 19.

Mission Local’s Marina Newman went to Cartagena’s talk in November, to discover that the photographer has moved away from photography.

“KAWS: Family” is open until May 3, 2026. The exhibit features more than 100 artworks created over three decades. KAWS (Brian Donnelly) began painting graffiti in Jersey City and Manhattan, but in 1996 received his BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts.

We sent Charles Lewis III to take a look.

“In his younger days, Donnelly would snatch subway advertisements, integrate his own characters and then replace the advertisements, making it seem as if his designs were always a part of the image,” Lewis writes. In the new show, he writes “for KAWS, family is about the art of marketing.”

The New York Times has a 2021 profile of KAWS here. He’s controversial, to say the least.

The exhibit includes a 36-foot-tall inflatable sculpture on SFMOMA’s rooftop.

The photo exhibit, “(Re)Constructing History,” fills three rooms on the third floor. The title plays on Carrie Mae Weems’ featured series “Constructing History,” asking viewers to consider “the layers of history we encounter through a seemingly fixed image.”

A contemporary Black artist — including Nona Faustine, Carla Williams, and Dawoud Bey — anchors each room.

“People Make This Place: SFAI Stories” is open through July 5, 2026, at SFMOMA. The exhibit looks at the the San Francisco Art Institute’s importance to the local arts eco-system and includes work from 50 alumni and former faculty in the museum’s collection. 

“New Work: Sheila Hicks” on the fourth floor illustrates how Hicks turns fiber into sculpture.

Asian Art Museum

 “Two Home Countries” by Japanese contemporary artist, Chiharu Shiota, opens April 2 with lots of planned events on Free First Sunday. One will be a talk  with the Hyde Street Mural Artist Kayan Cheung-Miaw.

And here is some of the work you will be seeing from Shiota.

Here is a video of Shiota talking about her webs.

Here is the Hyde Street mural by artist and activist Kayan Cheung-Miaw who will be at the museum on Sunday. “This Asian American Life” shows scenes from Chinatown from the POV of a child. It is part of a public-art series on Chinatown’s mothers, workers and tenants.

“Echoes in the Small Mountain: Park Dae-sung and the West Coast” is open until July 26.

Dae-sung (b. 1945) is “credited with reinventing the techniques of traditional Korean ink painting,” according to the museum’s website. The paintings are based on California landscapes and are spectacular.

“Jitish Kallat: Covering Letter (Terranum Nuncius)” invites visitors to reflect on the things that unite humanity.

You will also see cutting-edge claywork from Japan in “New Japanese Clay.” 

The museum has a series, “Takeout Tuesdays,” where you can meet online to talk about a piece of art with docents and others. 

General admission is free on the first Sunday of every month and the special exhibitions are discounted. Here is more information for free and reduced-cost admission. The museum also hosts a robust list of events.

de Young Museum

Tuesday to Sunday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

Saturdays are free for residents of the Bay Area’s nine counties.

“Monet and Venice” opens Saturday and to help you prepare we have a review by Julie Zigoris. She writes, that the French painter had all but decided to give up his water-lily project when his wife Alice, suggested a trip to Venice – thereby rescuing the water lily project and giving us some exquisite paintings from Venice.

It is meant to be in dialogue with “Venice Drawn” at the Legion of Honor and will be on view through July 26.

“Boom and Bust: Photographing Northern California,” featuring photographs of “San Francisco before and after the 1906 earthquake and fire, the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge, and the development of San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood.” It is on through August 2.

Artist Rose B. Simpson’s show “LEXICON” will be on until Feb 7, 2027.

Noma Faingold writes in her review, “Coming from a long line of Native American ceramic artists of the Santa Clara Pueblo (Kha’po’oe Ówîngeh), based just south of Española, New Mexico, pottery is in Simpson’s DNA. While she still lives at the pueblo and has her studio close by, she has forged a different creative path, while examining the past, present and future.”

Simpson’s exhibit is all part of the opening of four galleries dedicated to Arts of Indigenous America, which draws on the permanent collections, new acquisitions and artists like Simpson.

The New York Times has an excellent piece by Carolina A. Miranda on the development of the Arts of Indigenous America galleries.

“Leilah Babirye: We Have a History” is the Ugandan artist’s first solo show in the United States. It closes May 26, 2026, Babirye creates sculptures in ceramic, wood and discarded objects.

I don’t know her work, but am excited to get to know it. Here is an introductory video with Babirye and the curator of SFMOMA’s African collection, Natasha Becker. Contemporary artists like Babirye are being invited to have their work in conversation with the museum’s excellent permanent collection.

Museum of Craft and Design (MCD)

Thursday to Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.

 “Video Craft” is open until August 16. From the website: “‘Video Craft’ explores the formal and technical properties that video, film, and early moving image technologies share with more traditional craft media like ceramics, textiles, and glass.”

The images look stunning.

Legion of Honor Museum

Tuesday to Sunday, 9:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.

“Drawn to Venice” will be on until Aug. 2, 2026. The exhibition is designed to be “in dialogue with ‘Monet and Venice,’ on view until July 26, 2026, at the de Young.” See our review of the latter here.

The exhibit includes 30 drawings and prints from 16th-century Venice, including landscapes and figure studies, from such artists as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770), Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757) and Canaletto (1697–1768). 

“Ferlinghetti for San Francisco” draws from the museum’s collection of prints, etchings and lithographs. Here is a 2012 profile from SFGate of the poet, artist, activist and founder of City Lights Book Store. The show is open until July 19, 2026.

Ferlinghetti died in 2021, but what a life. Even before arriving in San Francisco, he had earned a master’s degree from Columbia University and a doctorate from the Sorbonne.

If you get into Ferlinghetti‘s history, visit the Counter Culture Museum, City Lights Book Store and the Beat Museum.

You can view the Legion of Honor’s full list of exhibitions here.

The museum offers Free Saturdays to residents of the Bay Area’s nine counties.

The Tenderloin Museum

Open Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

On April 2, “Finding Our Way Home: Mary TallMountain in the Tenderloin’ opens.

A friend just saw “The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot” and loved it. It is at the museum’s venue at 835 Larkin St and runs every Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. You can get tickets here. Chris Carlsson writes about the 1966 riots and resistance on FoundSF, a great resource for history.

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the Tenderloin Museum’s planned expansion to 10,000 square feet from 3,000, adding a room for San Francisco’s neon history, including a sign from Hunt’s Donuts, once based in the Mission District and known as the “epicenter of crime.”

There is a lot more going on at the Tenderloin Museum, including the permanent collection that explores the neighborhood’s history and upcoming events, such as a walking tour focused on the area’s LGBTQIA+ history. Other walking tours are listed here.

SOMArts

“Tabi Tabi Po: Come Out with the Spirits!” featuring the works of artist and muralist Cece Carpio is open and on view until March 29.

Museum of the African Diaspora

Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, noon to 8 p.m.

“Beauty Plus” by photographer Jasmine Ross at MOAD opened March 18 and will run through May 31 as part of the museum’s Emerging Artists Program.

MOAD also announced MoAD Announces its Spring Affair for Wednesday, April 8. The honorees include the Crankstart Foundation, Kaiser Permanente and the artist Mildred Howard. For more information, click here.

Also on at the Museum of the African Diaspora, “Unbound: Art, Blackness and the Universe,” which runs through Aug. 16, 2026.

Teresa Moore reviews “Unbound” this writing, “Over three floors, she (curatorial chief Key Jo Lee) presents an African diaspora that is “unbound” from earthly and chronological conceptions of diaspora.”

The Letterform Archive

Thursday,1 to 8 p.m. and free to all; Friday to Sunday: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Monday to Wednesday.

This place looks to have many interesting offerings, including a new portfolio of French sign painters‘ alphabets and a collection of Chinese lettering manuals.

“Good Luck 2026” opened recently and will be up until April 4. Here is an explainer from the website: “Building on our first show in 2025, the exhibition returns for the Year of the Fire Horse with an expanded focus on the cultural ties between San Francisco and New York City’s Chinatowns through a cross-country exchange with our partners on the East Coast, the W.O.W. Project, Midnight Project, and lucky risograph who organize the NYC-based Lunar New Year exhibition From Chinatown, With Love.”

“Piet Zwart: Brand Architect” opened Nov. 8.

From the website: “From the 1920s to the 1960s, Zwart profoundly influenced both the Netherlands and the international graphic design community, and many of his works are celebrated as milestones in design history.” 

There are many great examples of his work in this piece by Steven Heller, a former senior art director at The New York Times.

And here is more from the Letterform Archive when it reprinted “Inside NKF: Piet Zwart’s Avant-Garde Catalog for Standard Cables, 1927–1928.” It also publishes his seminal essay, “from old to new typography.”

The new, he writes, “rejects a predetermined formal structure, but builds up forms according to the function … the new typography incor­porates active red as a functional element: as a signal, an eye-catcher.” Sounds like an interesting fellow.

See all events and programming here.

“Localization: 15 Years of LetterSeed” opened in mid-August. It explores Korean typography.

The Letterform Archive is a nonprofit arts center focused on graphic design.

California Academy of Sciences

Monday to Saturday, 9:30 a.m to 5 p.m; Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m; Thursday, NightLife (21+ with ID): 6 to 10 p.m. (Last entry is always one hour before closing time.) 

There’s a lot going on here.

The newly renovated Wilson Family Nature Lab is open with lots of hands-on learning.

“Big Picture” competition winners are on view.

Make sure to plan ahead and see the admission and ticketing page for more information. Also, see how you can get a free or reduced rate for your next visit. 

Counterculture Museum

Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

We have more museums in town. This one is at the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets with a whole lot of San Francisco history.

I could see a whole weekend, or a couple of weekdays, spent between the Counterculture Museum, the Beat Museum and the “Ferlingetti for San Francisco” show at the Legion of Honor. It would be like a graduate seminar on the late ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

Beat Museum

Thursday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The Beat Museum is at 540 Broadway, across the street from City Lights, the bookstore founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

“We are dedicated to carrying on the Beats’ legacy by exposing their work to new audiences, encouraging journeys — both interior and exterior — and being a resource on how one person’s perspective can have meaning to many,” according to a statement from the museum.

This sounds like a great place to visit.

500 Capp St.

Friday and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.: Free self-guided tours. Saturday at 4 p.m.: A guided tour for $20.

500 Capp Street and Root Division are collaborating on “Open Your Eyes to Water,” a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based visual artist Trina Michelle Robinson that spans both venues.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; free on Wednesdays and second Sundays.

“The Prince of Homburg: A Solo Exhibition by P. Staff” runs until June 24.  From the website: “Loosely inspired by Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 play of the same name, the work explores exhaustion as a response to structural oppression. The centerpiece of the installation is a 23-minute video…”

San Francisco State University’s Fine Arts Gallery

The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday, noon to 4 p.m.

“Slow Burn” is on. “Guest curated by Lorena Molina, ‘Slow Burn’ centers how BIPOC artists use slowness as a form of refusal and a way to highlight the systems of oppression that structure their lives,” according to the press release.  

San Francisco State University’s Global Museum

It’s a teaching lab and open to the public during the school year – Oct. through May. 11 a.m. to. 4 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday, and by appointment. Location: Fine Arts Building, Room 203

Now on: “Craft or Commodity?” And “Please Touch!” “Both exhibits focus on themes of responsible stewardship of cultural heritage, decolonizing museum work, and expanding accessible museum experiences,” writes Marley Townsend, a graduate student in Museum Studies.

The Walt Disney Family Museum

Thursday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

“Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story” is open. The museum described it as a “treasure trove of Disney history” taking “will take “guests behind the scenes of one of the most groundbreaking endeavors of the 20th century — the creation and opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California.”

The museum is showing rare objects featured in the book “Walt Disney Treasures: Personal Art and Artifacts from The Walt Disney Family Museum.” The objects will change every two months.

Visit the museum’s website for more information on admission costs and reduced ticketing options. The special exhibits are free with a suggested $5 admission fee.

Exploratorium

Closed Mondays. Sunday, 10 a.m. to noon (members/donors only); noon to 5 p.m. for everyone. Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, 6 to 10 p.m. for 18+.

Experience After Dark at Pier 15. Every Thursday evening, immerse yourself in more than 700 interactive exhibits. For people 18 and older. The museum advertises a carefree environment with new themes each night. Here is information for reduced admission.  

The Chinese Historical Society of America

The museum is closed for renovations, according to its website.

The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

Closed until further notice.

See the center’s website for offerings. 

Institute for Contemporary Art

The Institute is now nomadic and leaving its permanent home. You can read more about the decision here.

Jewish Contemporary Museum

The museum closed in December for at least a year as it works out its financial situation. You can learn more here. Laura Waxmann wrote a good piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about the difficulties museums are facing.

Its closure is a reminder to visit our museums.