We have arrived at the summer months during a chaotic time for the arts. Federal funding sources are drying up left and right, affecting arts nonprofits across the country, and, ultimately, artists and their audiences.
It turns out the antidote to this particular dark spiral is, in fact, viewing art (and supporting the organizations you love). Art is the opposite of destruction: it’s hard and meaningful, it brings new images and ideas into the world. Here’s some art to pull you back from the brink over the next few months.
A still from Alex Reynolds & Robert M Ochshorn’s ‘A Bunch of Questions with No Answers,’ 2025; HD video, 23 hours 10 minutes. (Courtesy of Et al.)
May 18, May 25 and June 1, 12–8 p.m.
Et al., San Francisco
At one point in No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary about the Israeli military’s relentless destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank, someone suggests that maybe, if Americans see what is happening, it will stop.
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A Bunch of Questions with No Answers shows the true depth of American knowledge — and inaction. In eight-hour stretches over the course of three Sundays, the Mission District gallery Et al. will screen the 23 hours and 10 minutes of Robert M Ochshorn and Alex Reynolds’ video, which captures questions posed by journalists to the U.S. State Department since Oct. 3, 2023. The artists chose to edit out the evasive and convoluted non-answers, leaving nearly a day’s worth of unmet demands for American accountability in the ever-worsening crisis. (On May 18, the video will pause at 2 p.m. for a talk between the artists and Dr. David A. M. Goldberg.)
The ‘Vaillancourt Fountain’ in more fountain-y days, in 2018. (Kirkikis/Getty)
Embarcadero Plaza Picnic
May 23, 2025, 4–7 p.m.
Vaillancourt Fountain, Embarcadero Plaza, San Francisco
A lot’s been happening at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza lately. Various ploys to “revitalize” the public space — or drastically redesign it — have spawned both fans and critics. One of the loudest voices arguing for the preservation of the plaza and its distinctive Vaillancourt Fountain is the wonderfully acronymed architectural nonprofit Docomomo US/NOCA, dedicated to documenting and conserving the Modern Movement’s buildings, sites and neighborhoods.
On Friday, May 23, Docomomo board members will picnic with none other than Armand Vaillancourt himself. Vaillancourt, now 95, will share a bit of his experience with the work (also titled Québec libre!), and its place in San Francisco’s history. Attendees are invited to join for a “relaxed and inspiring Friday evening.” BYO chair, skateboard and snacks.
‘Untitled (Medallion)’: pieced by Sherry Ann Byrd in 1990; Richmond, California. Quilted by Irene Bankhead in 1990; Oakland, California. (Courtesy Laverne Brackens; Photo by Kevin Candland)
June 7–Nov. 30, 2025
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
If this guide was arranged by intensity of anticipation rather than opening date, Routed West would be at the top of the list. Back in 2019, BAMPFA announced it had received Eli Leon’s African American quilt collection, a staggering bequest of nearly 3,000 works, including over 500 pieces by Rosie Lee Tompkins alone.
Tompkins’ 2020 retrospective was our first taste of the collection in its new home. It was stunning. Routed West expands on that to include nearly 80 artists, tracing the “flow and flourishing of quilts” as millions of Black Americans left the South during the Second Great Migration. Previews of the works included in this show include orderly and intuitive compositions, and everything in between: all bursting with the colors and patterns that will make keeping one’s hands off the art very difficult indeed.
‘Media Burn’: The iconic image of impact, printed on over 100,000 postcards by Ant Farm since 1975. (John F. Turner)
July 4–Aug. 23, 2025
500 Capp Street, San Francisco
Fifty years ago, on July 4, 1975, the art collective Ant Farm drove a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado into a pyramid of burning TVs. It was a spectacular piece of performance art. Media Burn, a highly orchestrated piece of theater, has lived on as a radical and mystifying happening, a satire meant to point back at television audiences’ increasing dependence on mainstream media. (In the circus of it all, Ant Farm had its own film crews covering the event’s press coverage.)
Curator Steve Seid literally wrote the book on Media Burn, and has organized an exhibition at 500 Capp Street for this half-century anniversary, opening on Independence Day. The show will be a celebration of all of the above, with souvenirs, press releases, documentation of the outrageously customized Phantom Dream Car and the Media Burn video itself.
Pao Houa Her, ‘untitled (real opium, behind opium backdrop)’ from ‘The Imaginative Landscape’ series, 2020. (Courtesy of the artist)
This exhibition, a 20-year survey of work by Pao Houa Her, a Hmong American artist based in Minnesota, takes place both within the white walls of the SJMA and out in the city of San José. At the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where the show is simultaneously on view, Her’s work appears on Sheboygan, Wisconsin billboards and yard signs, and in a 2025 calendar put out by Union Asian Market. This unconventional exhibition, rooted in photographic and video work, explores how diasporic communities reconstruct images of their homelands.
July 26, 2025–July 2026
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Perhaps unsurprisingly in a small town like this, SFMOMA and the San Francisco Art Institute share an origin story. Both were offshoots of the San Francisco Art Association (SFAA), founded in 1871 to promote the young city’s early art scene. So it’s fitting that, over 150 years later, one of those institutions should care for the history and artwork of the other.
People Make This Place will include artworks by over 50 former SFAI faculty and alumni in the museum’s collection, along with a “dynamic and quirky range of archival materials” from the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation + Archive, now housed across the street from SFMOMA. Much has been said — often by this reporter — about the importance of SFAI’s unruly ethos and outsized influence on art scenes near and far, but it’s quite another thing to see that output in person. I predict this opening will be absolutely mobbed.
Rose B. Simpson, ‘Maria,’ 2014; 1985 Chevy El Camino, Bodywork and customization by artist. (Photograph by Kate Russell; Courtesy of the artist)
Aug. 30, 2025–Aug. 2, 2026
de Young Museum, San Francisco
Like Art Farm, Rose B. Simpson has a thing for custom cars. LEXICON, the de Young’s first exhibition by a contemporary Native American artist, will install two classic cars (a 1985 Chevy El Camino and a 1964 Buick Riviera) in the museum’s atrium, which can be visited without a ticket. For Simpson, who is best known for her ceramic work, the cars act as vessels, painted with pottery motifs that honor both Pueblo traditions and lowrider culture.
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The show coincides with the opening of the museum’s newly reinstalled Native American art galleries, a project that brought Native scholars into the curatorial team and advisory committee. A crucial part of this reinstallation is the inclusion of new work by contemporary Indigenous artists. Let’s hope Simpson’s “first” brings many more exhibitions in its wake.
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