Find more of KQED’s picks for the best fall 2023 events here.
Fall is a flashy time in the visual art world. So many of the region’s artists are also teachers that early September brings a refreshing “back-to-school” energy to the scene. After summer group shows and lazy August hours, the fall months are a time for impressive solo exhibitions, regional surveys and grand reopenings.
‘Dude, Where’s My School?’
Aug. 26–Sept. 23
127010, 1207 10th Street, Berkeley
Where does that back-to-school energy go when the school in question has slowly, painfully, run itself into the ground? A new not-for-profit space in Berkeley has organized a group show of alumni and faculty from the San Francisco Art Institute, which shuttered in the summer of 2022. So much changed during the pandemic, but those connected to SFAI learned — in a very hard way — about the importance of not relying on large institutions. With Dude, Where’s My School?, curator Josh Hash is interested in creating new supportive structures and artistic communities — ones bound by trust and generosity rather than a shared experience of staggering debt.
‘Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered’
Sept. 6, 2023–Jan. 21, 2024
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
Morris Hirshfield only began painting at the age of 65, after a career as a tailor and slipper manufacturer in Brooklyn. He would produce just 78 works in his lifetime, painstakingly layered pieces that conjured both adoration and mockery (Peggy Guggenheim collected him, but a contemporary art critic referred to him as the “Master of Two Left Feet”). Now, his highly patterned and vibrant paintings of women, cats and other animals are coming to the Cantor from the American Folk Art Museum, to be hung alongside work by other Surrealist and self-taught artists, cementing his weird and wonderful work into the art historical canon.
Big Northern California Energy
‘To the Max!’
Sept. 8, 2023–Aug. 25, 2024
di Rosa, Napa
Two shows at Bay Area institutions honor the wonderful extra-ness that has long defined Northern California art-making. At the di Rosa, a permanent collection show called To the Max! gathers the work of 10 artists who ardently resisted 20th-century minimalism, instead luxuriating in the Pattern & Decoration movement, bold colors, inventive materials and a true sense of abundance.
‘Nuts and Who’s: A Candy Store Sampler’
Aug. 11, 2023–Feb. 25, 2024
San Jose Museum of Art
Pair that with a trip south to the San Jose Museum of Art for Nuts and Who’s, a sampling of work from Adeliza McHugh’s legendary Candy Store Gallery, which occupied a small house in Folsom from 1968 to 1985. The Candy Store was a meeting place — of Funk art, Nut art and Chicago’s Hairy Who scene — that brought artists like Maija Peeples-Bright, Robert Arneson, Clayton Bailey, Gladys Nilsson and Jim Nutt into each other’s orbit for lasting, irreverent and delightfully punny artistic conversations.
