The Best Art I Didn’t Write About in 2024

There’s simply too much art to see in the Bay Area, let alone write about. And so at the end of every year, I compile a list of visual art shows and happenings I saw, deeply enjoyed and didn’t get a chance to cover. As usual, it’s highly personal and in vaguely chronological order. All in all, another great year for Bay Area art.

The best shows up for the shortest time

Torreya Cummings, ‘Paradise Lost & Found’
Craig Calderwood, ‘The Trash Oracle Sings’
Recology, San Francisco
Jan. 19, 20, 23, 2024

Blink and you’ll miss Recology’s shows. In theory, I understand this. Studios need to be turned over to the next batch of artists in residence. And yet, the quality of work that comes out of the residencies, proven by Cummings and Calderwood’s shows earlier this year, calls for more eyes and longer viewing hours. Cummings’ installation, dominated by a mirrored platform and an upside-down assemblage of inflated palm trees, fake plants, lamps and a plastic skeleton, included an eerie soundscape cut together from discarded records and cassettes. Next door, Calderwood’s large-scale paintings depicted zany beings adorned with detritus the artist pulled from the real-life dump. Sketches, notes and found scraps of paper showed how Calderwood builds their dense, pattern-heavy worlds, full of symbols, codes and, in Pile Elemental, even a hidden character behind a draped piece of canvas.

The art that most helped me catch my breath

Ruth Laskey, ‘Loops & Circles’
Altman Siegel, San Francisco
March 7–April 20, 2024

I’ve long been a fan of Ruth Laskey’s work: carefully composed, delicate textile pieces made with hand-dyed and hand-woven linen. In her debut show with Altman Siegel (she was previously represented by Ratio 3), Laskey’s spare, beautifully framed pieces got the space and airiness they deserve. Elegant, angular loops sat against lightly hued polyhedrons; denser arrangements of three colored circles were bound within solid building-block shapes. Every now and then I spied a slight wobble in the otherwise tautly stretched twill, a reminder of Laskey’s slow and satisfying artistic process.

Most convincing reasons to always stop by Bass & Reiner

Bec Imrich, ‘Tin Cry’
April 6–May 25, 2024
Morgan Corbitt, ‘Waters of March’
Sept. 7–Nov. 9, 2024
Bass & Reiner, San Francisco

Trippy, exacting realism really knocked my socks off this year. And two of my favorite shows in that vein took place at Minnesota Street Project’s smallest gallery, Bass & Reiner. In April, Imrich’s graphite on paper work (and one optical illusion–inspired sculpture) was a precise, silvery presentation of textures and patterns punctuated by cast tin shapes — a strange combination of materials I haven’t seen before or since. Five months later, Corbitt’s Waters of March opened in the same space, a very different show (large oil paintings of reflective estate sale objects, metal grates and hunks of deli meat), but with the same boggling attention to detail — and ability to render familiar objects in off-kilter, world-altering ways.

The best non-photos in a photo show

Libby Black in ‘Turning the Page’
Pier 24, San Francisco
April 15, 2024–Jan. 31, 2025

After a generous 15-year run, Pier 24, the presentation arm of the Pilara Family Foundation’s incredible photography collection, will close its doors for good at the end of January 2025. The final show, Turning the Page, turns its focus to photo books (and beyond the Pilara holdings), placing artists’ monographs at the centers of its galleries and exploding images out from the pages. Included are installations of Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills and Masahisa Fukase’s Karasu. But the show opens with Pier 24’s first true display of sculpture, a stunning grid of Black’s painted paper replicas of photo books. (A new publication, Photo Book Photo List includes even more of her pieces, one for each list provided by a photographer of cherished photo books in their own personal libraries.)

The best interpretation of an interpretation of a waffle

Gay Outlaw, ‘Inner Sousaphone’
Et al., San Francisco
April 19 – June 1, 2024

In two galleries at Et al., Theadora Walsh (who has contributed to KQED Arts & Culture) organized a solo show of painting, prints and sculptures by the impossible-to-pin-down San Francisco artist Gay Outlaw. While Outlaw’s materials vary from piece to piece (a rough wedge of wood, smoothly fused glass, hand-printed linocuts), all her work is united by a pristine attention to craft. For this show, even the pedestals supporting the art were impeccably crisp. Touring Inner Sousaphone felt like being in good hands, with objects arranged just so: Untitled (Saw Box), a glass and wood sculpture that seemed to project out its own shadows, was perfectly graced by a skylight on one of my visits.

The most enjoyable trompe l’oleil

Imin Yeh, ‘A Salty Rainbow’ and Michael Hall, ‘For Real Life’
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco
May 11–July 3, 2024

In Catharine Clark’s newly expanded space, these two solo exhibitions were partners in crime: two eye-popping presentations of artists skillfully rendering everything things in their chosen materials. Yeh’s expansive show included delicate paper sculptures of objects in odd, delightful combinations — studio snacks and rubber bands, a slice of Swiss cheese and birthday candles — all hanging from paper screws. Hall’s For Real Life was a collection of stunning trompe l’oleil paintings of books, albums and everyday objects, interspersed with ecstatic, abstract washes of color, googly eyes and a Holbein-esque distorted cat.

A very good reason to visit the CJM before Dec. 15

Leah Rosenberg, ‘When One Sees a Rainbow’
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco
June 6, 2024–Dec. 15, 2024

Leah Rosenberg’s installation at the CJM is the first artwork conceived specifically for the museum’s tricky Yud Gallery. The Daniel Libeskind-designed space, with its high ceilings and angled walls, also has 36 rhomboid-shaped windows — a perpetual challenge to curators. Color is Rosenberg’s primary medium, and she has dunked the vaulted space in it. The windows now channel in pink, yellow and green light. Brightly painted chairs and benches are scattered throughout the room, and a wall of rainbow-hued stripes invites visitors to write personal reflections on the 36 hues. The installation was originally meant to be on view well into 2027, but the museum announced it will close for at least one year starting Dec. 15. Catch this monumental site-specific artwork while you can — we don’t know when, or if, the CJM will reopen in its current building.

The shiniest conclusion to a public art mess

Lava Thomas, ‘Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman’
San Francisco Public Library
Unveiled Sept. 19, 2024

The triumphant unveiling of the city’s first monument to a Black woman, made by local artist Lava Thomas, does not erase the fact that this was one of the most bungled public art commissions in recent memory. But the few hours that singers, actors, poets, politicians and artists gathered to celebrate Thomas’ book-shaped ode to Dr. Maya Angelou were exquisite ones, punctuated by roaring cheers from the assembled crowd. And now, we have a permanent marker of Thomas’ artistry and perseverance — and Angelou’s connection to San Francisco history — to greet us outside the library’s Larkin Street doors.

The best show in a shipping container

Jim Isermann & T.S. Leonard, ‘Supporting Roles’
Escolar, Santa Rosa
Sept. 28–Oct. 21, 2024

It’s hard to compete with a shipping container, an object of such iconic shape, size and corrugated surfaces that it is pretty much the opposite of a white cube. But Jim Isermann’s colored pencil drawings fit perfectly into the narrow corridor that is Escolar — an artist-run project space in a Santa Rosa back yard. Supporting Roles included a poem written for a scrolling LED screen by Isermann’s partner T.S. Leonard, and showcased the artist’s densely colorful drawings of structures designed by gay, queer and otherwise marginalized architects. Various “supports” were visible throughout: the geometric shapes that combined into patterns; the notes and sketches that informing future paintings; and the clear plastic frames that held the graph paper up for viewing. Even the container was a reminder of the raw materials it might once have held — and perhaps went on to support the very structures Isermann now distills into bold geometric patterns.

My favorite art experience of the year, hands down

The Corridor of Horror
Mission District, San Francisco
Oct. 29–31, 2024

“You are your own keeper through the darkness,” read the “gentle guidelines” handed to me before I stepped into the most thrilling, scream-filled minutes of my 2024. The Corridor of Horror was a homemade haunted house, a windy pathway of jump scares and creative visual delights that went down the service entrance of a four-unit apartment building and through its garages. Though it’s hard to say where I was at any given moment, so thoroughly was time and space warped by ever-narrowing cardboard passageways, costumed performers and numerous references to both horror film creatures and fine artists working in more gothic strains. Built over six weeks by friends and volunteers, the haunt was advertised by hand-distributed flyers (“$5. It’s very small”). Impresario Aaron Wojak promises this was a test run for a larger, more sustained project: “I hope to plan another for 2025, hopefully not at my house.”