Be sure to check out our full 2025 Fall Arts Guide to live music, movies, art, theater, festivals and more in the Bay Area.
The fall season opens with a closing: On Saturday, Sept. 6, the San Francisco outpost of the arts nonprofit KADIST will present six hours of music, readings and artwork in a final farewell. After 14 years at the corner of Folsom and 20th, KADIST has become something of an institution, reliably bringing international artists and ideas to local audiences.
But like McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and Pier 24 before it, KADIST is funded by a lone donor. And we’ve learned by now to view such projects as temporary gifts, rather than permanent fixtures of the Bay Area art scene.
The good news is that there are many (so many!) other art happenings this season, including the return of a recently established Chinatown festival, the reopening of the Museum of the African Diaspora and an atmospheric open house in the Marin Headlands.
Sara Siestreem, ‘i love you lucille ball,’ 2015-2022; Acrylic, graphite, color pencil, and Xerox transfer on 45 panel boards, 16 x 16 inches each; 88 x 144 inches overall. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
Sept. 10, 2025–July 12, 2026
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
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A show pulled from a museum’s collection may not sound like the snazziest offering, but it’s these types of exhibitions that remind us of the true breadth of local institutions’ holdings. Remember BAMPFA’s Way Bay and Way Bay 2? Packed, eclectic, thrilling. Object Oriented goes for a narrower focus on artists’ interpretations of everyday objects, delightfully blurring function and form. Expect material-minded paintings, chairs you can’t sit in but would really like to, maquettes, artists’ books, and other uncategorizeable, beautiful things.
The Grant Avenue Follies perform in front of Edge on the Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown during last year’s contemporary art festival. (Henrik Kam)
Sept. 13, 2025, 4–10 p.m.
Chinatown, San Francisco
For the fourth year running, Chinatown’s contemporary arts hub, Edge on the Square, will stage an evening-into-night festival of performances, activations and multimedia presentations in the neighborhood’s streets. This year’s event, curated by Candace Huey, Taraneh Hemami and Theo Lau, takes a direct stance against cultural erasure and division. Wander around Grant Avenue, Waverly Place, Ross Alley and Wentworth Place to experience work by two dozen artists and groups, including Ramon Abad’s interactive “Puppet Movie Studio,” a site-specific radio broadcast from Sholeh Asgary, and sculptures pulled from Karen Tei Yamashita’s incredible 2010 novel I Hotel.
Graphite sculptures by Laura Figa (left) and a lithograph by Fran Herndon (right). (Courtesy of Et al.)
These are two separate shows, but the pairing promises to be quite exquisite. In the first, Laura Figa’s precise, delicate sculptures — graphite formed into spindly shapes — sit on beds of kraft paper and felt. In the second, we get 1960s collaborations between the artist Fran Herndon and the poet Jack Spicer, including lithographs produced at the California School of Fine Arts (later called the San Francisco Art Institute) and printed in Spicer’s 1962 book The Heads of the Town up to the Aether. Expect some overlap of the two artists’ work in the form of typewritten drawings.
Julio César Morales, ‘Gemelos #4,’ 2025; Watercolor, graphite and ink on paper, 20 x 30 inches. (Gallery Wendi Norris)
Sept. 19–Nov. 1, 2025
Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
Julio César Morales, recently returned to the Bay Area from Arizona, has not one but two major solos this fall, the first of which already opened at the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis. My America, his smaller exhibition in Wendi Norris’ Jackson Square gallery, will center on a sound installation created with musician and producer Mexican Institute of Sound. Watercolors from the artist’s Gemelos series — depictions of two figures in the tight quarters migrants endure while trying to cross into the United States — will surround the listening booth.
Sept. 27, 2025–Jan. 25, 2026
de Young Museum, San Francisco
This may be the first de Young exhibition that requires a “cosplay policy” (props can be checked at the CosCheck, no pyrotechnics!). Manga long ago transcended its Japanese origins to become a worldwide obsession, but despite its ubiquity, we rarely get to see the actual drawings that go into these mass-produced comics and graphic novels. This show highlights 11 manga artists who work across genre and artistic style, including Taniguchi Jiro (The Walking Man), Takahashi Rumiko (Inuyasha), Araki Hirohiko (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure), Tagame Gengoroh (My Brother’s Husband) and Oda Eiichiro (One Piece). And if you are bringing your fabulous cosplaying self to the museum, select Saturdays throughout the show’s run promise some of that comic-con spirit.
Oct. 1–5, 2025
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco and other Bay Area venues
The inaugural Black Art Week included a robust slate of programming on both sides of the bay, with the Museum of the African Diaspora, its founding institution, at the center. Not gonna lie, it’s been a tough year for our art museums since then: temporary and permanent closures, delayed reopenings, layoffs, and huge cuts to federal funding. Which is why the return of MoAD, after six-ish months of gallery renovations, is such a joyous event. The museum will reopen on Oct. 1 (just in time for the second Black Art Week) with UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe, a group show that looks at Blackness as “expansive, unknowable and cosmically rich.” 2025 also marks MoAD’s 20th anniversary, so expect plenty of celebrating and an action-packed early October.
Dominique Viviant Denon, ‘A Coven of Witches’ (detail), 18th century; Etching. (Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University)
Oct. 15, 2025–Feb. 22, 2026
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford
Just in time for Halloween, the Cantor opens a seasonally appropriate show of works on paper, paintings and personal items related to European magical practices of the 16th through mid-18th centuries. Unlike more malicious witches, “cunning folk” were those who cast spells and assembled remedies meant to cure and protect. Though the boundary line between well-meaning poultices and diabolical witchcraft could quickly blur in society’s eyes — sometimes with the help of artists’ imagery.
ektor garcia, ‘crochet bronze textile’ (detail), 2021; Cast bronze, crocheted copper wire, 53 x 16 x 1 inches. (Courtesy the artist and Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco; Photo by Robert Divers Herrick, San Francisco)
When so much of our time is spent looking at slick images on a shiny screen, it’s important to give our eyes and brains the pleasure of witnessing complicated, multidimensional texture. ektor garcia’s sculptural installations are wonderfully handmade, referencing Mexican craft traditions and standing as testament to the artist’s endurance for repetitive gestures. There’s something of Eva Hesse’s material experimentation in garcia’s work, but softer, more organic, fueled by weaving, knitting and crocheting. At SJMA, existing and new sculptures will be repurposed into a single, new installation.
Jim Melchert, ‘Alternating Current #2,’ 1985; Fired porcelain tile with glaze, 40 x 40 inches. (di Rosa)
When artist and longtime Bay Area educator Jim Melchert died at the age of 92 in 2023, his career had spanned eight decades and multiple mediums, influencing countless students, colleagues and viewers over those years. Melchert may be best known for his fractured, kaleidoscopic ceramics, which embrace chance with stripey, bold patterns. But he also created conceptually driven work in film, photography and performance. A mixture of all of the above will be on view at di Rosa’s new San Francisco location — getting the space and institutional attention his works rightfully deserve.
A performance at the Spring Open House 2025 at Headlands Center for the Arts. (Tom Idle)
Nov. 2, 12–5 p.m.
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito
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Once a season, Headlands opens up its campus to visitors for a day of leisurely wandering through the former military barracks, to visit with artists in residence, preview works in progress and enjoy some of the finest food a mess hall has ever produced. Plus: hiking trails, Rodeo Beach and views galore. A day at Headlands (blissfully, often without cell service) is always a day well spent.
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