Your Guide to the Bay Area’s Biggest Art Month

January is now the most action-packed month of the year for Bay Area artists, galleries and museums, thanks in part to the international crowds that flock to Fort Mason for the opulent FOG Design+Art fair.

In 2026, by my count, we have three additional fairs popping up before and during FOG, along with a dense schedule of openings, events, talks and performances taking place in and around SF Art Week (Jan. 17–25). Compared to the rest of the year, January’s pace can feel a bit frantic. What are we, New York?

If you made a New Year’s resolution to get out more but don’t know where to start, we’ve put together an eclectic list of the month’s noteworthy art events for you. Gather your stamina:

‘Sahar Khoury: Weights & Measures’

Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis
Jan. 7–June 20, 2026

After a star turn in the Asian Art Museum’s Rave Into the Future show (up through Jan. 26), Oakland artist Sahar Khoury is starting the year off strong with a solo museum exhibition. Khoury’s sculptures repurpose everyday objects (plastic toys, broken wicker chairs) and combine them into elegant assemblages with ceramics, cast iron and brass. Through her materials and their arrangements, Khoury pointedly asks who and what is worthy of preservation, referencing social spaces, family histories and architectural ruins.

‘Anthony McCall: First Light’

Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco
Jan. 11–March 8, 2026

The British artist Anthony McCall, now 79, developed a way to create artworks from “solid light” in the early ’70s. With the help of fog-machine-like haze, projected light beams sketch three-dimensional shapes in space that people can walk under, reach into and marvel at. (The immersive video installations of today wish they were this beautiful.) Thanks to a partnership with the Kramlich Art Foundation, the elegant Line Describing a Cone, Canonical Solid and Cone of Variable Volume are on display at Fort Mason for two whole months. And the price is right: free.

Sally Scopa, ‘Atmospheric River’

Bass & Reiner, San Francisco
Jan. 10–March 28, 2026

I once picked up a set of tarot-like cards at the flea market that looked a lot like Sally Scopa’s paintings and drawings: enigmatic, ethereal, speckled with airbrushed gradients. Scopa describes the dots covering her paintings as “tiny, condensed beads of moisture” that submerge or dissolve lines of sight. Recently emerged from our own atmospheric river, this blurred view of the world is a familiar one. Visit this show for a gentle reentry into the regular flow of work and life.

‘Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903–Now’

San Francisco City Hall
Jan. 15–June 18, 2026

In a selection of photographs from the 200,000 images that make up the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s photo archive, Moving San Francisco charts the history of the city’s public transit system. Cable cars, buses and trains may be the ostensible focus of these images, but the story of San Francisco’s people and its physical growth is a welcome byproduct. The SFMTA needs all the good will (and riders) it can get right now, as the agency faces a budget deficit that could exceed $300 million annually. Long live MUNI!

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, ‘Garden = Grid = City’

Anthony Meier Gallery, Mill Valley
Jan. 15–February 27, 2026

When Barbara Stauffacher Solomon passed away in 2024, she had a supergraphic painted across the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art lobby (still there), and an asphalt artwork planned for the Minna Street corridor (now under construction). But she didn’t have local gallery representation, and opportunities to see her smaller scale artwork in person were rare. Garden = Grid = City is the artist’s first exhibition at Anthony Meier Gallery, which now represents her estate. Included in this show of works on paper, paintings and a supergraphic are Solomon’s Ping-Pong table paintings, hung on the wall with a net attached, capturing the artist’s playful, devastatingly clever approach to making art.

‘Pure Passage: Soleé Darrell’

Bolinas Museum
Jan. 17–March 29, 2026

I can’t think of a better setting for Solée Darrell’s dreamy silk velvet paintings than Bolinas. The Oakland artist’s alchemical use of powdered and liquid dye continues in a solo exhibition just steps away from the crashing waves of the Pacific.

SF Art Week

All over the Bay Area
Jan. 17–25, 2026

Established in 2024, SF Art Week enters its third year with over 100 participating institutions, some as far-flung as the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and the Sonoma winery/outdoor sculpture garden the Donum Estate. The week kicks off on Jan. 17 with a party hosted by the now-itinerant ICA San Francisco at the Transamerica Pyramid, followed by Marin Art Day on Jan. 18. The best news for us locals is that most of these shows will still be up after the whirlwind week comes to a close.

The Fairs

FOG Design+Art
Fort Mason, San Francisco
Jan. 22–25, 2026

The big, carpeted daddy of San Francisco art fairs, FOG brings an international roster of art and design galleries to one of the city’s most picturesque spots. The addition of FOG FOCUS two years ago opened the door (a crack) to smaller galleries showing less blue-chip, more emerging artists, but this thing remains extremely high-end. A hidden gem in the midst of all the shiny surfaces is the series of talks put on by the fair, featuring local luminaries getting candid on stage.

Atrium & Skylight Above
Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco
Jan. 22–25, 2026

For those seeking a slightly more affordable art experience, Minnesota Street Project has pulled together its own version of a fair, with booths set up within the atrium, and a curated program of off-kilter, artist-run projects showing upstairs in the former Rena Bransten space. Guests include Cambria’s Cruise Control Contemporary, San Francisco residency The Space Program, and Oakland’s Cone Shape Top. It’s a welcome experiment at a time when art fairs have become terrifyingly expensive for galleries to participate in. Best of all, admission is free.

Art.Fair.Mont
Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco
Jan. 19–20, 2026

Nine galleries, hailing from places as near as Oakland and as far away as Zimbabwe, are part of this “boutique” art fair in the hotel’s Pavilion Room. Admission is free with a $10 suggested donation, and the whole thing was organized by GCS Agency, recent host of Epicenter, an exhibition of Jacob Rosenberg’s photography of Embarcadero Center’s early ’90s skating scene.

Creativity Explored X Open Invitational
East Cut Pop-Up (215 Fremont St.), San Francisco
Jan. 23–25, 2026

Creativity Explored and progressive art studios from across the country will exhibit (and sell) work by artists with disabilities. This San Francisco event builds on fairs organized by Open Invitational in New York and Miami, alongside those cities’ major art weeks. As artists with disabilities increasingly enter museums exhibitions and collections, this fair is a testament to their place in every strata of the art world.

‘Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings’

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Jan. 24–April 19, 2026

I couldn’t be more excited for this show. Cha, an interdisciplinary artist who studied art practice, comparative literature and film at UC Berkeley, has often been defined by what might have been — she died in 1982, at the age of 31. But more recently, her remarkable use of deconstructed language, her avant-garde approach and her influence on later generations of Asian American artists, notably Cathy Park Hong, who wrote about Cha in her 2020 book Minor Feelings, have made it clear just how prolific Cha was in her short career. This will be her first retrospective in 25 years.

While you’re at it, why don’t you …

Explore the foundations of Viola Frey’s practice at Walnut Creek’s Bedford Gallery (Jan. 10–April 5)? Fill in the blanks of Cybele Lyle and Carrie Hott’s Et al. solos by attending the openings on Jan. 16? Or see women become one with their environments in Anoushka Mirchandani’s ICA San José exhibition (Jan. 16–Aug. 23). Get a solid 8 Hours of Rest with artist SoiL Thornton at the Wattis Institute (Jan. 20–March 7)? Find out what happens when 3 Dykes Walk Into a Bar… at dani lopez’s Richmond Art Center textile show (Jan. 21–March 14)?