The 10 Best Museum and Gallery Shows to See This Fall

Be sure to check out our full 2026 Fall Arts Guide to live music, movies, art, theater, festivals and more in the Bay Area.

I’ll be honest with you: making this list is hard. There’s simply too much great stuff going on in the Bay Area’s visual arts scene to do it justice in 10 or so blurbs. 

In just the next three months, we’ve got the Richmond Art Center turning 90 years old (and celebrating accordingly). We’ve got RM of BTS co-curating a truly good-looking show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. And we’ve got a gloriously packed third annual Black Art Week, led by the Museum of the African Diaspora.

The arts community has been through a lot this year. And while few of us have the funds or the power to single-handedly save our arts institutions from obsolescence, we can go to things. We can show up at talks, screenings, openings and walks. Because sometimes the difference between something existing and something ceasing to be is an enthusiastic crowd.

Sept. 5, 2026–Jan. 17, 2027
Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco

I have a distinct memory of a book with this title existing on my parents’ coffee table. Turns out it was the catalog of a landmark 1969 Smithsonian exhibition on the previously un-exalted subject of American studio craft. Revisiting this premise nearly 60 years later, R & Company, a New York design gallery, has organized an exhibition that features artists from the original show, as well as a roster of contemporary artists working with clay, fiber, glass, metal, wood, enamel, mosaic and more. A must-see for fans of funky materials, lively interiors and colorful objets d’art. 

Sept. 10–Oct. 24, 2026
Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

It’s been eight years since Lava Thomas’ last solo exhibition in the Bay Area — the 2018 show Mugshots at Rena Bransten Gallery, which featured portraits of women arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. Now, Thomas has turned to her own family history for her large-scale graphite and Conté crayon drawings. Delicate lines and shading give luminous three-dimensionality to Thomas’ images of her ancestors in post-Emancipation Texas. (Opening upstairs the same night is new work from Sadie Barnette, whose equally precise drawings include dollops of rainbow-hued color.)

Sept. 10–Oct. 31, 2026
1201 Minnesota St., San Francisco

KADIST and the Minnesota Street Project Foundation are teaming up to present video installations by Sophia Al-Maria, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Sara Cwynar, Alex Da Corte, Beatrice Gibson and Martine Syms in the foundation’s cavernous warehouse space. In each piece, the artist appears on-screen in a “guise.” I’ve seen only one of these works — Cwynar’s Baby Blue Benzo, an elaborately orchestrated video that exposes the artifice of how images are made — but that one alone is worth lining up for.

Sept. 16–Dec. 13, 2026
St. Mary’s College Museum of Art, Moraga

Malcolm Kenter, a whiz at creating homages to utilitarian and underappreciated facets of the urban environment, will show a decade of his work in his first museum solo show. Kenter takes a variety of material approaches in his work: needlepoint, miniatures, life-sized replicas of architectural features. In all these forms, you can see Kenter’s appreciation for the accumulation of history, building styles and daily grime that gives San Francisco its essential, beautiful character. 

Sept. 17, 2026–Jan. 18, 2027 
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford

In 1859, long before we had 3D scanning and printing, a 29-year-old French artist and inventor came up with a means to translate photographs into solid objects. These photosculptures were an attempt to make portraiture more affordable for a growing middle class. Ultimately, the technology didn’t take off — it’s hard to be ahead of one’s time. But that means we’ll have even more to learn from the first major exhibition of this strange, hybrid approach to capturing likenesses.

Sept. 19–Dec. 13, 2026 
Palo Alto Art Center

This show, curated by Christine Koppes, gathers work by Solée Darrell, Terri Friedman and Angelica Trimble-Yanu to trace the influence of Corita Kent, the artist and one-time nun whose bright colors and lessons on curious, close looking have shaped generations. The pleasure in this one will be seeing how Kent’s work interacts with Darrell’s dye on velvet paintings, Friedman’s kaleidoscopic textiles and Trimble-Yanu’s monochrome prints. 

Sept. 30–Oct. 4, 2026
Various locations

The third edition of Black Art Week, founded by the Museum of African Diaspora, packs a dense schedule of talks, shows, open studios, screenings and parties into spaces all around the Bay. Not to miss: Dewey Crumpler’s Sonic Lineages at MoAD; Dread Scott’s The Body Politic at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; and what’s sure to be an excellent conversation between Emory Douglas and Ashara Ekundayo at Minnesota Street Project. 

Oct. 3, 2026–Feb. 20, 2027
Slash, San Francisco

We are rich in interestingly framed group exhibitions this fall. This one focuses on artists exploring the lesbian body, feminist practices and work that has a physical effect on the viewer. Curator Elena Gross pulls together installation, sculpture and video from Alexa Burrell, Sienna Freeman, Daviel Shy and the late Barbara Hammer (subject of a recent, fantastic documentary, Barbara Forever). “In the act of a woman looking at a woman, specificity is introduced,” Shy writes in the essay that lends this show its name. “Once there are two women in the equation, neither can be the symbol of woman.”

Oct. 10, 2026
Lake Merritt, Oakland

This event comes from the wonderfully acronymed Docomomo, an international organization committed to documenting and conserving sites associated with the modern architecture movement. As part of a national tour day devoted to recreation and play, our local chapter will lead a walk around Lake Merritt to point out the park pavilions, boathouses, playgrounds and athletic facilities that contribute to the lake’s public space. Anticipate thoughts on how this landscape has shifted over time and who gets to access it. 

(If you can’t wait until October, and have a penchant for brutalism, there’s a Docomomo tour of the Glen Park BART station on Sept. 12.) 

Oct. 31, 2026–Jan. 3, 2027
Bolinas Museum

The Bolinas Museum is on a roll. It just opened a show of community publishing from the ’70s (including the town’s own take on the Yellow Pages, on view through Sept. 27) and it will soon mount a retrospective exhibition of the late Bolinas resident Paul Harris. The onetime California College of the Arts professor produced work in a variety of mediums, but his most unique format has to be his stuffed textile pieces, which merged figures with furniture. Organized by the artist’s estate, the show sounds possibly bigger than Bolinas itself, with nearly 40 works and an accompanying catalog.

Nov. 21, 2026–ongoing 
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

For some reason, I thought the Julie Mehretu paintings that currently flank the main staircase inside SFMOMA’s Third Street entrance were a permanent fixture. Not so! Sarah Sze, known for her dazzling, complex installations of small, colorful objects, has been commissioned to create a new piece for the atrium. Created with accessibility in mind, the work includes video projections, three monumental paintings and a “rhythmic, pulsating soundscape.” (We hope, for the sake of SFMOMA staffers at the coat check, that the sound levels are conducive to long-term exposure.)

September: Masaki Fujihata’s BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration at OMCA; Dorian Reid’s Calling All Cats! at MoAD; the group exhibition I see every wave at the Berkeley Art Center; Greg Ito’s solo show at the ICA San José.

October: an unobstructed view of the Ferry Building, when the giant lady is finally deinstalled; Leila Weefur’s The Chapel of Becoming at the Lab.

November: the films of Paul Clipson, screening at Indexical in Santa Cruz.