Guide toSan Francisco's Museums and Galleries This Summer
Explore inspiring exhibitions from esteemed creators of the past and present at these San Francisco institutions.
San Francisco is home to dozens of must-see museums and acclaimed art galleries. Need help deciding which to visit during your stay? No problem! We’ve gathered the goods on the most exciting exhibitions on display across the city. Keep reading to learn more and buy your tickets.
Asian Art Museum
200 Larkin St.
Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War
The personal becomes universal in recent work by pioneering Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming (b. Taipei, 1965), whose starkly poetic videos and installations examine contemporary life's fragmented and surreal nature. On display through July 7, 2025.
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Dr.
NightLife
Every Thursday, the California Academy of Science invites visitors (21+) to a vibrant evening of dancing and musical performances, participating in thought-provoking talks and presentations, and a visit with Claude, the resident albino alligator. And to ensure you're having a fabulous night, the café and bars at NightLife serve pizzas, pastas, specialty cocktails, craft beer, and delicious wines.
Dino Days
This spring, come face-to-fang with prehistoric giants as 13 awe-inspiring, life-size animatronic dinosaurs take over both of the Academy’s outdoor gardens in the academy's biggest Dino Days ever.
Venom: Fangs, Stingers, and Spines
Discover how often-feared yet biologically important animals like spiders, scorpions, jellyfish, and snakes sting, suck, bite, and stun while using venom to capture prey and provide deadly defense against predators.
Unseen Oceans
Oceans cover 70% of the Earth’s surface—and yet it’s estimated that only 5% have been explored. Quench your curiosity about the mysterious marine world that surrounds us with Unseen Oceans:
Children's Creativity Museum
221 Fourth St.
Lil' Critter City
This brand new Early Childhood space is designed for the museum's youngest visitors. Crawl, feel, explore, and play in a space designed for tiny hands and expanding minds.
Counterculture Museum
1485 Haight St.
The Counterculture Museum is a brand-new museum in San Francisco’s historic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood that explores the city’s role as the epicenter of America’s countercultural movements. From civil rights and racial justice to LGBTQ+ liberation, women’s rights, and the hippie era, the museum highlights how these transformative movements helped shape the city—and the country—through immersive exhibits and powerful storytelling.
The de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Dr.
Isaac Julien: I Dream a World
Over the last 25 years, pioneering artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (b. 1960, London) has created immersive, multichannel video installations. Celebrated for his poetic visual narratives, Julien explores power, politics, and personal experience through the lens of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Featuring 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, alongside select early single-channel films including his iconic Looking for Langston (1989), this exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Julien’s work in a museum setting and his first retrospective in the United States. On display through July 13, 2025.
Art of Manga
This is the first major museum show in the Americas dedicated to exploring the art form of manga, the genre of Japanese comics and graphic novels characterized by evocative drawings. The 700-piece exhibition provides a rare opportunity to experience original drawings by some of the most influential manga artists, many of which have never been on public view. On display September 27, 2025 to January 25, 2026.
The Exploratorium
Pier 15, Embarcadero
Adventures in AI
Discover how AI works, think like a computer, and paint with your voice. Interact with AI-powered artworks, look inside a video game chip, and play with image generators. Encounter AI at work in real-world science and research, explore its ethics and impacts, and bring your curiosity to live programs for adults and families. On display through September 15, 2025.
Edge of the Square
800 Grant Ave.
All Eyes On Us
All Eyes on Us: Invention & Ingenuity During Artistic Diasporas shines a spotlight on “hidden dragons” - individuals whose artistic careers, practices and expressions shape shifted or became dormant as they navigated the complexities of immigration, assimilation and survival.
FOR-SITE
Black Gold: Stories Untold
2 Marina Blvd Building C
Now on view at Fort Point, FOR-SITE’s highly anticipated exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold invites 17 contemporary artists and collectives to reflect on the resilience, struggles, and triumphs of African Americans who lived in California from the Gold Rush to the Reconstruction period following the Civil War. On display through November 2, 2025.
Jewett Gallery at the San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin St.
Skateboarding San Francisco: Concrete, Community, Continuity
This exhibit spans 50 years from 1975 and celebrates the unique urban features that make the city so skateable and a lodestar for skateboarders worldwide. On view in the Jewett Gallery at the San Francisco Public Library, the exhibit is just steps away from the UN Skate Plaza’s new expansionOpens in new window, which features three unique, skateable geometric art pieces developed by Olympic skateboarder, MIT-trained architect, and Converse CONs skate rider Alexis Sablone. On display through July 6, 2025.
Legion of Honor
100 34th Ave.
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art
Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021) became famous for his colorful paintings of American confections and buffets. He was also a self-described art “thief,” who openly drew ideas from and reinterpreted old and new European and American artworks. Highlighting work from across the beloved artist’s six-decade career, this exhibition features Thiebaud’s inventive reinterpretations and direct copies of famous artworks, as well as objects from his personal art collection that inspired him. On display through August 17, 2025.
Ferlinghetti for San Francisco
Ferlinghetti for San Francisco explores the artistic practice of one of San Francisco’s most beloved and significant cultural figures: Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021). A poet, activist, publisher, and cofounder of City Lights Bookstore, Ferlinghetti was also an avid painter, draftsman, and printmaker. On display from July 19, 2025 to March 22, 2026.
Museum of Craft and Design
2569 Third St.
Beau Mccall: Buttons On!
Buttons On! marks the first-ever retrospective for artist, Beau McCall. Proclaimed by American Craft magazine as “The Button Man,” McCall creates wearable and visual art by hand-sewing clothing buttons onto mostly upcycled fabrics, materials, and objects. Buttons On! showcases pieces from McCall’s nearly forty-year career, the debut of several new works, and select archival material. On display through September 14, 2025.
A Roadmap to Stardust
Drawing on antiquarian images of the heavens, origin stories, and myths of early civilizations, A Roadmap to Stardust is a modern inquiry into the cosmos and humankind’s eagerness to explore distant planets. On display through September 14, 2025.
The Museum of Failure
145 Jefferson St.
This is a 10,000-square-foot space that showcases over 150 historical missteps, oddities, and corporate flops. In residence through mid-August, the museum highlights how missteps such as Apple's ill-fated Newton and Colgate's frozen lasagna can ultimately spark growth and innovation.
Palace of Fine Arts
3601 Lyon St.
EmotionAir
Experience art like never before at EmotionAir—now through September at the Palace of Fine Arts. This immersive exhibition uses inflatable art and interactive installations to turn emotions into larger-than-life masterpieces. From playful projections to thought-provoking performances, get ready for a sensory journey that will move, surprise, and inspire.
Rebecca Camacho Presents
526 Washington St.
Michiko Itatani : Cosmic Codes
Michiko Itatani’s paintings consider science, the cosmos, and cultural traditions. Over the course of her decades-long career, Itatani has developed a unique pictorial language focusing on the human desire to understand and apprehend the unknown. On display from June 26 to August 2, 2025.
Laura Rokas : A Meal In Itself
In the project room, Laura Rokas: A Meal in Itself is the artist's first exhibition with Rebecca Camacho Presents. Excavating vintage Betty Crocker and Weight Watchers recipe cards, Rokas painstakingly recreates these bygone images in oil paintings on paper. On display from June 26 to August 2, 2025.
So the City Can Exist
For the artists in So the city can exist the city is muse. A particular city or cities, real or imagined, function as a recurring source of inspiration, fostering ideas with which to respond to, react against, or deeply engage with over a sustained period of time. The exhibition artists represent discreet elements that comprise a city's unique features - its architecture, power grids, facades, signage, and the people that inhabit it - through a range of approaches and viewpoints. On display from August 7 to September 13, 2025.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third St.
Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
This first posthumous retrospective presents the full range of Ruth Asawa’s work and its inspirations over six decades of her career. As an artist, Asawa forged a groundbreaking practice through her ceaseless exploration of materials and forms. On display through September 2, 2025.
Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting
The artist's first U.S. survey exhibition showcases over 60 works that challenge the conventions of photography. Her work is defined by the balancing of dualisms—Japanese/American, organic/human-made, and painting/photography. On display through September 14, 2025.
The Walt Disney Family Museum
104 Montgomery St.
Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic
The Walt Disney Family Museum presents a reimagined Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic. This exhibition that explores the artistic brilliance of one of Disney's most original and beloved designers. Blair influenced the look and feel of many of Disney’s animated films and theme park experiences, and the exhibit features nearly 150 artworks and historical photographs. On display through September 7, 2025.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission St.
The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison Through Art
Curated from within prison, The Only Door I Can Open: Women Exposing Prison through Art explores truths about women and incarceration. For this immersive multimedia exhibition, co-curators Tomiekia Johnson and Chantell-Jeannette Black asked eight currently and formerly incarcerated artists to reflect on their relationship to their bed. On display through June 22, 2025.
Lucas Mittenentzwei is a digital project and content consultant. Originally from Germany, he has lived in California since 2010, calling San Francisco his home for several years. Lucas started in the hospitality industry before joining Visit California in its mission to inspire the world to visit the Golden State. He is passionate about all aspects of the travel experience, but trying new restaurants (or tried-and-true classics) is at the top of his list.
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