Your Guide toSan Francisco's Museums and Galleries This Spring
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 Street
New Japanese Clay
The Asian Art Museum presents New Japanese Clay, infused with color and sculptural audacity. This exhibition pushes the boundary of centuries-old tradition by challenging the conventions of functional ceramics. Included with general admission, on display now through June 1.
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries
Debuting as a solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area is this collection of work by Berlin-based Japanese contemporary artist Chiharu Shiota. Throughout her career, Shiota’s visual language evokes the fragility and resilience of memory through installation, sculpture, video, and performance. On display April 3 through July 20, special exhibition tickets required.
California Academy of Sciences
55 Music Concourse Drive
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 to ensure you're having a fabulous night, the café and bars at NightLife serve pizzas, pastas, specialty cocktails, craft beer, and delicious wines.
Tiny Chef, Big Impact
In a museum-wide takeover, including an inspiring short film in the Morrison Planetarium, Tiny Chef will host a pop-up exhibit celebrating how tiny actions can make a big impact on our planet. Now on display through May 3.
Children's Creativity Museum
221 Fourth Street
The Children's Creativity Museum is the perfect place to spend time with the children in your life! Visitors can explore two floors of multimedia exhibits and activities designed to guide children of all ages through self-discovery while building creative confidence and collaboration skills.
Counterculture Museum
1485 Haight Street
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.
Edge on the Square
800 Grant Avenue
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.
Legion of Honor
100 34th Avenue
Ferlinghetti for San Francisco
This exhibition 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 now through July 19.
Drawn to Venice
Spanning the Renaissance to the Rococo period, this exhibition celebrates the vitality and originality of the arts in Venice and the Veneto region through more than 30 drawings and prints. From landscapes and figure studies to designs for sumptuous decorations, the works presented in this exhibition offer a fresh look at this memorable place in history and art. On view now through August 2.
de Young Museum
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
Monet and Venice
Although Claude Monet visited Venice only once, his paintings of the city are among his most dazzling. The exhibition will bring together more than twenty of Monet’s Venetian views from public and private collections around the world, including two masterpieces from the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco—The Doge’s Palace and The Grand Canal, Venice. It will mark the first dedicated exploration of Monet’s luminous Venetian works since their debut in 1912, placing them in context with select paintings from key moments throughout his career, and in dialogue with portrayals of the city by artists such as Canaletto, Édouard Manet, John Singer Sargent, J. M. W. Turner, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. On view March 21 to July 26.
Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
685 Mission Street
UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe
UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe is a groundbreaking exhibition that explores the intersections of Blackness and the cosmos. Curated by Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs, the show invites visitors to reimagine Blackness not as fixed or earthbound, but as infinite, expansive, unknowable, and cosmically rich. On display through August 16.
Beauty Plus
Beauty Plus commemorates the closure of the 31-year-old, Black-owned beauty supply in New Haven, Connecticut. Over three months, Jasmine Ross, a multi-media artist based in Oakland, documented the store's final days with her 4 x 5 film camera, honoring owner Mel while revealing a layered narrative of small-business ownership, communal care, and Black survival. On view March 18 to May 31.
Presidio
640 Old Mason Street
I Am An American
I Am An American is a traveling free exhibition honoring the service and sacrifice of World War II Nisei soldiers. Opening its national tour at the Presidio’s MIS Historic Learning Center, the exhibition highlights powerful firsthand accounts, historic photographs, and rarely seen artifacts that illuminate the experiences of second‑generation Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. Army despite widespread wartime discrimination. On display now through July 31.
City Hall
1 Dr Carlton B Goodlett Place
Moving San Francisco: Views from the SFMTA Photo Archive 1903 - Now
On display on the Ground floor and in the North Light Court Hall, Moving San Francisco features a free exhibit that celebrates the history of Muni and the evolution of San Francisco through photography. With images dating back over 120 years, this exhibit will be on display till June 18.
The Walt Disney Family Museum
104 Montgomery Street
Happiest Place on Earth: The Disney Story
The Walt Disney Family Museum continues its celebration of the 70th anniversary of Disneyland with the debut of Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story, an original special exhibition curated by award-winning producer and Disney Legend Don Hahn with museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions Marina Villar Delgado. Inspired by the 2025 book, this treasure trove of Disney history will take guests behind the scenes of one of the most groundbreaking endeavors of the 20th century—the creation and opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Happiest Place on Earth: The Disneyland Story will be on view beginning Friday, November 14 in the museum’s Lower Lobby and Theater Galleries till May.
Museum of Craft and Design
2569 Third Street
Video Craft
Video Craft brings together nearly 20 artists at different stages of their careers, from early pioneers of video production to emerging digital natives. The exhibition hopes to illustrate an unlikely partnership between the heavily embodied practices of craft and the ephemeral nature of the screen. Now on display through August 16.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third Street
Samia Halaby: Kinetic Paintings
This presentation showcases four newly acquired works by pioneering digital artist Samia Halaby, shown on a monumental screen in SFMOMA’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium. Halaby’s “kinetic paintings,” first created using custom code on a Commodore Amiga, transform numerical algorithms into shifting abstractions of color and light. Recently preserved for contemporary display, these works offer a rare look at her groundbreaking fusion of art and technology. On display now through May 19.
KAWS: FAMILY
The KAWS: FAMILY exhibit presents a captivating exploration of the American artist's work, featuring more than 100 pieces from the last three decades. KAWS (born Brian Donnelly, 1974) began as a graffiti artist in the mid-1990s while a teen. KAWS’s recurring cast of characters draws on pop culture icons and mascots, infusing them with his unique visual language. His work now includes sculptures, paintings, and product collaborations, organized by thematic encounters. On display now through May 3.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street
Diedrick Brackens: gather tender night
Throughout the exhibition, single and paired figures are depicted in resplendent scenes of water, flora, and fauna, launching the viewer’s imagination. For Brackens, the outdoors is an important space where queer folks can be themselves and freely participate in spaces of desire and sensuality. On display March 13 to August 23.
Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements
Conjuring Power is a multimedia exhibition exploring the resilient beauty, cultural richness, and fierce resistance of Bay Area queer and trans communities. The exhibition will include work by Ester Hernández, Serge Gay, Jr., Tanya Wischerath, and Crystal Mason, as well as emerging artists from the Queer Ancestors Project, archival material from the GLBT Historical Society, and audio clips from Caro De Robertis’ oral histories with the groundbreaking Elders Project. On display March 13 to August 23.
The Prince of Homburg: A Solo Exhibition by P. Staff
On view for the first time in the United States, The Prince of Homburg explores freedom, repression, desire, and the queer body through prints, sculpture, and a dream-like video installation. The video is projected within an intimate, cabaret-style gallery, with visitors seated at café tables. The immersive installation also includes photograms, images created by placing objects directly on light‑sensitive paper and exposing them to light, and a sculpture of a security fence with impaled objects, both featuring items related to the video. On view now through June 14.
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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