Creativity in Full Force: San Francisco Unveils Major Exhibitions, Immersive Art, and Bold Public Works | San Francisco Travel
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Creativity in Full Force: San Francisco Unveils Major Exhibitions, Immersive Art, and Bold Public Works

San Francisco (May 5, 2025)—This summer, creativity takes over San Francisco. Major exhibitions, boundary-pushing installations, and bold public art are transforming museums, galleries, and open spaces across the city, offering visitors an immersive, exhilarating season of discovery.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s (SFMOMA) impressive exhibition program includes major presentations of celebrated artists’ works:

  • Ruth Asawa: Retrospective (through September 2): This global debut of the San Francisco artist’s first posthumous retrospective features more than 300 artworks that showcase the full range of Asawa’s groundbreaking practice over six decades of her career.
  • Kunié Sugiura: Photopainting (through September 14): 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.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco hosts a diverse range of not-to-miss exhibits:

  • Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (through July 13 at the de Young) is the first comprehensive survey of the British artist’s work in a U.S. museum. Over the past 25 years, Julien has developed a singular, choreographic style of moving image exhibition in the form of immersive multichannel film and video installations that compellingly fuse fact and fiction, social critique, and aesthetic immersion. The exhibit features 10 major video installations, plus early films.
  • Ferlinghetti for San Francisco (July 19, 2025 – March 22, 2026, at the Legion of Honor) 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. 
  • Art of Manga (September 27, 2025 – January 25, 2026, at the de Young) 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.
  • Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art (through August 17 at the Legion of Honor) explores artist Wayne Thiebaud’s six-decade career, including rarely exhibited paintings and works from his personal collection at the Legion of Honor. It is the first retrospective highlighting Thiebaud’s extensive reinterpretations of works by his artistic heroes. 
  • Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm (through July 6 at the de Young) showcases more than 250 personal photos by Paul McCartney, video clips, and archival materials that offer a behind-the-scenes look into the meteoric rise of the world’s most celebrated band. Eyes of the Storm reveals the intensity of life on tour, capturing a period from December 1963 through February 1964. 

The Balloon Museum’s acclaimed EmotionAir: Art You Can Feel exhibition makes its U.S. debut at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. Spanning 7,500 square feet, the exhibition features large-scale interactive installations, projections, and performances that take visitors on a sensory journey. Created by 22 internationally renowned artists, the artworks are on view through September 7.

The free Institute of Contemporary Art, SF (ICA SF), debuts the largest presentation of Masako Miki’s paintings, sculptures, and installations. The fully site-responsive exhibition brings Miki’s paintings, “Night Parades,” to life in experiential form, featuring throngs of Miki’s signature felted character sculptures in a dramatically darkened, immersive environment. Running in tandem (May 16 to December 7) is a site-specific solo exhibition by David Antonio Cruz, including newly commissioned paintings and drawings created in response to the queer histories of San Francisco. Visitors will experience select works from Cruz’s chosenfamily series in an intimate, tactile space, mirroring the plush interiors of his compositions.

The Asian Art Museum presents Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War, the pioneering Taiwanese artist's first North American solo exhibition. The exhibition features work from his critically acclaimed presentation at the 60th Venice Biennale (through July 7). The large-scale exhibition showcases Yuan’s masterful exploration of contemporary life through poetic video installations that bridge personal experience and universal themes. 

FOR-SITE's Black Gold: Stories Untold (June 6–November 2) at Fort Point National Historic Site features 17 installations by local, national, and international contemporary Black artists reflecting on the resilience, struggles, and triumphs of African Americans in California from the Gold Rush through post-Civil War Reconstruction. 

The Museum of Craft and Design presents A Roadmap to Stardust (May 10–September 14), an immersive installation featuring new site-specific work by acclaimed artists Neil Forrest and John Roloff (collaboratively known as OortCloudX). The immersive installation combines mysticism and modern science to reimagine the characters in a present-day narrative influenced by science fiction and popular culture. Also on view is Beau McCall: Buttons On! (May 10 to September 14). The exhibition marks the West Coast debut of the first-ever retrospective showcasing his extraordinary career. Known for his innovative wearable and visual art, this exhibition presents the McCall’s embellished wearable art, including jackets, durags, vests, and jewelry; contemporary art pieces like a button-encrusted cast iron bathtub and a life-size Kool-Aid Man; never-before-seen archival materials; and a few select items of McCall’s button-less works that spotlight his versatility and boundless creativity. 

Since opening in 2015, Letterform Archive has expanded from a 15,000-item private collection to a publicly accessible resource of over 100,000 objects. For its 10th anniversary, the Archive is featuring 100 of the collection’s most beloved objects, offering a glimpse into every corner of the collection with selections that span graphic design movements and include everything from a cuneiform tablet to contemporary artists’ books, modernist typography to everyday ephemera. “10 × 10 for 10” is on view until October 2025. 

SKATE, an electrifying exhibition at 111 Minna Gallery (through June 20), is a love letter to skate culture and the Bay Area. The exhibition includes over 400 skate decks by nearly 300 artists, including Bay Area artists, select LA-based artists who launched their careers in San Francisco, and international artists who either lived in the Bay or share a profound connection to its creative scene. 

Skateboarding San Francisco: Concrete, Community, Continuity (Feb. 13–July 6) 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 expansion, which features three unique, skateable geometric art pieces developed by Olympic skateboarder, MIT-trained architect, and Converse CONs skate rider Alexis Sablone.

Missing Objects Library: CARBONIVORE (through July 20, 2025) at Gray Area Gallery is a sprawling, site-specific exhibition weaving together sculpture and new media to draw attention to the profound physical presence and environmental consequences of our networked lives. A fantastical chimera of animal, plant, mineral, and machine made from 2,000 pounds of e-waste, the main installation manifests the relentless physical infrastructure that supports the Cloud, Big Data, and AI.

All Eyes On Us: Invention & Ingenuity During Artistic Diasporas (through December 13) at Edge on the Square unveils those who are known in Chinatown as “hidden dragons”— individuals whose artistic careers, practices, and expressions shape-shifted or became dormant as they navigated the complexities of immigration, assimilation and survival. All Eyes on Us features sound art, mixed media, installations, and photography by “hidden dragons” such as sculptor and master of paper cutting Yumei Hou and painter, illustrator, and photographer Leland Wong. 

The Walt Disney Family Museum presents a reimagined Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic (May 22–September 7) 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.

Dino Days at the California Academy of Science (on view through Sept. 1) features 13 life-size animatronic dinosaurs taking over the Academy’s outdoor gardens, an interactive fossil dig pit, and kids’ programming. The Academy’s other new traveling exhibition, Unseen Oceans (on view through September 7), takes visitors from the ocean’s sunlit surfaces to its inky depths. Highlights include glowing supersized models like larger-than-life plankton, a floor-to-ceiling array of biofluorescent fish and turtles, fossil casts and specimens, plus the opportunity to hop into the driver’s seat of a submersible with a digital interactive game.

The Museum of Failure in Fisherman's Wharf 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. 

Fantastic Animals from Mexico have taken over Yerba Buena Gardens. The Alebrijes & Nahuales exhibition features seven monumental works, each towering 20 feet tall in the gardens. The free exhibition is on through June 22.

Catch a view of FUTUREFORMS’ Leviathan, a 30-foot site-specific sculptural installation, from outside Moscone Center’s glass-enclosed gallery space at 3rd Street and Paseo Alley (through November 2025). Digitally crafted with hundreds of custom 3D-printed nodes and wooden rods, colorful origami-like scales spiral up the sculpture, and LED light tubes twist up the inner spine to create playful patterns of light and shadow. 

SPECTRA, a groundbreaking new LED public art installation, is illuminating the Civic Center’s Fulton Plaza. Joshua Hubert's installation spans 1.6 acres across the rooftops of the San Francisco Public Library and the Asian Art Museum. SPECTRA’s 1,271 individually programmable LEDs pulse and shimmer in an audio-reactive display of color and light that mimics light and sound spectrums.

R-Evolution has come to Embarcadero Plaza. A commanding 45-foot sculpture by artist Marco Cochrane, R-Evolution celebrates feminine strength and body autonomy and brings art from Burning Man’s playa to downtown San Francisco’s waterfront. Fabricated with over 55,000 welds of steel rod and tubing, R-Evolution is a feat of engineering and artistry. At night, she illuminates, casting a soft yet powerful glow over the plaza. 

Last year, San Francisco’s monument honoring Dr. Maya Angelou was unveiled outside the San Francisco Public Library in Civic Center. Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman by artist Lava Thomas was created to honor Dr. Maya Angelou’s groundbreaking contributions to literature, civil rights, and equality, and is part of a city initiative to increase female representation in public spaces.

The AIDS Memorial Quilt is displayed at San Francisco International Airport’s International Terminal through January 25, 2026. The free exhibit is accessible to all airport visitors before security. With nearly fifty thousand panels dedicated to more than 110,000 people who have died of AIDS-related illnesses, the Quilt is the world’s largest community art project. Founded in 1987 by the NAMES Project in San Francisco, the Quilt is now under the permanent stewardship of the National AIDS Memorial.

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