Samaira Wilson reports for Elephant on all things San Fransisco Art Fair.
For the 14th edition of the San Francisco Art Fair, sunny skies and a warm bay breeze ushered art patrons into the Fort Mason Festival Pavilion. Situated along the waterfront, the pavilion has sweeping views of the Marin Headlands, Pacific Ocean, Golden Gate Bridge, and Alcatraz Island. It all felt distinctly San Franciscan, as the city’s history met its enduring creative spirit. Produced by Art Market Productions under the direction of Fair Director Kelly Freeman and Artistic Director Nato Thompson, the fair continues to serve as a triumph of both regional and global voices in contemporary art. Featuring 88 exhibitors, 46 cultural partners from across the region, public projects, large-scale sculptures, immersive installations, and a curated panel program.
“This year, organically, looking at many of the submissions we were getting from a territorial and gallery standpoint, the idea of an Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) immigrant legacy focus emerged. I don’t like to force curatorial moments, so when they happen like this, we can really lean into it,” says Freeman. The ecosystem in the Bay Area demonstrates how great contemporary art cities have different kinds of institutions: big collecting institutions, galleries, locally focused non-profits, and ambitious non-collecting institutions. These spaces invite artists to push their practice, take risks, try new things, and be nimble in their DNA. Thompson noted, “Every gallery has its own sensibility and approaches the world in its own way. With our projects, we try to introduce people to things that aren’t just for the home, like performance art, video art, and political art. We also have our cultural partners, so visitors understand the local cultural infrastructure that shapes their city. There are multiple purposes happening in one room, and that’s what helps us keep the community as present as possible.”
Central to the fair’s AAPI focus, the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) of San Francisco and Edge on the Square, presented 大大膽 Da Da Daam, a curated exhibition of Asian diasporic artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and more. I learned that Da da daam means bravery, almost like being insanely brave. The repetition of Da da, pays homage to the avant-garde Dadaism and daam means your gut, referring to having the courage to follow through with your instincts even when it feels risky. “I always tell people I don’t just curate objects. It’s really about the neighbor, the times, and the people. It’s a social practice for me,” said the curator, Hoi Leung. The artists include Bijun Liang, Leland Wong, Yumei Hou, Alice Wu, Connie Zheng, and Tung Pang Lam. All of which have moved through Chinatown’s arts ecosystem in a number of ways. Some artists were born and raised in San Francisco, and still live and work in Chinatown, sometimes out of public housing or single-room occupancies. As well as artists whose practices took major turns through residencies, research, or relationships formed in the neighborhood. The Chinese Culture Center also got the chance to welcome visitors to their new physical space at 667 Grand Avenue, now representing around 75 emerging Asian artists. Accompanying the booth was a pop-up CCC Design Store, featuring items for sale made by affiliated artists, designers, and craftspeople.
Another partner with the fair was the Black Art in America Fine Art Print Fair, founded by avid collectors Najee and Seteria Dorsey, showcasing works by over 50 artists including Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Traci Mims, Michael Ellison, and more. The print fair will continue to travel with Art Market Productions to the Seattle and Atlanta Art fairs, continuing to put contemporary artists in conversation with legacy artists. The focus of Black Art in America has always been to share limited edition prints, with low edition numbers. With focus on building value, educating people about collecting, and giving them access to material. “We want art to be accessible to people. So, the least expensive work that’s in there is about $300 to $350, and then it goes up from there. People can get sticker shy, so there are multiple points of access for people to get something that they enjoy.” Black Art in America honors the intricacy of printmaking, displaying prints that require meticulous layers, laborious processes, and experimental methods that create new modes of legibility. There was a stunning Traci Mims relief print that had several colors and profound detail, I was floored, if you know anything about relief printing, you know how intuitive color reduction is and how much control you must exercise over the buildup of the image. The Dorsey’s even had archival Robert Pruitt aluminum plates, Kerry James Marshall woodcuts, and David Driskell acrylic monotypes on view.
Further engaging visitors through curated panels, Inheriting San Francisco, moderated by Dwell Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, William Hanley, brought together stage curator and designer Anand Sheth, with artists Chibuzor Darl-Uzu and Damaso Mayer. Hanley guided the conversation to retrieve a pulse of the San Francisco art scene today, probe what each participant has inherited from the city’s history, how it informs their work, and the philosophies shaping their design practices. Sheth explained how the stage itself embodied these ideas, as a key material used in the installation was OSB (oriented strand board). Beyond its aesthetic transformation, OSB carries conceptual weight: it evokes both DIY ingenuity and the boarded-up storefronts common in San Francisco and other urban environments facing vacancy. This duality became central to the project’s narrative. As a temporary pop-up occupying space, the installation pokes at both transience and systemic urban challenges. Sheth referenced the idea that “vacancy is vandalism,” reframing emptiness not as neutrality but as a condition shaped by authority, ownership, and neglect. Darl-Uzu was the mind and hand that constructed the seating for the stage. Compiling different wood grains, metals, and cushions full of sawdust, the seating had an edgy mid-century mod feel. As a recent graduate from California College of the Arts, his process is dictated by his experience as a skateboarder, as he leans on improvisation, investigates hidden design, studies the history of material, and defines the art scene not waiting for permission to make. Mayer, whose background spans industrial design and landscape architecture, emphasized a deep appreciation for materiality. Presenting aluminum and stone sculptures, Mayer described how the region’s geology, geography, and industrial infrastructure are his biggest influence, where bridges meet bluffs, and engineered systems exist in constant dialogue with nature.
Another notable panel, Curating Across Landscapes and Biennials, moderated by Nato Thompson, brought together Jenny Gil (Executive Director at Desert X), Mara Gladstone (Curator of the Philippine Pavillion at the Venice Biennale), and Robin Wright (Founder of Further Triennial) to discuss what it takes to produce a biennial, represent a nation-state, and organize a brand new triennial. Gil emphasized that the most important part of a biennial like Desert X is the invisible work: what happens before, between, and after exhibitions. Gil remarked on how two years passes quickly, as they support artists in producing some of their largest and most ambitious works. Many installations are built only for the exhibition’s duration, after which all the materials are recycled. An audience member asked if the installations would ever be permanent, and Gil went on to thoughtfully question permanence: “What is permanence? Is it five years, ten, twenty? Permanence usually involves a lot of public discussions, which is a different level of convening that isn’t the same as a temporary exhibition, so it would slow down the projects that we present. The projects are meant to highlight areas in the Coachella Valley in the desert, but then to go away and leave no trace. So, it’s not so much about changing the landscaping or affecting it.”
Gladstone unpacked the politics of representing a nation-state at the Venice Biennale, as the project she curated by Jon Cuyson tells a love story through four perspectives: the sailor, his trans lover, his shamanistic mother who protects him, and the ocean itself as an omnipresent oracle. Gladstone also curated The Sun Beneath, on view at the fair, a selection of paintings by Cuyson. In the work he builds embossed surfaces with acrylic and lacquer, embedding impressions of mussels, crustaceans, single-use straws, and everyday debris to evoke traces of human presence. Rooted in sediments of history and social ecologies, Cuyson adopts the perspective of a seafarer, and Gladstone noted that almost every artwork at the Venice Biennale has most likely been touched by Filipino sea labor. The work asks us to see the ocean not simply as passage, but as a plane of being, an archive of movement, memory, and exchange. Wright described the Further Triennial as the first Northern California triennial, launching March 10, 2027, running for three months with over 80 nonprofit partner spaces across the region, from Santa Cruz to Sacramento, Sonoma to San Jose, and 40 spaces in San Francisco.
To close, I meditate on the Saint Joseph’s Arts Society founded by Ken Fulk. Inspired by its home inside a revitalized historic church, they carved out space for respite on the fair floor by using church pews as seating, inviting collective rest within the bustle of the fair. They presented Shared Scriptors, a collaborative writing project developing an evolving text that laid on a pulpit, offering space for inscription. The prompts asked, “Where do you find your church? What is sacred to you? What are your rituals?” I took up a whole page writing about my church being my mind, body, soul, and spirit. My sacredness being my breath, heartbeat, and senses. My ritual being gratitude for being guided like the wind directing a sailboat. All in all, this year’s fair practiced a sentimental stewardship of historical, cultural, and geographic legacies.
