SF Art Events: Week of 08.03.25
THING ONE: Chris Austin: Contrasts
Chris Austin: Out Past Curfew, 2025, Gouache on paper mounted on wood, 6 × 8 in | 15.2 × 20.3 cm
Harman Projects is pleased to announce CONTRASTS, a solo exhibition of new works by Toronto-based painter Chris Austin. Known for his dreamlike paintings of wildlife anachronistically navigating suburban and urban settings, Austin’s latest body of work builds on his unique surreal visual language. This will mark the artist’s second solo presentation with Harman Projects and his first solo exhibition in San Francisco.
Austin’s work explores the precipice of narrative and metaphor. In CONTRASTS, marine life drift quietly through familiar yet eerily ominous terrains: snow-covered streets, dimly lit intersections, and quiet neighborhoods under sodium light. These improbable juxtapositions unsettle and invite, prompting the viewer to confront their own sense of alienation while also sparking imagination and delight. Rendered in rich hues and cinematic lighting, the works suggest the filmic tension of Edward Hopper’s twilight scenes (House at Dusk, 1935) and cerebral surrealism of René Magritte (Le Domaine d'Arnheim, 1962).
At the heart of Austin’s practice lies a personal mythology stemming from his own deeply personal autobiographical experiences. The artist describes his aquatic protagonists as “symbolic anchors” drawn from his own childhood experiences embodying moments and memories of both chaos and clarity. Marine life, in particular, becomes a recurring metaphor for higher consciousness and emotional refuge. The scenes he paints are less about a literal coexistence of worlds than about navigating more abstract psychological terrains: moments of serenity and silence cast into the wake of dissonance and estrangement.
LOCATION: Harman Projects SF, 1275 Minnesota Street, Suite 106, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday / 11am - 6pm
Thing Two: David Huffman: A Brilliant Blackout
David Huffman
Boundless, 2025
Acrylic, oil, glitter, fabric, color pencil and spray paint on wood panel
20 x 16 x 1 inches / 50.8 x 40.6 x 2.5 cm
July 24 to August 30, 2025
Jessica Silverman is pleased to present “David Huffman: A Brilliant Blackout,” the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. On view from July 24 to August 30, 2025, the exhibition will present new Afrofuturist paintings from the artist’s acclaimed Traumanaut series.
Huffman is a pioneer in Afrofuturist painting. Blending science fiction, history, and fantasy, Afrofuturism is associated in literature with Octavia Butler and in music to Sun Ra and George Clinton. Themes include space travel, ancestral wisdom, and advanced civilizations led by people of African descent. Unlike Afrofuturist artists like Ellen Gallagher and Wangechi Mutu, Huffman’s works focus on the human (not the alien) and deftly engages with the broad history of post-war painting on canvas.
Over the past twenty-five years, Huffman has explored African-American experience as a parallel reality of intergalactic travel and foreign atmospheres, featuring a diaspora of spiritually connected “traumanauts.” These Black figures in white spacesuits inhabit timeless worlds that are at once reimagined histories and speculative futures. During the past decade, Huffman has also made expressive, painterly works that he calls “social abstractions” in which he deployed varied aesthetics of Black popular culture, including the visual repertoires of sports, fashion, interior design, and psychedelia.
In the new Traumanaut paintings of “A Brilliant Blackout,” Huffman merges the two series; his Black astronauts now inhabit cosmic realms that pulse with abstraction and gestural brushwork. These imaginative landscapes not only reflect the formal and material evolution of Huffman’s practice but also set the stage for new voyages of self-discovery and healing.
In Cornbread Sky (2025), Huffman depicts a traumanaut zip-lining through a complex multi-dimensional abstraction. Buzzing with energy, the environment is simultaneously outer and inner space; it's a galaxy, an interior design, and a state of mind. Employing yellow and purple zigzag stripes, floral fabric, green expressionist brushstrokes, and the artist’s characteristic basketball net motif, the work is in dialogue with artists as varied as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frank Stella, and Yayoi Kusama.
Soul Mother Earth (2025), by contrast, conveys a gentler mood. Layers of baby blue paint, sparkling glitter, and patterns, large and small, have the utopian feel of puppy love on a sunny day. Swirling brushstrokes and a wiggly amoeba-shaped graphic evoke a primordial soup that teems with potential and transformation—a creation event. At the base of the painting, a noble traumanaut holds a white flag that declares “LOVE.”
A suite of smaller works, such as Lobi and Many Rivers (both 2025), includes African animals and Lobi sculptures as symbolic figures for reconnecting with lost spiritual traditions. Set in surreal landscapes, traumanauts ride elephants and encounter sacred objects beneath neon trees and marbled skies. Both intimate and expansive, the scenes meditate on displacement, reverence, and return.
Huffman’s new narrative paintings appear alongside several historic works, including Sideshow (2009). Named after the informal car meet-ups that were a feature of East Oakland in the 1980s and 1990s, this ten-foot-wide work on paper depicts exuberant traumanauts performing donuts and burnouts in Chrysler, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile sedans. Smoke fills the air, and tire marks spiral across pavement framed by cypress and palm trees. Sideshow shares with the new traumanaut works a spirit of freedom and joy.
In a time of backlash and widespread civil rights violations by the US government, Huffman’s empowering counter-narratives are more meaningful than ever. With the works in “A Brilliant Blackout,” the artist deploys all the powers of his imagination to visualize emotionally intelligent and socially relevant alternate realities. One can only hope that the self-determination, dignity, and serenity of Huffman’s new traumanauts will be manifest throughout the country, like a self-fulfilling prophecy destined to come true.
LOCATION: Jessica Silverman, 621 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday-Saturday, 10 AM-6 PM
THINGS THREE: Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California
Ongoing – November 30, 2025
Installation view
Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California traces the flow and flourishing of quilts in the context of the Second Great Migration. As millions of African Americans sought greater opportunities and escape from the South’s oppressive racial environment from 1940 to 1970, they carried quilts as functional objects and physical reminders of the homes they left behind. Simultaneously, the quiltmaking skills that many migrants brought with them—frequently learned from mothers, grandmothers, and other kin—spurred the creation of a new wave of African American quiltmaking in the later part of the twentieth century, extending its roots into the Western United States. The quilts in this exhibition explore the medium’s unique capacity for connecting kin across time and distance, holding memory and ancestral knowledge, and opening up space for beauty and artistic ingenuity.
Consisting of one hundred artworks representing nearly eighty individuals—many of them women with ties to the Bay Area—and recent works by local Black quilt artists, Routed West honors quiltmakers of this distinctive migrant generation and those who carry forth their aesthetic and cultural legacies. It is the first group exhibition of artworks drawn from the African American quilt collection at BAMPFA. Enhanced by a fully illustrated exhibition catalog with significant new scholarship, the exhibition invites audiences into a conversation around the quilts’ joyful power as objects of African American cultural heritage and artworks within expansive histories of art in the United States.
LOCATION: BAMPFA, 2155 Center Street Berkeley, CA (map)
HOURS: Wed - Sunday 11am - 7pm
