SF Art Events: Week of 09.21.25
THING ONE: Art of Manga
Opening September 27, 2025
September 27, 2025 – January 25, 2026
Yamashita Kazumi, LAND, Hand drawing
Manga — Japanese comics and graphic novels — have become a global phenomenon. Featuring rarely presented original drawings by major artists, this exhibition showcases the world of manga from the 1970s to today. The exhibition explores manga as a powerful medium for visual storytelling, highlighting themes across genres, from friendship to sexuality to the human condition. Looking closely at each artist’s narrative worlds and creative processes, the exhibition also spotlights manga’s cultural impact today and possibilities for the future.
LOCATION: de Young, Golden Gate Park, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday – Sunday 9:30 am – 5:15 pm
Thing two: Katy Grannan:Mad River
ONGOING - October 25th
Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Katy Grannan: Mad River, an exhibition of new photographs made in Northern California’s Humboldt County, where Grannan has recently been living and working. In the ongoing portrait series, on view for the first time, Grannan depicts subjects who reflect the independent spirit of an area known for the privacy and seclusion it offers. Often building relationships with her subjects, Grannan explores the connections between self-presentation and place, creating a kind of collaborative fiction. This will be the gallery’s sixth exhibition of Grannan’s work since 2006.
Densely forested and largely rural, Humboldt County has been called a place where people go to disappear. Grannan first came to the area in 2023 and began photographing people she met through methods she knew, using Craigslist ads and fliers posted on local bulletin boards to find models. Her subjects are eager to be seen, and to collaborate with Grannan for reasons as varied as the individuals themselves: an autistic teenager, a circus performer, an actress, a queer farmer, a man and his goat. Over time, Grannan’s network has expanded as subjects refer friends and roommates, offering a cross-section of a particular community. In a place that has long attracted nonconformists of different types, many of the people Grannan photographed are part of the area’s different creative circles, and many identify as genderqueer.
LOCATION: Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tuesday–Friday, 10:30am–5:30pm, Saturday, 11am–5pm
Tony, Arcata, CA, 2025, pigment print, 29 x 21-3/4 inches (image, sheet & mount) [73.7 x 55.2 cm], edition of 3
THINGS THREE: Belinda Fox: Tipping the scales
Installation view
Ongoing - October 15th
Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Tipping the Scales, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Belinda Fox. Tipping the Scales is Fox's fifth solo exhibition with Maybaum Gallery and brings together a new series of paintings that explore growth and the strength of nature in a time of deep uncertainty. With so much conflict, displacement, and environmental crisis around us, Fox feels compelled to make work that offers a quiet resistance —an intentional act of optimism. These paintings are her way of trying to tip the scales toward something more compassionate and healing. As with much of her work, Fox combines a range of techniques— watercolor, ink, pen, collage, spray acrylic, and encaustic wax. The layered surfaces and botanical elements speak to a love of materials and mark-making, and to the richness she finds in the natural world— not as a form of escape, but as a vital source of resilience.
LOCATION: Maybaum Gallery, 49 Geary Street, Suite 416, San Francisco, CA (map)
HOURS: Tues - Sat 10:30 am - 5:30 pm
