Spring Fling

San Francisco Art Fair

Fort Mason Festival Pavilion

April 17-19

     San Francisco Art Fair has returned, bringing together a dynamic cross-section of modern and contemporary art from the Bay Area and beyond. The Fair will present 85 leading galleries from around the world alongside a dynamic series of public programming. With an emphasis on thoughtful presentation and curatorial rigor, the Fair’s 14th edition reflects the experimental and inclusive character of the Bay Area while continuing its role as a year-round platform for the many voices of our region.

Prominent Public Projects

     Consider attending these Baker’s Dozen of Public Projects:

Shared Scriptors

     For many years, Saint Joseph’s Arts Society has partnered with SF Art Fair as a public presence on the fair floor, creating environments that prioritize rest, conversation and collective experience attuned with the pace of the fair. This year, they join with Art + Water, an organization addressing the urgent need for affordable artist workspace while fostering long-term artistic careers and revitalizing San Francisco’s waterfront. Together, they present a collaborative project centered on mentorship, co-presence and mutual support across Bay Area arts institutions.

A Quiet Resilience

     The San Francisco Art Dealers Association’s exhibition explores how artwork can be resilient without overtly depicting it in the subject matter. It asks, what does resilience looks like behind the scenes? Rather than visually depicting resilience, the exhibited artworks either embody it materially, imply it thematically, or even more subtly, demonstrate it through artistic achievement.

BAIA Fine Art Print Fair

     Black Art In America’s presentation will include fine art prints and original works on paper from over 50 legacy masters and contemporary trailblazers. The presentation responds directly to the continued growth and resilience of fine art prints today. Collectors increasingly understand that editioned works—when thoughtfully produced and historically grounded—offer a compelling balance of rarity and accessibility. 

Fine art prints have carried institutional significance for centuries, with major institutions acquiring them as early as the 1400s, affirming their enduring cultural and scholarly value. Here you will find limited editions from almost everyone you can imagine, including Sam Gilliam, Richard Mayhew, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Traci Mims, Najee Dorsey and Alfred Conteh.

Where Art Originates

     What does it mean to give an artist space and time, truly, without demand or deadline? For over four decades, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program has invested in what is often invisible: the conditions that allow art to begin. Removed from the pressures of production and presentation, artists at Djerassi are supported by an environment designed for concentration and experimentation: private studios, shared dialogue and daily meals prepared by resident chefs. This presentation at the SF Art Fair allows you to trace the generative arc between residency and realization.

大大膽 Da Da Daam

     This is a Special Presentation by the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and remarkable Edge on the Square, powered by Chinatown’s audacity and courage. 大大膽 (Da Da Daam) means bold, audacious and courageous in Cantonese. It celebrates risk-taking, playful experimentation and fearless imagination. This spirit animates both Chinatown and the artists in this exhibition.

     America has often been disappointing to immigrants and diasporic communities. Yet, these artists imagine what-could-be. As the country continues to wrestle with who belongs, this exhibition highlights Asian diasporic artists whose work moves between remembrance and play. In moments of rupture, they build meaning from loss, humor, absurdity and uncertainty.

CCC Design Store Pop-Up

     If you’re really there just for “the stuff,” check out the CCC Design Store. It plays a vital role in amplifying the voices of both emerging and established artists, with a strong focus on those from Asian American, immigrant, BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ communities. Items are available for purchase, which directly supports the artists and furthers the Chinese Culture Center’s mission to uplift and empower these communities; thus inviting you to be part of a larger movement, one that champions creativity, equity and community strength.

The Accordion Shop

     The site operates as a platform for artists experimenting across materials and forms. The exhibition fosters dialogue between contemporary art, history, and community.

Seeing San Francisco

     Inspired by Italo Calvino’s iconic work Invisible Cities, Root Division is proud to present a selection of artworks that reflect San Francisco (and the Bay Area) not merely as a collection of homes and buildings but as a network of interconnected relationships, memories, desires and fears; a mirage that is both real and imagined. 

Anida Yoeu Ali: The Red Chador – Becoming Rogue

     Internationally acclaimed artist Anida Yoeu Ali presents The Red Chador: Becoming Rogue as a new, participatory experience. The exhibition began a decade ago in Paris during a surge of Islamophobia in France. 

The Red Chador is an iconic figure wrapped in a sequin chador, a full-body garment worn by some Muslim women. After appearing in 15 cities across 7 countries, this iteration finally arrives in the Bay Area, where Ali transforms a section of the SF Art Fair into a fashion boutique. Visitors are invited to step inside the Red Chador’s luxurious walk-in closet and activate the performance.

Jon Cuyson: The Sun Beneath

     This painting series offers an early glimpse into Cuyson’s forthcoming exhibition for the Philippine Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Here, the artist builds embossed surfaces with acrylic and lacquer, allowing negative impressions of mussels, single-use straws and everyday debris to settle into luminous fields of blue, green and violet. The glossy finish creates shifting depth, suggesting an undersea terrain where beauty and residue coexist.

Trulee Hall: Cloud Goddess

     Suspended from the ceiling as an ethereal, watchful presence, Cloud Goddess is a large-scale, multimedia, kinetic sculpture that greets visitors with a sense of cosmic oversight. Shaped like a luminous cloud, the work evokes ancient sky deities who governed weather and fate. Here, that celestial presence reappears in a contemporary feminist form.

     Embedded within the cloud’s surface are two video monitors creating animated eyes, shifting like the planet’s ever-changing atmosphere. Her curious gaze suggests a living sky—an observant being quietly witnessing humanity’s rituals of gathering, exchange and spectacle. Hanging beneath and around the cloud are rotating zigzags in vibrant shades of purple. These motorized lightning bolts playfully reference atmospheric electricity with a subtle retro energy and the coded signals of modern communication.

     Together, the elements suggest a divine cloud consciousness transmitting energy
toward the earth—an active, feminine intelligence whose shifting moods ripple through air, weather and human experience.

Chad Hasegawa: Untitled

     Chad Hasegawa’s work meets corrugated steel with edge and color. The composition is minimal and hard edged, with clear planes and precise boundaries and nothing unnecessary. In the spirit of California abstraction, shaped by clarity and coastal light, the mural embodies the power of shape, pattern, repetition and color. A shape leans into another. Intervals echo. Edges hold their ground. Nothing strains for attention. Everything moves with purpose.

Mary Lai: Carry On

     These sculptures are made of layers of leather and wood. Each layer is stitched with edges painted like a handbag strap, creating a prolonged arched shape. They resemble long portals, rainbows or some kind of plant life.  They can stand alone but grouped together they parallel a forest ranging in height from 2-6 feet tall. The soft/hard sculptures are simultaneously masculine and feminine. Leather straps are used as the medium to question the baggage one carries in life and how these Carry On sculptures are free from it.

For more information on any of these exhibitions or the SF Art Fair in general, click here.