#contemporary-art

#contemporary-art

While the local scene blows up for SF Art Week and the FOG Art + Design Fair, the folks at Minnesota Street Projects have got their own thing going on: "a new free alternative art fair showcasing the best established and emerging contemporary art galleries in the Bay Area, alongside long-standing Bay Area galleries." That includes Marrow Gallery, presenting new work from Stephanie Robison (so cool!), Hiroshi Sato, Mercy Hawkins, Mae Aur and Ronald Hall.

For the first time in its 62-year history, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art will present a survey of artists living and working in Connecticut. Today, Tuesday, January 13, the institution named the 40 participating artists in the inaugural Aldrich Decennial. The exhibition, Aldrich Decennial: I Am What Is Around Me, which is expected to recur once every decade, will open on June 7 and run until January 10, 2027. A complete list of artists is included at the end of this article.

Alexander Basil has created a cosmos. His instantly recognizable style and established color palette implicate the subject matter in a process of calm and sure scrutiny. Central to this cage is the familiar figure that reappears, on a quest through daily life. The protagonist is both the subject and object of reflection that morphs in and with his surroundings, travelling worlds beyond the room he finds himself in.

Running from 15 January to 22 February, the as-yet-untitled show includes works from across four decades of Ai's career. Among them are his large-scale Lego works based on famous artworks, including versions of Surfing (After Hokusai) and Water Lilies, a reinterpretation of Monet's triptych of the same title. To mark his India debut, he will also show new Lego works based on Pichwais, intricate cloth paintings depicting devotional Hindu subjects, as well as homages to the country's storied Modernist painters V.S. Gaitonde and S.H. Raza.

Two Chinese Artists Created This Terrifying Hyper-realistic Sculpture Of The Falling Angel An Artist Captured the Innocence of Childhood by Photographing His Three Sons Florey's Unforgettable Alternative Movie Posters Sensitive Ballerina Watercolour Portraits By Liu Yi Artist Turns Animals Into Original Characters That Look Like They Belong In An Anime Russian Artist Adds Digital Pixel Glitches To Animal Tattoos. And It's Awesome!

Nigerian American photographer Mikael Owunna's life-size, shimmering images of ancient deities in outer space set the tone for "UNBOUND: Art, Blackness and the Universe," MoAD's stellar exploration of the African diaspora in the eternal and the infinite. "UNBOUND," which runs through Aug. 16, 2026, is MoAD curatorial chief Key Jo Lee's most ambitious exhibition to date. Over three floors, she presents an African diaspora that is "unbound" from earthly and chronological conceptions of diaspora.

And at Santa Clara's Triton Museum of Art, there's not one but four exhibits opening in January, ranging from slashed-and-bleached abstractions to uncanny paintings of suburbia that hearken to Edward Hopper and David Lynch. That latter show, opening Jan. 10, comes from South Bay artist Jonathan Crow who grew to fame with drawings of U.S. vice presidents wearing octopuses on their heads.

Kathleen Goncharov, a longtime curator who served as the United States Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale, has died at the age of 73. The news of her passing was announced by a group of friends and her partner, poet and artist Charles Doria. She died of natural causes in her Boca Raton home on New Year's Eve. Goncharov is remembered as a doting friend, a champion of artists, and a gifted and intuitive curator.

Blue became my favorite color as soon as I laid eyes upon that most reproduced of artworks: Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," a framed poster of which still hangs in my grandmother's room. Maybe you grew up with a print of this piece somewhere in your home, too. Over the last 12 months though, as blue as they've been, I find myself drawn more and more to the green that hooks my eye: the brushstrokes behind enthralled ballet dancers in British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's " Harp-Strum" (2016), the shifting fabric in Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka's 1931 "Young Woman in Green" and the candy paint of the Bugatti in her 1929 self-portrait, the phthalo green skin of Byron Kim's '90s Belly Painting series.

As the year winds to an end, we cannot move forward without remembering who we've lost. David Lynch, a filmmaker so revolutionary that his style became a new standard. Frank Gehry, the sculptor of skylines. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the multi-hyphenate force of Indigenous aesthetics. Alonzo Davis, who was one of the first Black gallerists in this country and didn't stop there. Koyo Kouoh, who would have been the first African woman to direct the Venice Biennale. And so many more.

"Anchoring" to me means grounding myself in the true, the felt, the tangible. The art world prizes in-person communion - the irreplaceable experience of seeing a work in person - yet increasingly trades in digital surrogates: press releases, Instagram posts, installation views. Coupled with the rise of AI, we're in danger of losing touch with what's embodied, what's real. The city's the exact kind of place that interrupts that