The Best Exhibitions to See Around San Francisco During FOG Design+Art

January brings a full slate of exhibitions and public programs across the Bay Area, many timed to coincide with San Francisco Art Week, headlined by the 12th edition of FOG Design+Art, which opens January 21-25 at Fort Mason Center. Across the city, galleries, museums, and independent venues are debuting solo shows, group exhibitions, and special projects that span contemporary sculpture, painting, ceramics, fiber, and design, alongside historical presentations focused on key regional figures that underscore the region’s enduring stronghold of artistic ingenuity. Below, explore nine exhibitions that caught Galerie’s eye.  

1. “100 Candleholders” at Blunk Space | Point Reyes Station 

Building on a lineage that began with JB Blunk’s influential 1981 exhibition “100 Plates Plus,” this expansive group presentation invites the same number of international artists to create a candleholder inspired by Blunk, his work, or the Blunk House, using any material and approach. The project reflects Blunk’s belief that repeated engagement with a humble object could open unexpected creative paths. “His constant iteration on the form became a springboard for creating sculptures,” explains Mariah Nielsen, director of the JB Blunk Estate and Blunk Space. Highlights include James Naish’s towering bronze candlestick that rises like a geological event and a spare copper piece by Aldo Bakker that distills the object to its bare essentials.  

2. “New Work: Sheila Hicks” at SFMOMA | Soma 

For her latest solo presentation, Sheila Hicks draws from objects, textures, and patterns tied to places of personal significance, from the cobblestones of her Paris courtyard to the lighthouses of Ouessant, the rocky Breton island shaped by treacherous seas. The installation brings together new works alongside reconfigured elements from earlier projects. A towering suspension of tumbling cords defines the gallery and recalls a soaring phare, or lighthouse. Beacon-like comets built from vivid, intersecting lines suggest topographical terrain, while panels of hand-inserted linen evoke constantly shifting cloud cover. Smaller works trace daily studio experiments, and reworked bâtons and mounds of tufted fiber demonstrate an approach Hicks describes as “walking the tightrope into the future.” 

3. “The Houses Are Haunted By White Night-Gowns” at The Future Perfect | Pacific Heights 

There’s no surpassing the thrill of the find, and Studio Ahead builds this exhibition around that instinct. Drawing on pre-internet habits of roaming secondhand shops, the Bay Area firm transformed the gallery with stacked arrangements of midcentury armoires and credenzas from Mid Century Møbler alongside historic furnishings from C. Mariani Antiques. Artists represented by the gallery such as Anna Karlin, Bari Ziperstein, Lindsey Adelman, and John Hogan contributed bowls, each scaled to hold fruit or serve pasta family-style, with complete freedom of material and approach. The installation recalls the dense accumulations of an antique shop while echoing the imagined landscapes children invent among towering furniture. 

4. “Auudi Dorsey: What’s Left, Never Left” at Jonathan Carver Moore | Tenderloin 

Drawing on archival photographs and historical records, New Orleans–based painter Auudi Dorsey excavates the histories of leisure sites that once served as vital gathering grounds within African American communities. These beaches and pools fostered joy, social life, and resilience before neglect, environmental change, and redevelopment erased many from view. Through a new body of paintings developed during a six-week residency, Dorsey reframes these sites to confront assumptions about Black distance from aquatic culture. The work focuses on African women and the generational loss of swimming knowledge tied to disproportionately high drowning rates. “This body of work aims to imagine what those missing photos and untold stories might have looked like,” Dorsey says. 

5. “Elmer Bischoff” for Nelson Duni | Mission District 

A central figure of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Elmer Bischoff moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration, guided by an acute sensitivity to atmosphere and mood. This show brings together roughly 30 paintings and works on paper that trace his practice, from early surrealist canvases to expansive figurative compositions and later abstractions. Seen together, it illuminates a painter who conveyed emotional charge through brushwork while resisting fixed representation. Spanning five decades, from the 1940s to the 1980s, the show marks the first presentation in more than 20 years to survey Bischoff’s full arc. Figure drawings from the 1960s and 1970s further illuminate his studio practice and collaborative working methods. 

6. The Donum Estate | Sonoma 

While not a formal exhibition, the Donum Estate will host daily walking tours during San Francisco Art Week that offer rare access to one of the most ambitious private sculpture collections open to the public. Assembled by megacollectors Allan Warburg and Mei Warburg, the holdings at The Donum Estate encompass more than 60 large-scale outdoor works by artists including Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, Olafur Eliasson, Sanford Biggers, and Keith Haring. Many works were conceived as site-specific commissions, unfolding across the winery’s rolling 200-acre landscape of vineyards and hills in Sonoma County. 

7. “En Este Momento” presented by AGO Projects at Anthony Meier | Mill Valley 

The two galleries reunite to present a focused group of Mexico City–based artists and designers whose practices move fluidly across disciplines. Pol Agustí, Alana Burns, Kora Moya Rojo, and Flores Cosmos each explore how handwork and material experimentation can expand contemporary approaches to domestic objects, from furniture and ceramics to textiles and florals. The front gallery becomes a botanical installation by Flores Cosmos, with sculptural arrangements set in ceramic vessels by Kora Moya Rojo, marking her first work in clay. Agustí introduces his inaugural furniture pieces in aluminum and ceramic, while Burns contributes a large silver alloy mirror alongside objects shaped from materials gathered from nature. 

8. “Rebecca Manson: Time, You Must Be Laughing” at Jessica Silverman | Chinatown 

A virtuoso sculptor attuned to nature’s microcosms, Rebecca Manson enlarges fragile details into commanding ceramic works that probe embodiment, empathy, and the cycle between vitality and decay. Her debut solo exhibition with the gallery presents 13 sculptures made primarily of porcelain, including monumental butterfly and moth wings, flowers, and a swing set. Many works stem from a technical breakthrough that allows bonded porcelain to flex like fabric, enabling wings composed of thousands of hand-shaped glazed elements that Manson calls “smushes.” At the center stands Nightsnack, an eight-by-eight-foot trompe-l’œil structure of ceramic and glass modeled after the artist’s childhood swing set, its posts mimicking lichen-covered wood as time presses visibly across the surface. 

9. “Tara Donovan: Stratagems” for ICA SF | Financial District 

Presented as part of the Transamerica Pyramid Center’s new arts initiative, ICA SF introduces a suite of large-scale sculptures by Tara Donovan, including five works making their public debut. Donovan’s practice centers on accumulation and transformation, using mass-produced materials to shift perception through repetition. In “Stratagems,” she turns to architecture, constructing vertically oriented works from thousands of recycled CDs. Installed in the glass Annex gallery at Transamerica Pyramid Center, the sculptures act as responsive surfaces that register changes in daylight and weather. Their reflective skins also echo the tower’s vertical reach, creating a dynamic exchange between material, site, and the city beyond.