Cliff Notes
Each week, our regional Cliff Notes columnists Hayashi Wilder, Emily Small, Jade Ichimura, and Renée Reizman pick the most exciting events and exhibitions on the West Coast.
ektor garcia: Loose Ends
San José Museum of Art (Loose Ends), San Jose, CA
October 17, 2025–June 7, 2026
I love ektor garcia’s art. Often it appears as crochet or knotted wire, sometimes accompanied by shells, horse hair, or leather, suspended off the wall, into vignettes that recall something both domestic and industrial. It is hardness made soft and softness made hard. It records periods of time. He undoes his meticulous work only to do it up again, so works rarely, if ever, settle into a final state. Instead, he translates and transports the energy of one sculpture into the next. He once told me that the man he buys his copper from was convinced garcia was an electrician.
For us to have two ektor garcia exhibitions at this moment is a sweet thing. At Rebecca Camacho, his copper curtains are mixed among new material explorations of rafia, porcelain, and metal sheeting. Exploded doilies that will never soil corral the gallery. I imagine they only grow more intense with time; that if they ever were left untouched, a partnership with the Earth would oxidize them a brilliant green. Land becoming craft becomes land once again. The exhibition at the San José Museum of Art is garcia’s first California-based museum solo. He was born and raised here in Northern California, and the work in the installation is continuous with his ongoing exploration of place, transformation, and identity.
Reflection: Have you ever remade something to keep the spirit of it alive?
Intimate Politics: Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson, JoAnn Elam (16mm)
The Roxie Theater (The Little Roxie), San Francisco, CA
*This programming has ended as of October 22, 2025*
Any time is a good time to visit the Roxie—October is especially fun because you can catch some of the greatest horror hits all month long. Following what would have been the artist’s 86th birthday last week, the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and Canyon Cinema present 5 key films of hers that broke ground in feminist cinema and political performance. This list includes Viet-Flakes (1962–67), which I am particularly looking forward to seeing, as it takes up the issue of media and images circulated during the Vietnam War. During a moment when we see images of war as spectacle from all angles, I think this is a very timely decision by the foundation and theater.
If you miss it, catch any of the films running through the Roxie’s Noche Oscura: Mexican Gothic Terror Tales film program. I’m looking out for the playdate of Hasta el viento tiene miedo.
Reflection: What is our relationship to images of war today?
People Make This Place: SFAI Stories
SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA
July 26, 2025–July 5, 2026
The fall, being “back to school,” is a major structuring component to any place near a university. I grew up in the Bay Area, but I wasn’t fully aware of how much of an impact the San Francisco Arts Institute (SFAI) had on the region until I left. For example, the SFMoMA itself was born from the SFAI as its own programming space.
An exhibition celebrating SFAI’s legacy is now on at the museum, showcasing both ephemera from the school’s open days and works by the seemingly countless incredible artists who passed through its doors both as students and as faculty—Catherine Opie, Ruth Asawa, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, or even briefly Courtney Love, just to name a few. Perhaps it kept the city provincial at times; at others, it was a necessary link to bring students from all over the world to the Bay. To have this kind of experimentation written into the legacy of the place I call home made me feel proud and nostalgic in the way fall is meant to do.
My favorite work in the entire exhibition by far was Howard Fried’s Studio Relocation from 1970, in which he chronicles the process of moving his studio from Davis, California, to San Francisco. It’s sentimental, it makes me think about all the things we lug around with us, because we give them meaning, and they return the favor. It made me think about how place makes people just as much as people make place, and that the two are a dialectic. We hear a lot about “bringing back San Francisco.” That new jobs in the booming fields of AI are going to “restore” our downtown and neighborhoods. This work insists that it isn’t moving to a place expecting prosperity from it, but rather bringing prosperity with you, to introduce it to that new place, open to its newness, history, precarity, and resources, wherever you land.
Reflection: What do you carry with you, wherever you go?