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.
8 Hours of Work
CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA
November 8–December 20, 2025
Past the gated campus doors, through the quiet courtyard of CCA, up and around towering wooden stadium seating, you’ll arrive at the rooftop garden where the Wattis Institute now sits. Beginning this month and spanning through April 2026, exhibitions will take the nineteenth-century laborer’s slogan “8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of what you will” as a guide. This first iteration—8 Hours of Work—presents sculpture, video, image assemblage from the Collection of Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University, and a reading section among two of the Wattis gallery spaces.
Always an urgent topic, at this moment in the Bay Area, the AI tech worker is rumored to be working a 9-9-6 work week with no union. I thought about this as I admired the brilliant pairing of Allan Sekula’s Performance under Working (1973) next to his Engine Room Wiper’s Ear Protection from Fish Story (1989–1995)—a Cibachrome print of one earphone with a label that reads “I can’t be fired, slaves are sold.” I was captivated by the sprawling SF State labor archives, presented in two cabinets, encompassing posters for farm worker strikes, documentary images of workers along the coast, manuals from the San Francisco Labor School, and even an interesting image of a Coyote trapped in a jaw trap. If you can time it right, watch Stephanie Comilang’s Lumapit, Sa Akin, Paraiso (2016) in its entirety.
I learned that the artist list will stay the same for each rotation of the exhibition, and I really hope that the public, not exclusively within the arts or academic communities here, has the chance to see and partake in its program as well.
Reflection: Do these time bifurcations still apply to, or hold use for, the work we do today?
To Bright Disturbances
SFAC Galleries, San Francisco, CA
September 25–December 13, 2025
I walked into the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery at its grand Civic Center building as artist Carmen Argote was pushing an unbelievable amount of shaving cream around the perimeter of one of the far walls. Curated by acting director Jackie Im, To Bright Disturbances is a group exhibition of artists who work with the tensions between how we live with and on the land we are located.
In the exhibition, I really love the work of Aspen Mays, whose wooden boards and cyanotype installation of a barn in Carmel Valley record the markings made by insects and birds over time in old wooden structures, including barns and oak trees along our coastline. The Acorn Woodpecker burrows its food supply within the wood, which often destroys the structure, therefore ultimately destroying the very thing it’s attempting to preserve. It is a productive, cruel-optimism model to think about our own relationships to preservation. The playful Portable Parks Project work by the late Bonnie Ora Sherk and Howard Levine is also not to be missed.
Reflection: In what other ways do we mimic how the natural world’s creatures alter their infrastructures?
Bonus Pick:
Small Press Book Bazar
The Lab, San Francisco, CA
December 6
As the holidays near and the Lab moves to their newly renovated space, there is no better event to attend than their Small Press Book Bazaar, which will feature the works of so many small Bay Area publishers and art spaces. Lest we ever forget that zines are a currency in our region—get your sweeties some photo books, some stickers, a print, a tape, a t-shirt. Mingle, and support the community—it isn’t all labor here, it is also fun!