Northern California art guide

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.

Natural Death
Mendocino Arts Center, Mendocino, CA
November 8, 2025–February 9, 2026

The group exhibition Natural Death, organized by Rino Kodama and Dav Bell, suggests that to be natural, death must also mean life. Many of the materials used by the artists—textiles, natural pigments, ceramics—are ever living. Some, like Cat Lauigan’s iron-dyed dress, continue to evolve throughout the show’s run time with little green sprouts emerging from a pile of dirt under which it had been buried before going on view. Jules Pierce’s Grief Pool (2025)is like a body flayed open, a landscape revealing its geological eras. It speaks to the ever-changing and lively landscape just outside the doors of the Mendocino Arts Center: tides meeting creeks and pulling land in and out and in again—maintaining the rhythms of the liveliness around us.

Reflection: Life is a mystery. How is it sustained by things around us?

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle: BAZOOMBAS IN LOVE
Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA
October 24, 2025–January 24, 2026

I had the chance to meet Beth a few weeks back and she told me, “Our show is all boobs!!” The creative partnership of Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle is erotic and fun. BAZOOMBAS IN LOVE is a life-is-art overload that wanders through history, archives, sculpture, printmaking, performance, video, community building, ecological relationships, and more. This show, and their greater practices, are also about healing. Annie was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time this past summer. Full of events around and about love, partnerships, bodies, humor, and recovery, Cushion Works hosts their story through January, about intertwining lives and bodies together. 

Reflection: Who does my body remember?

Women of Afrofuturism 
San Francisco Airport (SFO), Harvey Milk Terminal 1, San Francisco, CA
May 17, 2025–Sep 27, 2026

It is the holidays and San Francisco’s SFO, like any other major airport, gets extra foot traffic in these months. Good! SFO has *the best* art collection and rotating exhibition spaces. It is on par with, if not personally preferential to, some of our very major institutions. As you depart and arrive from the city, whether you know it or not, you move past so many incredible artists’ works from Vito Acconci to Mildred Howard, Kota Ezawa, Tammy-Rae Carland, the Mission School artists, Lee Mullican, and William T. Wiley. I could go on. Over Thanksgiving, I flew out of Harvey Milk Terminal 1 and saw Women of Afrofuturism, which does amazing work connecting the ephemera of Afrofuturism to its active engagement as an artistic and sociopolitical liberation movement. Walking through a dark corridor, the displays densely compose artwork, artifact, text, music, publications, celebrity, public record, myth-making, and costuming, across time and space. 

Reflection: What kind of archive do we need to tell a complete tale?

 [Obstructed view of the house through the trees with the road visible on the left side in the foreground.] or black point reinterpretive site
Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA
December 13, 2025–March 29, 2026

I have yet to see this! But I have long loved period rooms. And I have long loved a mystery, a bracketed title, things withheld from my understanding, and a command to perform a work’s work itself. 

What does one do with every inch of a space? Cummings’ and Lowe’s work itself is a 19th-century Victorian “period room” that examines the political dramas of natural history, colonialism, and mechanical interventions into the Northern California landscape. Stepping inside the speculative lives of Mrs. Jesse Benton, wife to General John Fremont, early pioneers of the American West, and into the more speculative interior space that the development of the California coastline endured under westward expansion. The exhibition’s brochure suggests that in situ, these elements produce a kind of artificiality that throws into question how we record and remember history. 

Reflection: Can a moment from the past, re-created, affect the present?

—Emily Small