Art Market San Francisco has undergone a transformation and is now the San Francisco Art Fair. A deceptively simple change, the new name reflects a desire to celebrate the city’s history, cultural institutions, and communities. Located at Fort Mason Pavilion and directed by Kelly Freeman and Nato Thompson, the fair runs until Sunday, April 20th, and features 85 galleries, most of them based in or near the Bay Area. 

This year’s emphasis on East Bay artists and institutions is particularly resonant in light of the San Francisco Art Institute and Oakland campus of the California School of Arts and Crafts’ closures in 2022. (Ansel Adams founded SFAI’s photography department and the department’s original faculty included Dorothea Lange and Minor White.) Many of the artists featured in the fair, such as Mission School painter Alicia McCarthy, attended or were heavily influenced by these universities. Haitian-American painter Erlin Adones Geffrard—who drew inspiration from his father, a devotée of the Black Panthers, and moved to the Bay to attend San Francisco Art Institute—created the mural Echoes (2025) for the fair, a work that honors the various art movements that have shaped the Bay, including the Bay Area Figurative Movement and Abstract Expressionism. 

An early highlight of the fair is a selection of furniture and artworks curated by Saint Joseph’s Arts Society, founded by designer Ken Fulk. Italian designer Sylvan Fiss’ Sea Anemone Lamp evokes the deep ocean and is punctuated by two textile works by Tana Quincy Arcega: Tulip Garment (2023) and Invisi Garment (2023). Arcega, who draws inspiration from her mother’s fabric store, often incorporates scraps of fabric in her work, creating abstract collage-paintings that reflect her investment in handiwork and sustainability.

Jessica Silverman Gallery, at the fair for the first time, is a standout. The gallery presents work by a formidable group of artists that includes Isaac Julien, Clare Rojas, and Woody De Othello. De Othello’s Capacity (2025), a bronze sculpture in which an ear and fist protrude from a set of horned instruments, bursts with kinetic energy, transmitting jazz’s urgent vitality to the viewer. British artist Emma Cousin abstracts the figurative in her wry drawings, twisting and stretching the body so it becomes cartoon-like or monstrous. Two figures merge as they hold one another in Looking into my history (2024), the drawing’s tone somber and playful. Featuring scenes of people gathering, paintings by Bay Area-based artist Chelsea Ryoko Wong call for joy, community, and harmony.

Suhas Bhujbal of Andrea Schwartz Gallery also attempts to capture the interconnected nature of life. Mosaic of Life (2025) offers a crowd scene of a different kind, in which multiple figures—who all look away from or seem to shield themselves from the viewer—jut up against vivid blocks of color. 

Barbadian artist Sheena Rose uses bright tones to revel in Black joy, communion, love, and leisure. A casual coolness emanates from the figures in her paintings. In Dinner Time (2025) a group drinks, gossips, and eats around a dinner table, fros carelessly buoyant, eyes hidden. Annie Duncan, also represented by Johansson Projects, created multiple large-scale ceramic works for the fair; she transforms everyday objects of beauty like cheap pink razors and ChapStick tubes into whimsical sculptures that function like still lifes. A favorite is Duncan’s sculpture Composition Book (2024), a reference to both Duncan’s childhood journals and the work of Roy Lichtenstein. The notebook contains two calla lilies and a bolt chain that spills over the notebook’s edges. The journal has two covers instead of a front and back, one that reads “Hopes and Dreams,” the other “Unrealistic Expectations.” 

Mary Finlayson of Eleanor Harwood Gallery is interested in objects as a form of self-portraiture; although mostly preoccupied with interiors, one sees traces of Hockney’s bright and evocative paintings of Southern California in her work. In Pink Poppies with Coeur D’Amour Epris Poster (2024), a mosaic that recalls Matisse, a stack of books appears on the right-hand side, most of their titles legible. There’s Funny Weather by Olivia Laing, Just Kids by Patti Smith. 

And then there’s Liu Tianlian’s gorgeous, meticulously rendered paintings, composed of mineral pigments and mica powder applied on silk. Tianlian, who studied Chinese painting and is represented by Yiwei Gallery, uses traditional techniques and filters them through a contemporary lens. Her paintings are kaleidoscopic and fantastical. In A Phoenix on a Pig (2024), a comic self-portrait, the artist tattoos a wary-looking pig while various creatures swirling above her and look on, tucked inside their portals.

Oakland gallery p.2, directed by Brock Brake, is a necessary stop, with works by Yameng Lee Thorp, Cannon Dill, and Ryan Whelan on view. Cinque Mubarak, who created Downtown Oakland’s first photo mural, has two 35mm prints at the fair, Untitled (2018) and 34th&mlk (2015).

Besides participation from galleries, a number of panels and programs will occur in conjunction with the fair. Independent Curator René de Guzman, former Director of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Senior Curator of Art at the Oakland Museum, will speak with Erlin Adones Geffrard at 5:30 PM today to discuss his connection to the Bay Area’s various art movements. On Saturday, April 19th from 2 to 3 PM, Ali Gass, Director of ICA, Roberto Ordeñana, Executive Director of GLBT Historical Society, and Key Jo Lee, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora, will come together to discuss the future of cultural institutions within the next four years. Sam Mondros, the San Francisco Standard’s art reporter, will moderate. After that, Art and Impact in the East Bay at 4 PM with Brock Brake, artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, and Nadia Ghani, Gallery Director at Creative Growth Art Center. 

San Francisco Art Fair offers an ambitious selection of works, successfully championing the Bay Area’s ever-evolving and thriving art scene. 

‍

Written by Elodie Saint-Louis