The 8 best art galleries in San Francisco

If San Francisco has one gallery of international consequence, it is Fraenkel. Jeffrey Fraenkel opened it in 1979, when photography was still a specialist’s market, and built it into one of the galleries that defined the medium: the estate of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Robert Adams, Richard Misrach, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Sophie Calle and Carrie Mae Weems have all shown here, several of them for decades. The program has long since outgrown the label “photography gallery”: it reaches into painting, sculpture and installation, and its books are collected in their own right.

The gallery occupies the fourth floor of 49 Geary, the building that has been the center of the Union Square gallery district for a generation, with Robert Koch Gallery, another photography specialist, one floor up. This autumn it shows about fifty photographs of Friedlander’s wife Maria, made over seven decades, followed from late October by Robert Adams’s finished prints beside the contact sheets they came from. Both come with new books from the gallery’s own press.

Jessica Silverman runs the city’s most closely watched contemporary program. The gallery opened in 2008 and moved in 2021 into two floors on Grant Avenue, in Chinatown, a few blocks from Union Square. Its roster mixes figures with long museum histories, Judy Chicago among them, with Bay Area and West Coast artists it has pushed to national attention: Woody De Othello, Sadie Barnette, Clare Rojas, Hayal Pozanti, Rupy C. Tut and Rose B. Simpson, whose customized cars are at the de Young this year.

Shows here tend to travel. Lava Thomas’s monumental drawings of her Texas ancestors, on view until late October, go next to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, and Barnette’s show upstairs is her twenty-eighth solo exhibition. At the end of the month the gallery turns over to GaHee Park on the ground floor and Chelsea Ryoko Wong upstairs, with a joint reception on October 28.

John Berggruen opened his gallery in 1970 and ran it on Grant Avenue for most of its life before moving, in 2017, to a three-story building on Hawthorne Street, a block from SFMOMA. It is the city’s blue-chip address for twentieth-century art: Bay Area figuration and California modernism, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud above all, alongside Calder, Picasso, Matisse and the School of Paris, and a contemporary program that includes Liam Everett, Stephen Hannock and Jacob Hashimoto.

The scale of what Berggruen can bring to Hawthorne Street is the point: this autumn’s group show gathers Braque, Calder, Gris, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Picasso and Tanguy in a single compact survey, the kind of display a museum would mount, free to walk into. Hannock’s show opens on October 29 with a talk, and Hashimoto’s follows in November.

Wendi Norris has made her gallery the place to see Surrealism in San Francisco, and in particular the women and émigrés the movement’s histories once left out: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, the painters who left Europe for Mexico in the late 1930s, and Gordon Onslow Ford, who ended up in Marin County. She has placed their work in museum collections and organized the exhibitions and catalogues that go with it. The contemporary half of the program, with María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Chitra Ganesh, Ana Teresa Fernández and Ranu Mukherjee, shares the same interests in myth, migration and the body.

Since 2020 the gallery has been in a brick storefront on Jackson Street, in Jackson Square, the city’s oldest commercial block, with Rebecca Camacho Presents around the corner on Washington Street. The current show, the first ever devoted to Paalen and Rahon together, sets his candle-smoke fumage paintings beside her sand-textured canvases.

Cheryl Haines opened her gallery in 1987 and spent decades at 49 Geary before moving it to Fort Mason Center, on the waterfront between the Marina and Fisherman’s Wharf. The program is international and often large in scale: Ai Weiwei, Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash, the photographer Linda Connor, Kota Ezawa and Binh Danh are among the artists it has shown for years. Haines is also the founder of the FOR-SITE Foundation, which brought Ai Weiwei’s @Large to Alcatraz in 2014 and has made Fort Mason and the Presidio the sites of ambitious public projects.

Fort Mason is a trip of its own, with the Bay in front of you and the San Francisco Art Institute’s former campus next door, so build an afternoon around it. This autumn the gallery shows eight Native American artists, including Sky Hopinka, Wendy Red Star and Jamie Okuma, in a group exhibition that treats 1776 as one moment in far longer Indigenous histories. Deborah Butterfield’s horses follow in November.

Catharine Clark opened her gallery in 1991 and has kept to a clear idea of what it is for: art that argues about the present, often with a political edge and a storyteller’s patience. Sandow Birk, Masami Teraoka, Deborah Oropallo, Stephanie Syjuco, Chester Arnold, Nina Katchadourian, Julie Heffernan and Stacey Steers have all shown here for years, and the gallery was early to give video and animation a room of their own. Since 2013 it has been on Utah Street, in the Design District at the foot of Potrero Hill, next door to Hosfelt.

The gallery marks its thirty-fifth year this autumn with a survey of Birk that fills both of its galleries, from two large paintings made after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising to new etchings, with an anniversary celebration on October 15. In November the rooms turn over to Steers’s paper collages and Heffernan’s new still lifes of present-day disasters.

Todd Hosfelt founded his gallery in 1996 and moved it in 2012 into a high, skylit former warehouse on Utah Street, one of the best-proportioned exhibition spaces in the city. The program favors artists who work slowly and systematically, across continents: Jim Campbell’s LED pieces, Liliana Porter’s small tableaux, Patricia Piccinini’s hyperreal creatures, Emil Lukas’s thread paintings, Rina Banerjee’s assemblages and the German painter Stefan Kürten, who has shown here since the gallery opened.

Hosfelt usually runs two or three shows at once, so a visit has range. In mid-October the whole space turns over: Andrea Higgins’s diptychs, Beto De Volder’s ink geometries, and a nineteen-artist group show on weaving as a conceptual practice that borrows a Lenore Tawney from the Berkeley Art Museum and a Nazca textile fragment two thousand years old. It is a two-minute walk from Catharine Clark, so see both.

Crown Point Press is not a gallery in the usual sense but something rarer: an etching workshop and publisher, founded by Kathan Brown in 1962, with a gallery that shows what is made there. Its list of artists in residence reads like a history of American art since the 1960s: Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, Sol LeWitt, John Cage, Chuck Close, Pat Steir, Ed Ruscha, Richard Tuttle, Kiki Smith, Mary Heilmann, Tomma Abts, Julie Mehretu, Tacita Dean and Anish Kapoor among them. Everything on its walls was printed in the building.

The press is in SoMa, a short walk from SFMOMA and Berggruen, and visitors can often glimpse the studio beyond the gallery. This autumn’s exhibition pairs Tuttle’s portfolio Type, a twenty-six-print invented alphabet, with Odili Donald Odita’s color-field aquatints, through October 30. Prices here start far below those of unique works, which makes this the place in the city to begin collecting.