The 8 best gallery shows in San Francisco in October 2026

Friedlander has photographed his wife Maria since the 1950s, and this show of about fifty pictures follows the two of them through marriage, parenthood and old age: Maria reading, driving, on the phone, lying in the sun, sometimes with his shadow falling into the frame. It is as much a record of how one of the great American photographers’ way of seeing changed over seventy years as it is a portrait of a marriage, and it is quietly devastating.

A new hardcover book accompanies the show, which closes on October 24. Fraenkel follows it on October 29 with Robert Adams’s photographs shown beside their original contact sheets, so a visit in the last days of the month catches the changeover.

Eight large graphite and Conté drawings of the artist’s ancestors in post-Emancipation Texas, drawn from family photographs and from the obituaries, pension files and other records she has copied out by hand. One drawing, nearly eight feet wide, shows the 1882 schoolhouse where generations of her relatives were taught. Thomas has been one of the Bay Area’s most serious artists for years, and this, her first exhibition with the gallery, is the fullest statement of her work the city has seen.

The drawings travel next to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. Upstairs, in the same building, Sadie Barnette’s twenty-eighth solo show introduces her Dots drawings and an eleven-foot wooden text sculpture; both close on October 24.

Ten artists who remade painting and sculpture in the twentieth century, in a single compact survey: Braque, Calder, Gris, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Matisse, Miró, Picasso and Tanguy. Among the works are two Calders, a 1942 Kandinsky, a 1956 Picasso and paintings by Miró from 1946 and 1971. It is the kind of display one expects to pay to see across the street at SFMOMA, and here it is free.

The show closes on October 22, earlier than most this month. Also at Berggruen until October 29 is Liam Everett’s first solo show with the gallery, recent paintings built from ink, oil, sand and wood ash and worn back to faint horizons.

The first two-person exhibition of the Surrealist painters, who were married from 1934 to 1947 and left Europe together for Mexico City in 1939. Rarely seen paintings and works on paper set Paalen’s fumage pictures, drawn with the smoke of a candle, beside Rahon’s canvases textured with sand. Paalen later moved to the Bay Area and helped found the Dynaton group here, which makes Jackson Square the right place to see them.

Gallery Wendi Norris has spent two decades building the case for these artists, and this show is a chapter in that argument rather than a one-off. Through October 24.

Eight Native American artists show painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and film in the year of the United States’ 250th anniversary, which the exhibition treats as one moment in far longer Indigenous histories rather than a date to celebrate. The artists are Victoria Grace Canby, Jordan Ann Craig, Sky Hopinka, Brad Kahlhamer, Terran Last Gun, Jamie Okuma, Wendy Red Star and Keith Secola.

Highlights include Hopinka’s film linking the 1969–71 occupation of Alcatraz, visible from the gallery’s front door, with the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois; Last Gun’s new drawings on antique ledger sheets; and a beaded deerskin handbag by Okuma. At Fort Mason through November 7.

Thirty-five years of Birk’s painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics and film fill both of Catharine Clark’s galleries, in a survey timed to the gallery’s own thirty-fifth anniversary. Birk pairs older works from series such as Prisonation, In Smog and Thunder and American Qur’an with new or reworked pieces that answer them; the earliest are two large 1992 paintings made with the graffiti artist REALM after the Los Angeles uprising, both revised this year.

The show also debuts new etchings from his Trumpagruel series, printed in Portland, Oregon. The gallery marks its anniversary with a celebration on October 15; the exhibition runs through November 7, and Hosfelt next door turns over on October 17, so mid-month is the time to visit Utah Street.

Paintings, collages and prints by the late artist, educator and curator, made between 1960 and the early 2000s. Driskell taught for nearly forty years and did more than almost anyone to write Black artists into the history of American art, while keeping up a studio practice that moved between figuration and abstraction, African and Christian imagery, jazz and the landscapes of his years in Maine. The title comes from the 1975 Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes song, chosen to honor his role as a teacher.

The show opens on October 2 with a reception from 5:30 to 7:30 pm and a conversation with the Driskell scholar Julie McGee at 6:15, and runs through December 19 at Minnesota Street Project in the Dogpatch, where Casemore and Eleanor Harwood have shows worth seeing in the same building.

Two abstract artists a generation apart, both published by Crown Point Press. Tuttle’s portfolio Type, from 2003, is a set of twenty-six small etchings that form an invented alphabet, with the printers’ tarlatan wiping cloth built into the prints. Odita’s 2022 prints, including Bliss and Net, set fields of colored aquatint behind syncopated soft-ground lines.

Everything here was made in the press’s own studio, a few steps from the gallery, and the prints are priced far below either artist’s unique work. Through October 30, a short walk from SFMOMA.