🌁 Fogline Celebrates SF Art Week

In today’s news:

Last Thursday was the kind of day when San Francisco really shows off: deep blue skies with few clouds, a light caressing breeze, and a clear view across San Francisco Bay, with the Golden Gate Bridge looking like a fiery beacon in the distance. I walked through a blanket of Bermuda buttercups on the slope down to the Fort Mason Center.

I was attending my first FOG Design + Art Fair. The fair showcases art and design installations from more than 60 leading international galleries created especially for the event. The showcases included design objects, furniture, textiles, and fine art. There was also an “Artist Activation” by artist Jasko Begovic (also known as Sko Habibi) in the immersive KIOSKO installation. The installation showcased tapestry, wearable sculpture, and live sewing demonstrations.

I spent the day exploring the exhibitions occupying Pier 2 and Pier 3. Even without a background in art or design, I found the FOG Fair incredibly accessible; the sheer quality of the work speaks for itself. The gallery representatives were engaging and open to questions about the pieces. I decided to highlight just a few of the wonderful works I came across here.

Maren Hassinger is an artist who lives in New York City, NY. She creates sculpture using wire rope highlighting the connections between industrial and natural forms.

Jay Sae Jung Oh is a South Korean-born artist working in Seattle, WA. She is known for creating sustainable furniture with sculptural design.

April Bey is a Bahamian artist working in Los Angeles. She is known for her mixed media work using social critique to explore race, feminism, colonialism, and pop culture.

The de Young Museum’s Art of Manga makes a strong case for manga as one of the world’s most vibrant forms of visual storytelling. You don’t need to be a manga fan to appreciate it. The exhibit works well as an introduction to the art form, familiarizing newcomers with popular artists and the surprising range of styles.

The exhibit showcases the range of the medium, from Hirohiko Araki's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure to Mari Yamazaki's detailed adaptation of the Steve Jobs biography. A special room called ONE PIECE ONLY: How Manga Is Made pulls back the curtain on the world's best-selling manga, displaying pages from over a thousand chapters alongside printing plates, editor notes, and behind-the-scenes footage of the weekly production process.

The exhibit also looks at where manga is headed. Visitors learn about horror master Junji Ito, the contemplative work of Jiro Taniguchi, and Gengoroh Tagame, whose work helped establish LGBTQ+ representation in manga. A section on digital delivery highlights K MANGA, an app that brings popular titles to global readers in both Japanese and English. The Shueisha Manga-Art Heritage project is turning original manga drawings into limited-edition fine art prints with blockchain verification.

And for those who just want to read, a dedicated reading room offers physical manga in multiple languages, with books provided by Kinokuniya's Japantown store. The show leaves you with a genuine question: as manga evolves from hand-drawn pages to apps to collectible art, what will it become next?

The Legion of Honor’s current exhibition “Manet & Morisot” highlights the artistic collaboration between French Impressionists Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. By exploring their personal and familial ties, the exhibition takes a deep dive into a relationship defined by both collaboration and competition. The sequence of the pieces within the exhibit tells the story of Morisot’s profound influence on Manet’s work over time. There is an excellent short film screening just outside the exhibit hall that provides greater context to the relationship between Manet and Morisot and how societal influences and gender constraints shaped their artistic paths in 19th-century France.