The Bay Area gets a lot of bad press, but that never stopped local artists, many of whom find inspiration in adverse conditions
In fact, many of them find inspiration in the adverse conditions. Others focus on the region’s positive aspects. Still, others use their art and the platform it gives them to highlight less-publicized narratives.
You can find examples of all three in a new exhibition of contemporary Bay Area art at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. “About Place,” on view at the de Young Museum through the end of November 2025, is the second show in a series of three unveiling a 2022 museum acquisition of 42 artworks by 30 contemporary Bay Area artists courtesy of the Svane Family Foundation, philanthropy project of Zendesk co-founder Mikkel Svane. The first show in the series, “Crafting Radicality,” focused on the ways in which different craft practices have influenced fine art in Bay Area history. “About Place” looks at the influence of the area itself, from landscape to local history, in a selection of 14 works by 10 artists. “We’re experiencing a renaissance of art and culture in the Bay Area,” Chelsea Ryoko Wong, one of the artists featured in the collection, said. “Celebrating what we have here with this acquisition and exhibition may be exactly what the global conversation about the Bay Area needs.” Paintings by representatives of the storied Mission School speak to other defining social movements. Chris Johanson’s “Unknow Know with What Is 12,” a large canvas of nebulous colors with floating heads, harkens to psychedelia, the title a cheeky play on a Donald Rumsfeld quote applied here to notions of identity and cosmic meaning. A poetic example of how the culture of a place informs one’s experience of it is seen in Clare Rojas’ “Walking in rainbow rain.” A gray-clad figure strolls down the sidewalk of an equally muted street scene in a downpour of rainbow-colored raindrops alluding to the history of the LGBTQ+ movement In Katy Grannan’s multiple photographs of her best friends, Gail and Dale are shown posing along various points of the Pacifica coastline, long hair and dresses blowing in the wind. The portraits are excerpts from Grannan’s larger series, “The Westerns,” which explores the idea of California as a natural home for dreamers and free spirits. Grannan, who moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago, said she was “immediately struck by the quality of the light and the way it serves as a beacon, luring people West — and it also has a cruel quality in that it illuminates failure and unfulfilled dreams as much as it provides comfort and inspiration.” Ex // Top Stories San Francisco plays starring role in historic night at DNC A pair of former City Hall colleagues combined to put the finishing touches on an unprecedented night in the nation’s history This SF pharmacist brings treatment to patients’ doorsteps A one-man team delivers opioid-addiction treatment — and a personal touch — to around 70 patients living in permanent supportive-housing in The City SF court clerks say low staffing, outdated infrastructure causing case backlog Staffers are speaking out in the wake of an appellate court dismissing 70 misdemeanor cases last week that failed to uphold defendants' speedy-trial rights Wong’s “Mint Tea in the Sauna During Sunset” features two figures sharing tea in front of a window offering a clear view of what is recognizable to many as Mount Tamalpais. The composition itself pays homage to Bay Area Figurative Movement legend Joan Brown’s painting “The Night Before the Alcatraz Swim,” placing Wong’s work both in the context of local landscape and art history. Wong said she seeks to express the “saturated feel” of The City, which is more vibrant compared to her former cities of New York and Seattle. That saturation is both a visual quality and a cultural one, she said. Other pieces explore place and landscape through the lens of climate concerns. Saif Azzuz’s “Lo'op' ” directly reflects Bay Area ecology, boasting a color palette inspired by fire maps of Northern California and incorporating the forms of weeds from his backyard and a creek near where he lives in Pacifica. Azzuz’s mother practices cultural fire work, or the Indigenous practice of prescribed burns to clear brush. It’s a form of ecological inheritance the artist said he hopes to pass down to his children. He must also contend with the displacement of his peers amid a regional housing crisis. “A lot of tech waves have come in and out,” Azzuz said. “It’s where I’ve grown up and spent most of my years so I’m just committed to staying here — for better or worse.” “About Place” touches on the Bay Area’s foundational Social Realism art movement throughout, putting contemporary work in conversation with the region’s broader legacy. The show doesn’t make a case for a uniform aesthetic movement coming out of the Bay Area. Instead, it presents a diversity of aesthetic practices equally informed by a sense of belonging and commitment to community. This also makes obvious a certain degree of determination that artists must have to continue to live and work here. “It’s not easy to survive here, which creates a sense of bonding,” Wong said. “It makes us a tight-knit community because we’ve all experienced that this is not an easy place to live.”
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