This year, the celebration has the chance to breathe much-needed new life into The City’s art scene
Every January, San Francisco Art Week kicks off the year in with a bang. This time, it has the chance to breathe much-needed new life into The City’s arts scene. Last year’s federal funding cuts affecting local museums and nonprofits, along with a precarious global art market and a rash of local gallery closures in the final months of the year, left the community here understandably shaken heading into 2026, worried about the health of the scene going forward.
This year’s Art Week is poised to be the biggest yet, featuring nearly 100 participating galleries throughout the Bay Area, as well as three brand-new art fairs joining the roster. With a potential boost in sales for local galleries and a chance to capture the global art world’s attention for a week, Art Week has the opportunity to set a positive tone for The City’s arts ecosystem in 2026. Kicking off Saturday with a party at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, Art Week runs through Jan. 25, concluding with Fog Design and Art, the region’s premier art fair, which will present its 12th edition Jan. 21-25 at Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion. Three years ago, the Fog festival introduced Fog Focus, a smaller secondary wing of the fair emphasizing emerging galleries. It has since grown in size, this year featuring 17 exhibitors, eight of them local. The fair also received more applications than ever before, said its director, Sydney Blumenkranz. New local additions to Fog and Fog Focus include Blunk Space, Catharine Clark Gallery, Gallery Wendi Norris, Morgann Trumbull Projects and re.riddle. While some galleries are dropping out of fairs and tightening their belts, these galleries are betting on collectors to come through. “I think galleries are choosing to invest in art fairs because the bet is that they will make sales,” Blumenkranz said. “This is the one time all year that the international art world’s eyes are on San Francisco.” Other organizations are hoping to harness that attention, evidenced by the proliferation of ancillary fairs taking place throughout Art Week, each spotlighting local galleries and history while also expanding the regional focus in their own unique ways. Minnesota Street Project will present Atrium, an alternative art fair running the same weekend as Fog and featuring over 23 local galleries. Four of the five galleries that shuttered in 2025 were located in Minnesota Street Project, a consortium of galleries in the Dogpatch founded 10 years ago by Andrew and Deborah Rappaport, offering below-market rent during what was then a prohibitive real-estate market. Ten years later, the issues facing The City’s galleries have more to do with making sales than finding space. MSP is looking for new solutions. “We could cut the rent to zero and that would not make a significant difference in terms of galleries surviving this particular moment,” Deborah Rappaport said. “The gallery model is almost 200 years old. The way that people interact with purchasing anything today — and especially something that could be considered a luxury item — is significantly different. We want to break down some of the boundaries for folks.” Similar to the other fairs joining Art Week, Atrium is free to the public. General admission for Fog clocks in at around $30. Eleanor Harwood, Atrium’s curatorial director and gallery-owner at MSP, said the criteria for selecting galleries was to usher in a combination of younger, curatorially driven galleries such as Et. al., 1599fdT and Pallas, as well as Bay Area mainstays such as Gallery 16 . Ex // Top Stories Word on the Street: A 'once-in-a-generation' race for SF voters The first forum for candidates running to represent San Francisco in Congress shows winner will inherit constituency expecting to be taken seriously Experts express alarm over changes to US vaccine schedule City, state counter new CDC guidance — but some pediatricians, educators and parents said they fear the damage is already done Collab between Senor Sisig, House of Nanking is coming The popular restaurants are joining forces to host a special pop-up near Chase Center in honor of Lunar New Year "Galleries were selected based on their energy, inventiveness and commitment to artists,” Harwood said. “We wanted to level the playing field — showcasing rigorous, artist-driven programs next to more established spaces." Jan. 23-25 at 215 Fremont Street, Creativity Explored x Open Invitational will offer art lovers the opportunity to view and support the work of 22 progressive art studios from across the country that work with artists with disabilities. Open Invitational, which debuted in 2024 in Miami, partners with organizations such as Creativity Explored, which has been fostering the careers of artists with disabilities locally for over 20 years. “The fair will provide a carefully curated overview of a movement that's been building momentum for some time,” said Harriet Salmon, director of art partnerships at Creativity Explored. “Not only do the artists make revenue, but art that expresses their individual, lived experiences is viewed, discussed and exhibited in the world, providing both visibility and representation.” Victor Gonzalez, founder of local gallery GCS Agency, said he was inspired by seeing Creativity Explored land a Culture Forward grant. He applied and received a grant for a series of exhibitions and events including Art.Fair.Mont, a boutique art fair that will take place Jan. 18-20 inside the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. The fair will focus on fostering an intimate environment with nine galleries in the hotel’s ballroom, while also bringing a diverse range of artwork into conversation, with participants hailing from the Bay Area to Zimbabwe. Gonzalez said that this year, he scaled back the concept to make it “a minimum viable product” but that he’s already planning ways to make next year “a whole different ball game.”“Success means quality over quantity,” he said. “Bigger can be better, but Fog is already big. We don’t need to be big like that. Big for us means big impact.” San Francisco’s art scene needs that impact to be a lasting one, too. It isn’t enough for support to come only once a year, even if a fair can make up a significant percentage of a gallery’s annual sales. The true impact of Art Week would mean sustained support for San Francisco’s art scene year-round — and that doesn’t only mean financial support. After all, galleries are always free to visit, and even The City’s museums offer free days. “Art Week creates urgency and buzz, but we also want to create opportunities for people to continue to engage with art throughout the year and make it part of their life,” said SF Art Week director Emily Counihan. “There’s really important work being done here that has more influence beyond the bay than it’s given credit for. I hope Art Week can deepen people’s understanding of that.”Max Blue is an art critic whose State of the Arts column appears monthly in The Examiner.
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