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Human | Nature: California Zen in Big Sur and the Bay Area
September 18, 2025 - January 25, 2026
Monterey Museum of Art
Featuring artists inspired by the natural elements of California's geography, Human | Nature: California Zen in Big Sur and the Bay Area includes 20 artists whose works are derived from their interaction and exploration of California Zen. The proliferation of Eastern aesthetics entering the Western artistic sphere in the twentieth century furthered the development of Abstract Expressionism in Big Sur and the Bay Area, creating a unique form of abstraction inherently tied to artists' experiences of nature and humanity.
Curated by David D. Keaton, author, curator, and consultant with a specialized focus on post-war art.
SIXTIES SURREAL
Sept 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026
Whitney Museum of American Art
The exhibition gathers a range of works by artists including Diane Arbus, Lee Bontecou, Franklin Williams, Nancy Grossman, David Hammons, Linda Lomahaftewa, Mel Casas, Yayoi Kusama, Romare Bearden, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. In the 60s, many of these artists sought new strategies for connecting art back to a lived reality that seemed increasingly unreal due to rapid postwar transformation and the social, political, and technological upheavals.
Unearthing a Treasure Trove of Bay Area Women Abstract Painters
“The Long View amply demonstrates that Jay DeFeo and Joan Brown may be the best known Bay Area women artists who worked in abstraction, but they were far from alone.”
Sept 1, 2022 by John Seed, Hyperallergic
Exhibition Reception: Saturday, May 7, 5-7pm
Vision Become: The Artists of the Six Gallery,
San Francisco 1954 -1957
“The legacy of the Six Gallery continues to emerge at times through subtle manifestations and fits and starts. It was a resoundingly creative and energetic space that liberated artists of disparate gender, color, age, socio-economic and sexual orientations to closely mingle and share ideas. It was an approach that sounds contemporary if not visionary to the here and now.”
image: Wally Hedrick, I’m the Director, mixed media on canvas. 1955
Collection of Sonoma State University
Sonoma Index Tribune
David Park: A Retrospective, organized by Janet Bishop at SFMOMA
October 4, 2020–January 18, 2021
SFMOMA is open to visitors. Click here to preview the exhibition.