Every single month, local museums refresh and replace dozens of fascinating art exhibits in San Francisco. We’re keeping tabs on the best new temporary displays, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibitions, fine art at the de Young and the Legion of Honor, and contemporary art exhibits at the Asian Art Museum.
Read on to start planning your next museum visit, and be sure to see our list of free museum days in SF to get the most bang for your buck.
After a successful run at the Brooklyn Museum, Monet and Venice arrives at the de Young Museum in San Francisco with over 20 of Claude Monet’s Venetian paintings, featuring his celebrated views of Venice and works like Water Lilies. See these works presented and contextualized alongside others from his career.
KAWS: FAMILY surveys three decades of the artist’s work across paintings, sculptures, collaborations, and collectible objects that reflect shared emotions and pop culture. The exhibition is centered around the monumental bronze sculpture FAMILY (2021), highlighting KAWS’s iconic characters to explore themes of kinship, vulnerability, and contemporary cultural memory.
Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for her large-scale, site-specific installations featuring enormous woven thread canopies. The Asian Art Museum’s spring exhibition showcases her work in the Yang Yamazaki Pavilion, one of its largest galleries. Rather than observe the art from afar, visitors move through it, joining a complex, meditative web.
Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries requires a special exhibition ticket to the Asian Art Museum.
Video Craft
The Museum of Craft and Design explores the intersection between film and video with more traditional craft media such as ceramics, textiles, and glass. From brightly colored clay works to a pixelated quilt, the works in this new showcase examine the juxtaposition of the “ephemeral nature of the screen” and the distinctly tangible practices of material craft.
Video Craft is included with general admission to the Museum of Craft and Design
This 2026 exhibition at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor marks the first major U.S. exhibition in two decades dedicated to the Etruscans. See nearly 200 artifacts, including rare bronzes, opulent gold jewelry, and the historic “Linen Book of Zagreb,” which highlight the Etruscans’ sophisticated society.
Unbound: Art, Blackness, & the Universe
After major renovations, the Museum of the African Diaspora reopened in October 2025 with a new exhibition that reimagines Blackness as a cosmic and ever-expanding concept through themes of maps, myth, and technology. See a collection of works by different artists in the realms of painting, sculpture, installation, and video.
Unbound is included with general admission to the MoAD.
Conjuring Power: Roots & Futures of Queer & Trans Movements
A collaboration with the GLBT Historical Society, this exhibition showcases the beauty and resistance of local queer and trans communities. Bay Area artists host a “journey through time,” achieved through a multimedia blend of archival material, audio clips, photography, and stunning murals.
Conjuring Power is included with general admission to the YBCA.
This new reinstallation of Indigenous American art presents four refreshed galleries in the de Young Museum, each of which explores part of the theme “Relationship to Place.” See works spanning over a thousand years of Native history, including the opening exhibition, Rooted in Place, which will stay up through Dec. 6th and honors the histories of Northern Californian Native communities.
Fiber artist Sheila Hicks presents her first solo exhibition at SFMOMA, featuring site-specific pieces including towering sculptures. See a range of intricate weavings using natural and synthetic materials, which draw inspiration from her life in Paris and her travels.
Stratagems
Tara Donovan’s work explores how ordinary, mass-produced materials can be transformed through repetition and accumulation into immersive sculptural forms. Stratagems presents a series of tall, reflective sculptures made from thousands of recycled CDs. As presented in the Transamerica Pyramid Center, the works engage with the surrounding architecture in a way that helps viewers reinterpret SF’s urban environment.
Stratagems is included with free admission to ICA San Francisco.
Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
SFMOMA commissioned artist Kara Walker, known for her work examining the exploitation of race and sexuality, to create this site-specific installation in the Roberts Family Gallery. See Walker’s automatons trapped in ritualistic cycles, enacting the memorialization of trauma in contemporary society. The mechanized sculptures are set in a landscape of black obsidian, which is thought to be healing.
Viewable to the public for free at SFMOMA.
BigPicture: Natural World Photography
The California Academy of Sciences presents the 12th annual BigPicture exhibition, featuring winning nature photographs carefully chosen by a panel of judges out of 8,000 submissions. See breathtaking captures from all over the world, demonstrating the artistry involved in capturing natural scenes in a fleeting moment.
BigPicture is included with general admission to the Academy of Sciences