Mark Van Proyen

Mark Van Proyen is Associate Professor of Art and Critical Thinking at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Many of the works presented in Multiple Offerings can be read as poetic gestures of sympathy and solidarity with the turbulent political situation in South Korea throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Installation view: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Multiple Offerings, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley, California, 2026. Courtesy Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Pegan Brooke’s new oil paintings are masterpieces of delicate evanescence, simultaneously allusive and omnipresent.

Pegan Brooke, S-378, 2024. Oil on Canvas, 40 × 30 inches. Courtesy the artist and re.riddle.

Bay Area Then was gathered by guest curator Eungie Joo, its title a play on the Bay Area Now triennial exhibitions hosted by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts since 1997.

Installation view: Bay Area Then, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2025–26. Photo: Charlie Villyard.

Most of the new works in Lynn Hershman Leeson’s About Time represent a departure from earlier efforts that focus on the anxious tension between virtual bodies and real mortality: an emerging concern in these post-pandemic times of vaccine controversy.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, I See the Future, 2025. UV print on Dibond®, 60 ⅞ × 45 ⅞ inches. Courtesy the artist and Altman Siegel.

Mildred Howard’s exhibition is the most recent installment of a far-flung project begun at two other venues a year ago, all interrogating the ways that idealized historical representation falsifies actual history.

Installation view: Mildred Howard: Collaborating With the Muses: Part Two, 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, 2025. Courtesy 500 Capp Street. Photo: Henrik Kam.

On July 4, 1975—two weeks before the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws—a group of renegade architects called Ant Farm convened an event on the vast parking lot of San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975. Courtesy 500 Capp Street. Photo: John F. Turner.

Thoma Hall’s hybrid constructions in To See with Eyes Closed are suffused with an archeological romance that imagines a magical reanimation of seemingly (un)dead or otherwise forlorn forms, showing how they are haunted by their past lives.

Marta Thoma Hall, Ge as Dreamer, 2024. Faux fur, graphite, and paint on canvas, 60 x 48 inches. Courtesy the artist and Anglim/Trimble. Photo: Promise Callahan.

Mythopoesis contains a selection of fifteen works by Carrington dating from 1940 to 1987. Two of the three drawings included in the exhibition were executed in Spain, the rest in Mexico.

Installation view: Leonora Carrington: Mythopoesis, Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, 2025. Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris. Photo: Glen Cheriton.

Each individual painting in Amy Sherald: American Sublime features a psychological tension between disassociation and a call for empathy, consistently playing conflicting notions of identity with and against each other.

Amy Sherald, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), 2014. Oil on canvas, 54 x 43 x 2 1/2 inches. © Amy Sherald. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jon Etter.
The rest is mere spectacle, almost always pre-packaged, its only salutary attribute being the way that it compels us to perpetually re-consider the relationships between truth and loyalty in a world governed by manipulative deceptions.

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