SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Art Market San Francisco, the Bay Area’s longest-running modern and contemporary art fair, returns to Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion this April 20—23, with 85 top local, national, and international galleries. The fair's highly anticipated eleventh edition will also feature a robust array of installations and programming curated by the fair's new Creative Director, Nato Thompson, that speak to the many layers and facets of creativity that define the region's vibrant arts community.

Art Market San Francisco - a fair built by its city, for its city - reflects San Francisco’s reputation as a global arts destination, and this year’s fair will continue to showcase a dialogue of diversity and inclusion through its broad range of artworks and activations, all rooted in authentic representation. These cultural moments prove yet again why Art Market has been renowned for creating an idyllic environment for educating, entertaining, and engaging collectors and the art curious at all levels.

Programming highlights at this year’s fair will include

Installations

● Motel 6, a sculpture by contemporary Mexican artist Miguel Calderón (presented by Kurimanzutto), which examines the game of correspondence between real spatial dimensions and our notion of them, specifically the paradox of the size of hotel billboards seeming much bigger than the actual size of the rooms themselves, by generating “a room” with the very same billboard advertising the motel.

● The site specific installation, The Many Worlds (2023) by Jeffrey Gibson (presented by ICA San Francisco), an artist of Choctaw and Cherokee descent who has created a mobile taking the form of a suspended model of our solar system set-up to represent worlds within worlds, with the intention to open up conversations regarding our physical, psychological, and emotional relationship to the land and all living things as inextricable from ourselves and each other.

● MCXT’s ReflectioNNN, 2023, is a visual recounting of our collective histories on the water. MCXT//, Monica Canilao and Xara Thustra, delved into the MAH archives and connected with local artists and historians to illuminate the stories behind the early Venetian Water Carnivals of Santa Cruz, an annual spectacle held along the San Lorenzo River from 1895 to 1927.

● Catalina Ouyang’s sculptural work: risk assessment (by what love have I), 2020 (Presented by Lyles & King), engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to indicate counter narratives around representation and self-definition. Her pieces address how a subject orients in physical and sociopolitical space: what histories and discourses are inscribed on the body, how the body exists in contingency with architecture and bureaucratic structures.

● Artist, metapoet, and AI researcher Sasha Stiles - who is widely recognized as a pioneer of generative literature and language art - will be presenting IN/VERSE (2023), a piece that fuses elements of poetry, art, code, AI, digital humanities and web3 creativity to probe what it means to be human in a nearly posthuman era.

● Social Fabric (2022), a large-scale woven piece by textile designer Susie Taylor (Presented by Johansson Projects), is made up of two vibrant woven panels handcrafted with a traditional loom, which have been hand stitched together, portraying how our overall strength depends on the interconnectedness of many diverse, individual components.

Programming (In the Art Market San Francisco Theater unless otherwise noted)

● Thursday, April 20th from 6:00-6:30 pm - Performance by Allison Fall (Presented by John Natsoulas Gallery on Art Market San Francisco’s Main Floor)
○ Allison Fall, a performance artist who uses her body to be a part of her art practice and her materials, will showcase her performance art, in which she interweaves her body within the performance space using objects to invoke a shared new experience.

● Thursday, April 20th from 6:00-9:00 pm - Ariel Stinks Record Swap & DJ Set (Presented by Jill Miller)
○ When artist Jill Miller discovered that an indie musician named Ariel Pink used a photo of her face on his album cover, she created a series of blistering digital artworks in response. Pink, an attendee at the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, did not ask Miller for permission to use her image on his Thrash and Burn album cover. Miller responded with an NFT artwork, ARIEL STINKS (50 Alternative Album Covers to Thrash and Burn), which uses artificial intelligence software to parody Pink’s album cover. The series of 50 record jackets will be printed exclusively for Art Market San Francisco. On opening night, attendees can bring in any Ariel Pink record jacket to exchange for a signed original by Miller. Local KALX DJ Matokie will spin records during the swap. This event is first-come first-served; one printing of each record jacket will be available.

● Friday, April 21st from 3:00-4:00 pm - “Ansel Adams In Our Time” (Presented by FAMSF)
○ The exhibition Ansel Adams In Our Time at the de Young Museum features more than 100 of Adams’ most iconic images of Yosemite, San Francisco, and the American Southwest. In this discussion, docent Mike Madrid will look at Adams’ long career, his ties to the Bay Area, and his commitment to environmental issues, while photographer Pete Andreotti will discuss some of the photographic techniques that Adams used to create these distinctive images.

● Friday, April 21st from 5:00-6:00 pm - “Reinventing Riley,” (Presented by the ICA San Jose)
○ Join Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) San José’s Executive Director James G. Leventhal in dialogue with San Francisco Bay Area artists Sarah Hotchkiss, Lordy Rodriguez, and Susie Taylor as they explore the themes of hard-edged abstraction at the SJICA exhibition, Altered Perceptions (March 17 – August 13, 2023), where the artists’ works are presented alongside the complete works from Bridget Riley’s “Fragments Series” (1963-5). Together, the panel will explore Riley’s powerful legacy while displaying the variety of approaches to art-making across the Bay Area arts scene.

● Saturday, April 22nd from 12:00-1:00 pm - “Art Intelligence: AI’s Impact on Creators” (Presented by Gray Area)
○ This special session organized by Gray Area brings together leading experts and developers in the field of artificial intelligence in conversation with artists and thinkers grappling with AI tools, and exploring the complicated entanglements of AI and artists working today.

● Saturday, April 22nd from 2:00-3:00 pm - “Art That Transports: Highlights from the Central Subway Public Art Collection,” (Presented by the San Francisco Arts Commission)
○ In collaboration with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the San Francisco Arts Commission managed the implementation of a robust public art program for the new Central Subway - the first new subway opened in 40 years - that includes ten permanent, site-specific artworks featured across four stations. In this panel discussion, artists Leslie Shows, Amanda Hughen (Hughen/Starkweather), and Yumei Hou will speak with SFAC Civic Art Collection and Public Art Director Mary Chou on the multi-year journey that brought their dynamic new artworks from concept to reality.

● Saturday, April 22nd from 4:00-5:00 pm - “Climate Changed Art,” (Presented by Art + Climate Action)
○ Working to center environmental consciousness in Bay Area arts organizations, Art + Climate Action recognizes the vital role artists play in tackling the climate crisis. This panel, moderated by art historian, media scholar, writer Matthew Harrison Tedford,
presents the work of four artists and thinkers who marshal science and technology - Maria Paz Gutierrez, Deborah Munk, Tahirah Rasheed and Danielle Siembieda - as they discuss how they are re-imagining our built environment and developing new methods of material production, use, and reuse, to suggest pathways to change.

● Saturday, April 22nd from 5:30-6:30 pm - “Enchanted Art and Other Ensorcellments (or, That AI Painting is Probably Cursed),” (Presented by Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical Magic)
○ In this interactive event, Aaron Gach of the Center for Tactical Magic will examine how art, across history and cultures, from the illusory to the transcendental, from the divinatory to the deceitful, has long sought to unlock the mysteries of human perception and experience. The conversation will explore recent trends in contemporary art in an attempt to illuminate the depths of creative inquiry and discern between the treasures and the trolls hiding in the shadows of our aesthetic affairs.

● Sunday, April 23rd from 12:00-1:00 pm - “Fight and Flight,” (Presented by Museum of Craft and Design)
○ The Museum of Craft and Design’s exhibition “Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life” is an interdisciplinary exploration of today’s Bay Area arts ecosystem. Framed through the narrative of the struggle of living and working in an untenable city– from the joy of finding chosen communities and families, to the loss of affordable housing and studio space– exhibition co-curators Jacqueline Francis and Ariel Zaccheo, with featured artist Ala Ebtekar), will discuss the challenges and triumphs of empowering an alternative word view– told through the perspectives of the educators, artists, gallerists, and arts institutions for whom the Bay Area is their creative home.

● Sunday, April 23rd from 12:00-4:00 pm - MCD Mobile MakeArt: Crafting a Bay Area Life (Presented by Museum of Craft and Design in the Festival Pavilion Outdoor Area)
○ Inspired by Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life, participants are invited to explore various exhibition-featured materials, concepts, and techniques to create unique, custom wearables.

● Sunday, April 23rd from 2:00-3:00 pm - “Talking Space in the Art Marketplace” (Presented by Creativity Explored)
○ Creativity Explored- an organization who has been partnering with artists with disabilities in the Mission since 1983 - will host a provocative panel discussion centered around questions about the artistic contributions of people with disabilities, who are rightly taking space in today’s modern art marketplace.

● Sunday, April 23rd from 3:30-4:30 pm - “Lost & Found: TNT in America” (Presented by TNT Traysikel)
○ The film Lost & Found: TNT in America tells a story of immigration, cultural production and noteworthy achievements by Filipinos and Filipinx Americans in the United States through the lens of an immigrant-object, TNT Traysikel, a Pinoy motorcycle-sidecar that gives rides and hosts karaoke sessions in and around SOMA Pilipinas District - navigating the streets of San Francisco to understand itself through its community as that community tries to define itself to the rest of the world. In tandem with the installation of TNT Traysikel at the fair, this panel is a discussion moderated by Trisha Lagaso Goldberg with TNT Traysikel creators Mike Arcega and Paolo Asuncion, joined with collaborator Rachel Lastimosa, following a screening of an abridged version of the film.

● Friday, Saturday & Sunday, April 21-23 at 1pm
Daily themed tours for the public, led by San Francisco Art Dealers Association. More info to come.