The pulse of northern California’s cultural scene still thumps the loudest in downtown San Francisco: There’s the city’s world-renowned Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Museum of Craft and Folk Art; and the Daniel Libeskind–designed Contemporary Jewish Museum will add to this visual-arts nerve center when it opens next summer. Yet outside the urban bustle are oases still within San Francisco’s city limits: the de Young Museum in bucolic Golden Gate Park and its sister institution, the Legion of Honor, perched above the gorgeous rocky coast overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. Wander a bit further and discover museums in Oakland, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and beyond, stretching from picturesque wine country—the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art and the di Rosa Preserve—all the way down to southern Silicon Valley—the San Jose Museum of Art and the San Jose Institute of
Contemporary Art. Gap CEO Donald Fisher’s proposed Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio—which, according to his plans, is se  to open as early as 2010 and be bigger than SFMOMA—will be just another addition to the Bay Area’s critical mass of excellent visual-arts venues.

San Francisco
SFMOMA in the SoMa (South of Market) district is the city’s most popular draw among veteran collectors and first-time visitors alike. “Take your time: Olafur Eliasson”—the Danish artist’s first comprehensive survey in the United States—proves why. Eliasson uses simple materials to create transformative installations that push the boundaries between art, science, entertainment, and philosophy  The intent is to jar us from passive viewing into interactive collaboration. In a dark room, mist and a spotlight produce Beauty’s rainbows, while in another, 360˚room for all colours transports us out of ordinary architectural space into a circular dynamic sunset that threatens to collapse time and space. One-way colour tunnel reconfigures a museum catwalk into a fun-house ride, and in Room for one colour, monofrequency lightbulbs transform the elevator foyer into a living photograph. Two floors below in the Art and Design galleries is Eliasson’s BMW car project: an icy carapace that comments on global warming.

The perfect antidote to Eliasson’s sensory overload is “Jeff Wall,” a show of large, representational photographs just one floor down at SFMoMA. A tight retrospective of 40 works, these images (called “cinematography” by the artist) are carefully staged tableaux mounted on light boxes, depicting moments drawn from the news, art history, and everyday life in crystal-clear detail. Across the hall, “Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” presents nearly 50 works. Monitors stacked four and five high play the artist’s varied fare of repetitive hand gestures and appropriated clips from Hollywood classics.

A short cab ride away in the Civic Center district, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco features one of the most respected contemporary artists in China, in the eponymous exhibition “Zhan Wang.” in this artist’s hands, traditional “scholars’ rocks”—natural rock formations of unusual shape worthy of contemplation—are wrapped in stainless steel that is then removed and polished to liquid-mercury sheen. At the AAM, Zhan’s use of rocks from the nearby Sierra Nevada alludes to Chinese immigrant miners during the California gold rush. The exhibition also includes one of his “urban landscapes,” in which he brings together actual rocks, their metal reproductions, silverware, and pots and pans to form a topographical map of San Francisco.

Moored in the greenery of lush Golden Gate Park, Herzog and de Meuron’s shiplike de Young Museum boasts a tower with panoramic city views and a globe-spanning collection with particular strengths in American and South Pacific art. The museum has increasingly ambitious special exhibition programming, which now includes “Gilbert & George,” the largest retrospective of the duo’s work ever organized. The pair’s 20-year (and counting) practice blurs the boundaries between artist and art. Their most celebrated work, the “living sculpture,” is documented by an array of large photographs, film, and computer graphics.

East Bay
Over the Bay Bridge in downtown Oakland, near a burgeoning enclave of cutting-edge galleries, the Oakland Museum of California fetes the California College of the Arts’s centennial with “Artists of Invention: A Century of CCA.” This survey of work by 100 faculty and alumni, many among California’s most influential artists, has two parts. The first presents established history from the Society of Six from the 1920s, through the Bay Area Figuration and the modern studio ceramics movements, to Minimalism, West Coast Conceptualism, and Photorealism. The second half examines the college’s shift away from crafts in 1987 to its current emphasis on contemporary art, design, and curating.

A short drive north to the University of California, Berkeley, campus is the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, host of a consistently full schedule of avant-garde film screenings and, through July, the special exhibition “Joan Jonas: The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things.” A pioneer in performance and video art, Jonas has focused on the body since the 1960s. The centerpiece of this exhibition is the eponymous multimedia installation that incorporates video, sound, drawings, photography, and found objects and reflects the artist’s experiences in the Southwest, which she first visited in the 1960s and revisited years later after reading 19th-century art historian Aby Warburg’s essay about his seminal visit there. To underscore the persistence of the past and the fragmentation of memory, Jonas has incorporated footage from the work’s earlier installations (it was first exhibited in 2004 at Chicago’s Renaissance Society) into this final iteration, which has been jointly acquired by the museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

South Bay
A few minutes drive from central Palo Alto, “Dreaming of a Speech Without Words: The Paintings and Early Objects of H. C. Westermann” continues a legacy of provoking thought and debate at Stanford University’s Cantor Art Center. Westermann’s unique, surreal, and violent works from the 1950s and 1960s were born from his military experiences in World War II and Korea and refer to Native American art. Though best known for his prints and sculptures, Westermann also created incisive and difficult paintings, which are showcased in this enlightening exhibition.

"The Best of the Bay Area" comes to ARTINFO from the winter 2008 issue of Museums magazine.