What's happening in Van Ness / Civic Center

Speak Low Tango Club on Saturdays and Milonga La Paz on Sundays

Participatory dance events for seniors and veterans.

Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries

Two Home Countries is the first solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area by Chiharu Shiota, best known for large-scale installations that fill spaces with densely woven webs of colored fibers. Featuring works from throughout Shiota’s career spanning installation, sculpture, video, drawing, and stage design, the exhibition offers a timely meditation on belonging, impermanence, and living with “in-betweenness.” In the monumental installation Diary , the Osaka-born, Berlin-based artist explores themes of nationality, identity, and memory through her distinctive visual language, reflecting on her own experiences of her “two home countries.” Strands of red yarn stretch across the 88-foot length of the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, creating a spectacular structure that surrounds audiences as they pass through; overhead, handwritten pages from the journals of Japanese soldiers and postwar German civilians hang suspended in the dreamlike web. “Shiota is interested in what remains after a person is gone,” says Dr. Robert Mintz, Chief Curator at the Asian Art Museum. “In Diary , the voices of individuals who never met are brought into conversation. The installation makes history feel personal, fragmented, and profoundly present.” As Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries unfolds, audiences accompany the artist on a journey that is both deeply personal and universally relatable. Navigating an existence suspended between Japan and Germany, absence and presence, isolation and belonging, Shiota explores the threads of memory, history, and identity that make up the complex fabric of our shared reality. Show more . . . Two Home Countries , the installation from which the show derives its title, evokes what Shiota calls the “in-between sensation” of bicultural identity: a red dress unravels into a sea of cascading red cords, stretching to fill the metal frames of two houses while restlessly climbing the gallery wall. Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries also features sketches, concept drawings, and video highlights offering a behind-the-scenes look at Shiota’s work as a stage designer for KINKAKUJI (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion) , a theatrical production commissioned by the Japan Society in New York. Later sections of the exhibition feature sculptures, performance videos, and works on paper in which the artist confronts her own body as a home that offers neither comfort nor belonging. As she questions the body’s place in the universe, Shiota finds unexpected beauty in its vulnerable depths. “Chiharu Shiota’s work resonates because it makes emotional states visible,” says Soyoung Lee, The Barbara Bass Bakar Director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “Her installations speak to the experience of living between places, histories, and identities — an experience that feels increasingly familiar to many people today.” Show less Special Exhibition Ticket Required.

Al-An deSouza: Table Settings

An ambitious watercolor project connects the museum collection to moments of beauty in overlooked places, starting with the ground beneath our feet. Al-An deSouza’s Table Settings invites viewers into a world of textures and details inspired by the permanent galleries of the Asian Art Museum and informed by the artist’s practice of photographing the streets while walking, attending closely to their “cracks and stains, signage and markings, bumps and dips, and potential slips and trips.” The work was created over months at a living room table; each session began with a pot of tea, remnants of which formed the ground of that day’s painting. Layering elements that are rarefied and humble, intentional and unplanned, Table Settings offers a meditation on where we find value and beauty, both in the galleries and beyond. deSouza describes taking inspiration from a uniquely attuned movement through their surroundings: “looking down, watching your step, accepting one’s connection to the baseness of matter.” “I decided on watercolor for its association with the amateur ‘Sunday’ painter, with the feminine, for its low carbon footprint, and especially in how it is a technique of more or less controlled staining,” relates deSouza. “It seems devalued for all these reasons, and it is this devaluing which attracts me in relation to what is socially valued, and what is seen as a stain on the social body and a stain on ‘pure’ culture.”

Assessment Appeals Board 1 Meeting

Assessment Appeals Board 2 Meeting

Ballot Simplification Council for the November 3, 2026, General Election

Rules Committee Meeting

Street Artists Committee Meeting - 7/27/2026 - SFAC

Storytime: For Babies

Services: Lunch at the Library

Workshop: Rising Creators

Assessment Appeals Board 3 Meeting

Land Use and Transportation Committee Meeting

July 27, 2026 Film Commission Meeting

SF’s “Civic Symphony” Free Concerts

Home » *Top Pick* , Community , In Person , Live Music , Sponsored SF’s “Civic Symphony” Free Concerts (2025/26) Sunday, March 22, 2026 - 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm | Cost: FREE* *RSVP - donations are...

Tutorial: Meet One-on-One with a Financial Counselor

Services: Aging and Disability Resources with the San Francisco Senior Center

教程: 基本科技協助 (中文和英文) / Tutorial: English and Chinese Tech Drop-In

Storytime: For Families

Social: Genealogy Club