The 12th annual Youth Arts Festival and Exhibition showcases the visual and performing arts by San Francisco students in grades K-12. The celebration includes a student art exhibition in the de Young Museum, and choral, instrumental, and dance performances in the de Young Museum and Music Concourse. In addition, a variety of hands-on art activities will take place in the Music Concourse, Wednesday through Saturday. On Family Day, Saturday, May 9, there are special performances and activities for the entire family.

The Fine Arts Museums are proud to celebrate the outstanding contributions to the museums by George Hopper Fitch, an ardent collector of works on paper and longtime trustee of the Fine Arts Museums, by exhibiting approximately 50 American and Mexican artworks collected by him. Over the years, Fitch has helped build the museums' collections both as a member of the museums' acquisition committee and through gifts to the museums from his personal collection.

A lively and engaging exhibition of art in all media, A Feast for the Eye celebrates and explores the vast subject of food. Still lifes, genre scenes, cartoons, photographs, and decorative arts illustrate both the serious and the humorous sides of food as a symbol of wealth, power, and status, as well as the powerlessness engendered by the lack of food.

Interventions by Fred Wilson
The internationally-exhibited New York artist Fred Wilson is renowned for his museum "interventions," often surprising and controversial additions and alterations to conventional museum displays which attempt to challenge viewers' ideas about the traditional role of the museum. Wilson's work often forces museums to reexamine their roles as "keepers of culture,"and encourages visitors to be aware of coexisting historical and cultural facts that are seldom addressed in traditional museum diplays.