Édouard Manet, The Balcony (detail), 1868–69. Oil on canvas, 66 15/16 x 49 3/16 in., (170 x 125 cm). Musée d'Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Art of Manga: First Museum Presentation in the Americas to Explore Quintessential Japanese Art Form
New Perspectives on Artistic Exchange in Manet & Morisot, Penultimate Show of Legion of Honor 100 Celebration
Commitment to Contemporary Artists with Exhibitions Featuring Works by Isaac Julien, Rose B. Simpson, and Yinka Shonibare
SAN FRANCISCO, February 10 — The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are excited to share a vibrant schedule of exhibitions for 2025. Newly announced exhibitions anchor this dynamic year, including Art of Manga at the de Young and Manet & Morisot at the Legion of Honor. Opening in September, Art of Manga will be the first exhibition in the Americas to explore manga as an art form and will spotlight its influence on global storytelling and its function as social commentary. In October, Manet & Morisot will be the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the pivotal relationship between the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot; it will serve as the penultimate exhibition in the centennial celebrations of the Legion of Honor 100.
“Featuring pioneering ideas, research, and artists such as Paul McCartney, Wayne Thiebaud, Isaac Julien, Rose B. Simpson, Édouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Yinka Shonibare, among others, our forthcoming year of exhibitions testify to art’s enduring power to inspire, provoke dialogue, and beyond,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. “We are incredibly proud to present such a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary program here in the Bay Area.”
Additional Legion of Honor 100 shows include Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art, the first exhibition to spotlight Thiebaud’s extensive appropriations, virtuosic reinterpretations, and direct copies of famous artworks. Rotations of permanent-collection works on paper will be on view in Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screenprint and in Ferlinghetti for San Francisco.
Culminating the centennial exhibitions will be the first major exhibition on the US West Coast dedicated to Yinka Shonibare. This exhibition will be the latest in the Fine Arts Museums’ Contemporary Art Program, which presents the work of living artists in dialogue with the Legion of Honor and de Young’s unique buildings, their location in the Bay Area, and the Fine Arts Museums’ permanent collection.
Works by living artists will also be on view throughout 2025 at the de Young in Golden Gate Park. Opening in March, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm will present more than 250 personal photos by McCartney and offer a behind-the-scenes look into the meteoric rise of Beatlemania. Pioneering artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien’s work, reflecting on political and cultural events, dynamics, and constructs, will go on view in April. In August, Rose B. Simpson will bring two customized cars to Wilsey Court, presented against an expansive geometric installation design that will transform the de Young’s free public space.
More details on all 2025 exhibitions are below.
Newly Announced Exhibitions
Isaac Julien: I Dream a World
de Young
April 12–July 13, 2025
Over the past 25 years, artist Isaac Julien has developed a singular style of moving image and sound choreography in the form of immersive multichannel film installations and videos. Distinguished by their compelling fusion of fact and fiction, social critique and aesthetic immersion, Julien’s works offer poetic reflections on political and cultural events that have shaped the lives of individuals and societies around the world—especially for those on the margins of power. Isaac Julien: I Dream a World is the first US retrospective of Julien’s work and the largest exhibition of his work to date. It will feature 10 major video installations made between 1999 and 2022, including Lessons of the Hour (2019), acquired by the Fine Arts Museums in 2023, plus early films.
Art of Manga
de Young
September 27, 2025–January 25, 2026
Art of Manga is the first exhibition in the Americas to explore manga as an art form, and will feature some of the world’s most influential manga artists, including Taniguchi Jirō, Takahashi Rumiko, Yamashita Kazumi, Araki Hirohiko, Tagame Gengoroh, Yamazaki Mari, Yoshinaga Fumi, and Oda Eiichiro. The exhibition will be a rare opportunity to experience original drawings by these artists, including many never before seen by the public.
The presentation will spotlight manga, a genre of innovative Japanese comics and graphic novels characterized by evocatively drawn artwork. Through more than 700 drawings, Art of Manga will enable visitors to gain an understanding of its creative and immersive power and the social impact of manga in the world today. Visitors will become fluent in reading manga after viewing the exhibition. Holding an extensive historical Japanese prints collection, the Fine Arts Museums are the first North American museum to highlight the contemporary Japanese art form, which traces its roots back to Japanese painting forms, 18th- and 19th-century woodblock prints, and Western comics and satire.
Manet & Morisot
Legion of Honor
October 11, 2025–March 1, 2026
This is the first major exhibition ever dedicated to the artistic exchange between the French Impressionist painters Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot. Manet was the era’s great pioneer of modern painting, and Morisot, the only woman to exhibit under her own name in the original Impressionist group. Supported by spectacular loans from international museums and private collections, Manet & Morisot will illustrate the ever-evolving nature of an artistic friendship at the heart of Impressionism.
The two painters were friends, colleagues, collectors of each other’s work, and, after Morisot’s marriage to Manet’s brother in 1874, family. The story of their relationship has often been told through Manet’s early portraits of Morisot, with Morisot’s own work treated as an offshoot of Manet’s. More recent scholarship, however, reveals that, although Morisot looked to Manet for inspiration and approval during her early career, by the final years of his life, Manet had begun to follow Morisot’s example, emulating not only her choice of subjects and high-keyed colors, but also her rapid, fluttering brushstrokes. Rich in new research, the exhibition will recast this celebrated artistic friendship—and, by extension, the story of modern art—in a fresh light.
Upcoming Legion of Honor 100 Exhibitions
Wayne Thiebaud: Art Comes from Art
March 22–August 17, 2025
Wayne Thiebaud was a self-described art “thief” who openly drew ideas from and reinterpreted old and new European and American artworks, believing that art history is a continuum that connects artists of the past, present, and future. Highlighting works from across the beloved artist’s six-decade career, this retrospective exhibition is the first to delve into Thiebaud’s extensive appropriations, virtuosic reinterpretations, and direct copies of famous artworks, as well as objects from his personal art collection, including two recently gifted to the Fine Arts Museums by the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation.
Printing Color: Chiaroscuro to Screenprint
May 24–November 30, 2025
Color has challenged and fascinated printmakers since the Renaissance. This exhibition explores technological and artistic revolutions in color print from the 16th century through today, highlighting innovative 18th-century mezzotints and vibrant lithographs from the late 19th century, as well as more recent practices by leading contemporary artists such as Chris Ofili (b.1968) and Tauba Auerbach (b.1981), who continue to experiment with color in printmaking processes. These radiant impressions on paper across time and technique reveal the enduring pull of color in print.
Ferlinghetti for San Francisco
July 19, 2025–March 22, 2026
This exhibition explores the artistic practice of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021), one of San Francisco’s most beloved and significant cultural figures. A poet, activist, publisher, and cofounder of City Lights Bookstore, Ferlinghetti was also an avid painter, draftsman, and printmaker. His work across mediums—often figural in nature with nautical motifs—frequently combines image and text to delve into themes of isolation, violence, and human resilience. With artworks drawn entirely from the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, this exhibition showcases Ferlinghetti’s dynamic work in printmaking, with examples in etching, lithography, and letterpress.
Yinka Shonibare
November 15, 2025–July 26, 2026
To culminate the Legion of Honor 100 exhibition program, the museum will present the first major exhibition on the US West Coast dedicated to Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist whose deceptively beautiful and playful works interrogate racialized power structures. Building on the historical arc of the collection at the Legion of Honor, the works on view will showcase the broad reach of his critical inquiry ranging from Victorian culture’s entanglement with the international slave trade to contemporary manifestations of social injustice including migration, homelessness, and climate change. Shonibare’s work also engages the whitewashed histories of classical sculpture and public monuments, as well as the looting and appropriation of African art. This is memorably commemorated in his 2024 Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul, which was recently acquired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in anticipation of this exhibition.
2025 de Young Exhibitions
Matisse’s Jazz Unbound
January 25–July 6, 2025
This exhibition celebrates the 2024 acquisition of Jazz, Henri Matisse’s 1947 artist’s book on the circus and theater. Considered the pinnacle of his graphic art, Jazz includes 20 color stencil prints of popular subjects on these themes, from horses to ringmasters. The prints were created using the artist’s lively paper cutouts, which Matisse called “drawing with scissors.” This presentation offers the rare chance to see the unbound works from Jazz in conversation with other artist’s books by Matisse from the collection.
Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm
March 1–July 6, 2025
Nearly 60 years after The Beatles performed their final concert at Candlestick Park, Beatlemania is back in the Bay Area. Organized by the National Portrait Gallery, London, and presented exclusively in California at the de Young museum, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm features more than 250 photographs taken by Paul McCartney, as well as video and archival materials that offer a behind-the-scenes look into the meteoric rise of the world’s most celebrated band.
Bouquets to Art
June 3–8, 2025
Now in its 41st year, Bouquets to Art is an annual weeklong event and fundraiser featuring floral displays throughout the galleries. In 2025, Bouquets to Art will expand beyond the de Young to the Legion of Honor, as part of the anniversary celebrations of the Legion of Honor 100. Leading Bay Area floral designers will transform the galleries at both museums with innovative botanical interpretations of de Young and Legion of Honor artwork and architecture. From striking sculptural creations to extravagant floral fashion designs, inspiration will fill every corner.
Rose B. Simpson: LEXICON
August 30, 2025–August 2, 2026
Rose. B. Simpson: LEXICON will bring together two seemingly distinct art forms: Pueblo pottery and classic cars. In 2014, Rose B. Simpson, a mixed-media artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, refurbished a 1985 Chevy El Camino, transforming it with a black-on-black Tewa pottery motif. Simpson titled her work Maria in honor of renowned artist Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1887–1980), who popularized the distinctive black-on-black style. Ten years later, this exhibition will debut Simpson’s second customized car, a 1964 Buick Riviera painted in vibrant polychrome. Both cars will be presented against an expansive geometric design, evoking the environment of the Southwest and transforming Wilsey Court into a bold, contemporary expression of Pueblo pottery traditions. Through this use of scale and space, Simpson will forge connections between the ancestral and contemporary, forming a new visual vocabulary, or lexicon, to assert her cultural heritage and its continuity.
Embroidered Histories
October 25, 2025–October 25, 2026
Featuring favorite stitches and motifs, embroidery samplers have been used to teach needlework skills and literacy since the 14th century. By the 18th century, these textiles were viewed as works of art in their own right. This exhibition highlights European embroidery samplers from the 17th through 19th centuries. Through a close look at the samplers’ materials, techniques, and designs, Embroidered Histories explores economic, political, and social developments in Europe during these centuries.
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About the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco respectfully acknowledge the Ramaytush Ohlone, the original inhabitants of what is now the San Francisco Peninsula, and we further acknowledge that the greater Bay Area is the ancestral territory of the Miwok, Yokuts, and Patwin, as well as other Ohlone peoples. Indigenous communities have lived in and moved through this land over hundreds of generations and Indigenous peoples from many nations make their home in this region today. Please join us in recognizing and honoring their ancestors, descendants, elders, and all other members of their communities.
Together, the de Young in Golden Gate Park and the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park make up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the largest public arts institution in the city and one of the largest in the United States. Opened in 1895, the de Young is home to American art from the 17th century through today; costume and textile arts; arts of African; Oceania, and the Americas, and contemporary art. Celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024–25, the Legion of Honor presents European painting; sculpture; and decorative arts; ancient art; works on paper; and contemporary art.
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