There’s one week left to see SF’s biggest exhibit in years

When the call for entries went out for the massive community art exhibition known as the de Young Open, it was all Rachel Leibman’s friends in the Bay Area art community could talk about. “Everyone you know is telling you, sending you an email: Did you see this?” the mixed media artist told SFGATE. “Everyone in my studio applied for it.”The excitement was warranted: While the Open has come around a second time since the museum launched it during the pandemic, as a triennial exhibition, it only happens every three years. And though many artists apply, only about 10% have their works chosen. A sculpture by Leibman was selected this year (No. 590, “Piano Scherzo No. 1”), but her 2020 application wasn’t accepted.

Since late September, the juried exhibit has taken over the museum’s downstairs gallery space, which is usually reserved for high-ticket exhibitions like surveys of fashion or Egyptian relics. Filling it instead are works only by artists from the Bay Area’s nine counties, stacked “salon-style” nearly floor to ceiling. It’s a sprawling love letter to the local art scene, and a model that at least one New York museum is talking about copying.

Each time I’ve visited the Open, local artists, both those with works accepted and those who didn’t get in, along with their friends and family, have been in the galleries. Everyone seems to know someone whose work is on the wall. Leibman’s best friend Alison Heath’s “Street Poetry” is work No. 828. Just below is my friend Robin Dick, whose “House on the Lake” is No. 832, and who introduced me to Leibman. 

“I felt like the de Young did something that didn’t just make them money but just showed that the talent here is wonderful,” Leibman said. “For the de Young to do this for our little Bay Area, that doesn’t get as much attention [as New York], I think is really important. It’s a real gift, even if you didn’t get in.”

Once the deadline for entries hit, communications between the artists went dead, Leibman remembered. “After we applied, nobody was talking about it,” she said. Ultimately, the de Young kept the artists on tenterhooks for about a month, Leibman said, before sending an email to those chosen with the news that they’d been accepted. 

But it wasn’t like the de Young spent that time dilly dallying. Narrowing nearly 8,000 works down to nearly 900 was no small task.

“The sheer number of artworks to be juried for The de Young Open is unprecedented and we are not aware of any other American museums that host exhibitions of this scale,” said Tim Burgard, curator-in-charge of American art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in an email to SFGATE. In 2023, 1,574 more artists applied to the Open than in 2020, he said.

The selection was a two-phase process. First, the 7,766 submitted works were winnowed by eight curators from the museum, each reviewing a roughly equal number of works. Four Bay Area artists — Clare Rojas, Sunny Smith, Stephanie Syjuco and Xiaoze Xie — served as round two jurors and ultimately selected the 883 exhibited artworks from the curators’ round one pool. 

Each piece was reviewed digitally and anonymously. There were no requirements for artists to have a certain education or art world experience or affiliations. Burgard called this “one of the exhibition’s greatest strengths.” Regarding the exhibition’s artists, Leibman said, “There’s people that only occasionally do art all the way up to people represented by galleries.”

As the acceptance emails went out, artist email lists once again filled with posts, this time with the news of who got in, invitations to celebrations, videos of rooftop champagne parties, Leibman said. She found herself tentative: “You don’t want to tell people because you don’t know if they got chosen.” But one fellow artist got the news from her immediately: Heath. The fact that they both had pieces chosen is not the norm. In Leibman’s studio, of the 15 who applied, just two were selected. 

The exhibition includes an incredible variety of media and formats. There are photos, sculptures, collages, weavings, assemblages, even quilts. Works are made of glass, wire, metal, ceramics, yarn and discarded and repurposed materials. The paintings are oils, acrylics, watercolors.

Deciding how to display the art was as multi-stage as the selection process. The works were given a thematic tag, and then grouped by these themes. That, plus each group’s overall square footage, designated them for display in a particular gallery space. Next, software suggested an arrangement for each thematic group. After that, the curator and the exhibit designer made numerous additional moves of various works, mostly to highlight their similarities in either subject or style.

The rich local themes throughout the exhibit make a Californian’s heart swell. You see beloved natural spaces — Bolinas Lagoon, Mount Tamalpais, Russian River, Yosemite — and our built environment is unmistakable. There are houseboats, Victorians, steep SF streets and an empty suburban mall (No. 98, “SEARS”). Our faces are here, too: a couple kissing in skull makeup (No. 315, “Dark Kiss”), a man in Indigenous dance dress outside a corner store (No. 271, “Aquí Estamos: Mission Danzante, SF Carnaval 2023”), a “San Francisco Firefighter” (No. 283).

Behind the works, the walls are painted a unique shade selected by the exhibit designer. The chosen color won’t be used in a future open, to give each year a distinct feel, according to Burgard. This year’s is a deep, dark Benjamin Moore paint called “Majestic Violet.” Displaying art on white walls is a 20th century invention, wrote Burgard of the intense color choice. “Museums and galleries with walls painted in colors have a much longer history.” 

Leibman thought the excitement at having her work displayed would override anything about its placement. “I was saying to myself, ‘I don’t care where they hang it,’” she told SFGATE. But when she went to the artists’ opening, she found that her delicate sculpture, which is made of piano wires, disappeared into the very dark background. “I don’t think I could be more disappointed,” she said. She eventually reached out to the de Young team, she said, and they ultimately painted the wall behind only her work a lighter shade. The silvery metal strands now stand out against a lighter violet background. 

When asked why the de Young has again given over its prominent exhibition space to local art, especially over the holidays, Burgard wrote: “The Fine Arts Museums would not exist without the artists who make their existence possible. … The de Young Open aspires to magnify the visions and voices of artists who are rooted locally, but thinking globally about the world we live in.”

As with 2020, the museum will acquire a number of the works this year for its permanent collection. The artists’ names and contact details are also prominently displayed on the exhibition’s web gallery, so interested buyers can make purchases. 

Leibman isn’t concerned with getting her work sold via the Open. Being chosen as one of the 883 artists is honor enough. “When we came for the artists’ show, all the staff would say, ‘Congratulations.’ It really made you feel special, like it was all about you,” she said.