Although many won’t recognize Maira Kalman’s name, they’re likely familiar with her witty covers for The New Yorker magazine; her online, illustrated odysseys for The New York Times such as "Principles of Uncertainty" or "And the Pursuit of Happiness," an

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, word has reached you that SFMOMA and late Gap founder Don Fisher and his wife, Doris, struck a deal on the disposition of their extensive contemporary art collection shortly before Fisher’s death in September, after

Photographer Daniel Nicoletta discusses his storied career

In his new creative nonfiction book Role Models (Farrar Straus Giroux), independent film director John Waters writes about people who have inspired him in his brilliant career.

If you’ve been looking forward to Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay, the blockbuster exhibition of nearly 100 paintings that opened at the de Young Museum last week, and you’re expecting an easily digestible parade of familiar, iconic works of Classical Impressionism, you will be in for something of a surprise.

During this brief lull between the wind-up of winter museum shows and the launch of summer blockbuster attractions like the Fisher Collection unveiling at SFMOMA in late June, there’s an assortment of interesting, idiosyncratic gallery shows to tickle the palette. Here’s a small and by no means comprehensive sample itinerary for the adventurously inclined.

Some people talk about diversity. Some people implement it. To my knowledge, San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) has yet to issue press releases about celebrating diversity or being inclusive. Instead, quietly and without fanfare, the museum’s small but stately building on Mission between 3rd & 4th Streets in downtown San Francisco has established itself as a place that’s open and welcoming to all.

Teeming with ideas, artist William T. Wiley’s mind is a crowded intersection where politics, literature and art history meet.

With Shanghai, a much-hyped, rudderless exhibition timed to coincide with San Francisco’s 2010 Sister City celebrations and Shanghai’s hosting of the World Expo in May, the Asian Art Museum steps bravely, if unsteadily, into the 20th and 21st centuries.

American industry takes form in artistic expression this week with the San Francisco debut of fine art photographer Susan Mikula’s American Device: Recent Photographs, opening at the George Lawson Gallery today (Thurs., Feb. 25). The exhibit follows a successful New York exhibit of sic transit, and Bearings, an exhibit of her work in Provincetown, MA, earlier last fall.

Is satiric cheesecake still cheesecake? Is titillating imagery of voluptuous flesh bursting forth from peek-a-boo bras and garter belts pornographic even when it’s delivered with a generous dose of irony and savage humor? This thorny dilemma, replete with alleged assaults on the gender of superheroes (more on that later), caught a 30ish, classically trained, feminist artist named Margaret Harrison in its clutches and threatened to derail her promising career. In 1971, the police shut down her first solo exhibition the day after it opened in London; a show that, in Harrison’s words, "tread the fine line between irony, sexuality, transgender, transvestism, power, masculinity, objectification and exploitation."

Ardent followers of modern art and even those who have only ducked into SFMOMA to escape the cold and rain can probably name their favorite exhibitions: the remarkable Eva Hesse show in 2000; the transformative, mind-blowing Anselm Kiefer retrospective; the Chagall blockbuster; or Olafur Eliasson’s environmental installations (in a memorable one, he stored a BMW roadster in a meat locker), which saved visitors the bother of standing on a glacier to experience the iridescent light of the aurora borealis.

’Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004’

New exhibit of stage design by Russian and European avant-garde artists at the Contemporary Jewish Museum opens a window onto an unknown chapter of art history, when Russian Jewish theater was allowed to thrive relatively free from government repression in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.