Haines Gallery

Haines proudly presents Bend Di Young Tree, an exhibition of new work by Stuart Robertson (b. 1992, Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in New York, NY). A graduate of Stanford University’s MFA program, Robertson’s practice is inspired by nostalgia for his birthplace, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies about the future of the African diaspora. He paints, collages, and assembles images from Black life, creating striking, often resplendent images that combine materials such as aluminum, textiles, bubble wrap, glitter, and acrylic paint. Bend Di Young Tree is Robertson's first West Coast solo exhibition, and introduces audiences to his practice through a deeply personal body of work that focuses on the familial relationships, institutions, and vernacular culture that shaped his formative years. Bend Di Young Tree reflects Robertson’s desire to examine and foreground his Jamaican identity after half a life lived abroad, while inviting viewers to reckon with the influences—cultural and kindred—that have shaped each of us.

Haines and Arion Press proudly present A New Chapter: Arion Press at Haines, a collaborative exhibition celebrating the press’ recent move to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. Since 1974, Arion Press has partnered with contemporary visual artists to bring seminal texts to life. Collaborating with artists whose practices and concerns often dovetail with these written works, their publications offer fresh perspectives on literary texts ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The exhibition at Haines showcases a selection of Arion Press’ handmade books alongside original artworks and limited edition prints by contributing artists such as Enrique Chagoya, Kenturah Davis, Michele Oka Doner, Natalie Frank, Tim Hawkinson, William Kentridge, Alison Saar, Richard Wagener, and Kara Walker. Many of these will be on view for the first time, including works from Arion Press’ latest release, Fables of Aesop.

For over fifty years, Deborah Butterfield has relayed a love of horses into a sculptural practice known for its craftsmanship, material experimentation, and nuanced depictions of a singular, recurring subject. Her debut exhibition at Haines features a selection of Butterfield's signature equine sculptures, constructed from wood and cast in bronze, each imbued with a specificity and presence typically reserved for living beings.

Material Matters brings together eight artists whose highly inventive use of materials is central to their practices. Some may take the natural world as a site of inspiration and transmutation or substitute one material for another, creating new chains of associations and meanings. Others combine and collage their materials in unexpected ways to reconsider the boundaries of form and genre.

Haines Gallery proudly presents Equations, our ninth solo exhibition with Northern California painter Patsy Krebs. Imbuing abstract geometry with a lush sensualism, Krebs' work exemplifies the restrained dignity of minimalism at its very best—elegant, intelligent, and enigmatic. Equations draws upon three decades of Krebs’ practice, ranging from paintings created during the early 1990s to newly completed works from 2024.

Haines proudly presents Sea of Glass, an exhibition of new and recent works by San Francisco-based photographer John Chiara. Focusing on the dynamic forces that continually re-shape San Francisco, Sea of Glass includes a striking new body of work created during Chiara’s recent residency on Treasure Island, as well as images made on nearby Yerba Buena Island and elsewhere along the bay. Chiara’s inventive methods yield images that subvert and refresh our reading of these familiar vistas, while the stylistic signatures of his analog process lend a sense of disorientation and discovery. Within these evocative, atmospheric photographs, the changing light and fog so distinctive to San Francisco parallels the story of a city in transition.

Haines proudly presents Earth and Sky, our 7th solo exhibition with the distinguished photographer Linda Connor. Connor's peripatetic approach to photography demonstrates a longstanding interest in the relationship between systems of belief and the natural landscape. Bridging the terrestrial and the celestial, Earth and Sky includes images from her ongoing series Once the Ocean Floor, which depicts the intricately jagged cliff faces in the mountainous Ladakh region in Northern India, as well as iconic images of the cosmos created from historic glass plates at the Lick Observatory in San Jose, California, reproduced as luminous sublimation prints on aluminum. Contemplative and quietly powerful, these images invite us to contemplate our place in the universe.

Haines proudly presents Reflections on Black, our first solo exhibition with Oakland-based multidisciplinary artist Adia Millett, whose practice weaves threads of African American experiences with broader ideas about personal identity, collective history, and human interconnectivity. Blackness and the subtleties of moonlight inform Millett’s palette in new paintings and glass mosaics that examine our experiences of literal and metaphorical darkness. Presenting a nocturnal world navigated through introspection, Reflections on Black asks the questions: What do we see when we close our eyes, and when do we choose to close them?

For over thirty years, David Maisel has created powerful photographs of sites transformed by human intervention. Un/Earthed, his eighth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery, brings together a survey of aerial works from various series created between 1989 and 2018. At once mesmerizing and disquieting, these thoughtfully composed images consider the aesthetics, politics, and environmental impact of these radically altered landscapes. In Maisel’s images, we find a strange, discomfiting beauty born of environmental degradation. The terrain here is an alien one, the Earth made unearthly by our own presence.

Haines Gallery proudly presents David Nash: Wildwood, a solo exhibition by the acclaimed UK artist. Including a selection of carved and charred wood as well as works on paper, Wildwood explores the nature of place and our relationship to the larger landscape.

Shaped by experiences of diaspora and exile and informed by exposure to New York’s art scene early in their creative development, both Ai Weiwei and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian are well-known for fusing the traditional methods and materials of their native countries—China and Iran, respectively—with the impulses of abstraction and conceptual art. Marking the first time the works of these important artists have been placed in dialogue, these tandem exhibitions bring together cultural references specific to each, while focusing on their shared use of geometrical forms to explore concerns that range from the political to the mystical.

Haines Gallery proudly presents David Simpson: Smoke and Mirrors, our 11th solo exhibition with the beloved Bay Area painter. Simpson's paintings weave together impulses of minimalism with those of the California Light and Space movement, at once reductive and radical—and resulting in a singular creative vision. Smoke and Mirrors features selection of paintings from Simpson's signature metallic and interference series, created between 1987 and 2019. Presented in Haines' new, light-filled Fort Mason gallery location, each jewel-like canvas appears to radiate with luminosity, offering viewers a space for contemplation.

Haines Gallery is pleased to present Elemental, a group exhibition featuring works by John Chiara, Binh Danh, Chris McCaw, and Meghann Riepenhoff—four West Coast photographers known for their analog processes that collaborate with the natural world and explore the medium's fundamental materials of chemistry and light. The works in Elemental are singular and unique photographic objects, defined as much by how they are made as by what they depict. Some are abstract and painterly impressions of the landscape; others ask us to reconsider our relationship to and memory of place. Throughout, innovative approaches to landscape and photography invite us to experience the world anew.

Haines Gallery presents Chicken Fingers, 1976–1980, our 15th solo exhibition with the Bay Area painter, musician, and filmmaker. Chicken Fingers highlights an important moment in Henderson’s creative evolution, focusing on the mixed media, Afrofuturist works that redefined his practice as he left behind the figurative paintings of his early career. Incorporating materials including shaped, painted, and burnt pieces of canvas, each of Henderson's ethereal, otherworldly spaces are filled with promise, mystery, and hope.

Haines Gallery presents Parlor Games, a solo exhibition by the acclaimed Cuban artist Marco Castillo. Castillo has created some of the most important work to emerge from Latin America in the past two decades, both as a founding member of the Los Carpinteros collective, and as a solo artist since 2018. Marking the artist's first solo presentation in San Francisco, Parlor Games features sculptures and works on paper that explore Cuba’s interlinking design and political histories. At the center of the exhibition is Familia Castillo Valdes (2022), a large-scale, multipart mahogany sculpture from Castillo’s latest series, Juego de sala. Referencing the visual languages of modern Cuban art and design that developed immediately following the 1959 revolution, as well as materials and techniques traditional to the island, Castillo addresses complex political, cultural, and social changes in the island state, both then and now. “Everything I am working with,” explains the artist, “are echoes of the past that are affecting us today.”

Haines Gallery proudly presents Social Abstraction, a group exhibition showcasing works by Angelo Filomeno, Won Ju Lim, Aili Schmeltz, David Simpson, Robert Stone and Lena Wolff. Working in a diverse selection of media and practices, these six artists demonstrate the potential for line, color and form to address both real-world concerns—political truths, environmental degradation and conservation, affordable housing—and matters of the mind and spirit.

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing, China; lives and works in Portugal) is celebrated for his enduring and iconic artworks that address our shared urgencies. His sculptures and installations often reveal surprising sociopolitical dimensions, shedding light on people, places, and events that might otherwise be forgotten. Designed specifically for Haines’ new Fort Mason gallery, Everyday Monuments comprises 18 works in materials such as LEGO, marble, and wood, each a synthesis of complex historical, cultural, and political references.

Haines Gallery proudly presents Andy Goldsworthy: Firehouse, a solo exhibition inaugurating the gallery’s new location at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. his site-responsive show celebrates 30 years of collaboration between the artist and gallerist Cheryl Haines.

Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice features new and recent works created in winter landscapes, from the snow banks of Aspen to remote creeks in western Washington. These new works contain a surprising diversity of colors, forms, and textures, from inky indigo and glacial white to flashes of orange, with subtle crystalline forms blooming throughout. Created in collaboration with the elements, Riepenhoff’s cyanotypes evoke the natural world at its most powerful and sublime.

Blaze Across the Firmament brings together works by six artists to explore our relationship to the heavens—those ethereal bodies that illuminate the night sky, mark our place in the universe, and offer us guidance and hope. The skies and cosmos serve as a visual and conceptual reference point in paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Linda Connor, Binh Danh, Ala Ebtekar, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Mike Henderson and Chris McCaw, inspiring meditations on the origins and cycle of life and inviting visitors to gaze both inward and out.

Chromotherapy brings together works in various media by nine artists: Ai Weiwei, John Chiara, Kota Ezawa, Angelo Filomeno, Andy Goldsworthy, Mike Henderson, Won Ju Lim, Meghann Riepenhoff, and David Simpson, arranged in dialogue with each other based, in part, on color relationships. Within this diverse selection of works, color can shape mood and perception, create immersive viewing experiences, or draw connections between our bodies and the earth.

Haines Gallery is proud to present Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: A Mirrored Garden, an online viewing room dedicated to the work of the celebrated Iranian artist. Monir spent over half a century creating stunning mirrored mosaics, sculptures, and works on paper that recall both the sacred geometry of Persian art and the reductive abstraction of the 20th century. Her artistic evolution was shaped at once by geopolitical events, ancient Persian traditions, and the New York art scene of the 1950s. The arc of Monir's creative development is one of the great stories of contemporary art. This diverse offering highlights a practice shaped by ceaseless curiosity and inventiveness, reflected in the many forms and materials that Monir masterfully employed throughout her long career. She was, in the words of curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, "a role model for the artist of the twenty-first century."

From the landscape photography of Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins to Eadward Muybridge’s panorama of San Francisco, the West Coast of the United States has long been an epicenter of American photography. Process and Invention, a new viewing room by Haines Gallery, brings together works by four photographers whose analog practices draw from this storied lineage while expanding the possibilities of their chosen medium. The images and alternative processes of John Chiara, Binh Danh, Chris McCaw and Meghann Riepenhoff owe as much to this history of photography as they do to the West Coast’s stunning and varied environs. Together, they represent an exciting new generation of artists who are reinvigorating handmade photography in our digital age.

Encompassing a diverse range of media — from graphite drawings to watercolors and collages — works on paper offer an insightful window into an artist’s creative process. Far from being considered studies or experiments, each of the works on paper offered below represents an important mode of art-making in its own right — one reflecting the freedom and immediacy that only working on paper affords.

Material Witness is a group exhibition exploring how artistic materials bear witness to and record events and processes, ranging from seismic cultural shifts to natural phenomena. By bringing together divergent artistic approaches, Material Witness amplifies the ways in which an artist's chosen medium offers up important evidence about the challenges and opportunities that define our present moment.

Haines Gallery proudly presents The Body Politic, an online viewing room showcasing a suite of new paintings by Iranian-American artist Shiva Ahmadi. In these works, Ahmadi mines the expressive potential of paint while exploring the body’s relationship to trauma and anxiety. Well-known for exquisitely crafted paintings, sculptures, and digital animations that use formal beauty to seduce viewers into scenes of conflict and chaos, Ahmadi’s recent works are introspective, intimate, and personal. Charged with emotion, these latest paintings illuminate a different kind of stress, one borne from a heightened awareness of the body, its susceptibilities and vulnerabilities, and the self-consciousness that arises from constant scrutiny.

In the aftermath of the US Civil War, famed naturalist John Muir trekked through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, finding beauty and inspiration in the meadows, rivers, and forests there. “It would be delightful,” Muir reflected, “to be storm-bound beneath one of these noble, hospitable, inviting old trees, its broad sheltering arms bent down like a tent, incense rising from the fire made from its dry fallen branches, and a hearty wind chanting overhead.” Sheltering Arms presents key works by John Chiara, Binh Danh, Andy Goldsworthy, Chris McCaw, David Nash, Meghann Riepenhoff, and Yoshitomo Saito, artists for whom nature is both subject and collaborator. As many of us shelter in place, the artists included in this exhibition bring us the poetry of the natural world, along with some of the comfort it can offer.

Haines Gallery is pleased to offer a preview of Ultramarine, a highly anticipated solo exhibition of new works by Los Angeles-based artist Leslie Shows. Reflecting Shows’ gift for modern-day alchemy, the works in Ultramarine combine unexpected materials with striking results: painted and printed canvas, kiln-formed glass and vitreous enamel, metal and sand are fused in ways that expand our no­tions of contemporary painting. Evocative and elusive, Shows' new works give rise to myriad associations: undersea life, fossilized flora and fauna, lapidary estuaries, and rapidly firing synapses emerge in turn from these dynamic forms. Yet there is nothing unearthly in Ultramarine; rather, as the title suggests, Shows asks us to look more deeply at the overlapping systems we inhabit, so that we might reimagine new ways of coexisting. Ultramarine is Shows’ third solo show at Haines Gallery, and her first in the Bay Area since 2015.

Haines Gallery proudly presents Desolation Desert, an online exhibition of recent photographs by David Maisel that focuses on Chile’s vast Atacama Desert. The highest and driest desert on the planet, this sensitive region is being transformed at an unparalleled pace and scale by massive mining operations. Maisel’s images of the Atacama are at once graphic and painterly, offering viewers detailed, open-ended information that operates on a metaphorical level as much as a documentary one. Desolation Desert was created with the support of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and is Maisel’s eighth solo exhibition at Haines Gallery.

Haines Gallery proudly presents Backscatter, an online exhibition by Baltimore-based Iranian artist Taha Heydari. Heydari’s latest works draw from an Iranian women’s magazine published in the years leading up to Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. Meticulously rendered, arresting in their bold colors and seamless integration of diverse styles, Heydari's new paintings excavate traces of a bygone era, revealing how cultural ruptures produce shifts in ideology and identity.

Showcasing paintings made primarily in the 1990s by Mike Henderson, the canvases included in this exhibition feature a palette of lush blacks, steel grays, and ultramarine blues. Set against the darkness, small shapes of bright blues, yellows, and reds flicker like jewels.

David Simpson’s exhibition takes its title from his use of “interference” pigments, which shift in color with changes in light and the viewer’s perspective. Now in his 90s, Simpson continues to delight with works of remarkable dynamism and depth.

Kota Ezawa's critically acclaimed project National Anthem makes its West Coast debut at Haines Gallery. An animated video and a suite of related watercolors and light boxes offers a powerful meditation on protest and patriotism, solidarity and hope.

At the Edge of Paradise features a suite of newly created, large-scale abstract paintings by pioneering Bay Area artist and 2019 Artadia Award winner Mike Henderson. Radiant with possibility, Henderson's latest works reflect an artist who has arrived at his prime.