SAN FRANCISCO — Walking into the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park is an energizing experience. The towering walls of the institution’s Herbst Gallery — painted in Benjamin Moore’s “Majestic Violet” — have been hung salon-style, with 15-foot-wide bands of artwork installed closely together. The massive gallery, which consists of a sequence of eight imposing rooms, is filled with 883 works by artists from nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s a dazzling tsunami of painting, drawing, printmaking, fiber, photography, sculpture, video, and digital art.
These works are part of the 2023 De Young Open, a juried exhibition that both salutes the European salons of the past and reinvents them. The show, which opened late last month and runs through January 2024, is a rare example of a museum stepping aside from the role of cultural gatekeeping and showcasing the artists of its community. In addition to exhibiting their works, the de Young is helping artists sell them: 98% of the pieces in the show are for sale, with the museum taking no commission. The de Young, which bought 16 works from the 2020 Open, also plans on acquiring a selection of works from this iteration for its permanent collection.
“The Open holds up a mirror to the Bay Area,” curator Timothy Burgard told Hyperallergic. Artist Kathryn Arnold, whose graceful abstract painting “Continuum: The Gradually Changing Spectrum” (2023) is included in the show, added that the exhibition “highlights all of the facets of a gemstone — with the gemstone being us, the creatives in the Bay Area.”
Roughly grouped by themes, the works were chosen from over 7,700 submissions narrowed down to about 2,000 selections by eight de Young curators; Bay Area artists Clare Rojas, Sunny Smith, Stephanie Syjuco, and Xiaoze Xie were in charge of the final cut. The overall effect is of an extravaganza that explores the progressive culture of the Bay Area while showcasying myriad individual perspectives.
The 2023 Open includes an especially strong showing of works that carry social implications, such as Don Hershman’s “Code-Switching I” (2023). Rendered in acrylic, ink, and pencil on wood panel, the painting is titled after a term that references how some individuals, including LGBTQ+ people, adjust their speech and demeanor in social situations. The human figure, another theme of the show, featured Devorah Jacoby’s idiosyncratic and sensitive mixed-media portrait “Butterfly II” (2019).
Sculpture, including works presented on pedestals and wall reliefs, is sprinkled throughout the exhibition. Jerry Ross Barrish’s “Rescue(d) Dog” (2021), crafted out of plastic scraps, industrial hot glue, and screws, stands out for its funky and charming use of repurposed materials. “Bountiful” (2023), a relief by Jack Mattingly, projects a vibe of environmental doom looming under three floating skulls radiating human legs.
This year’s Open is slightly larger than the inaugural 2020 edition, proposed by Burgard to help celebrate the museum’s 125th anniversary, which featured the works of 766 artists and was forced to close after only six weeks on view due to COVID-19. This spring, the museum announced that the Open will officially continue as a triennial.
“There is a wonderful sense of validation as an artist to have your work on exhibition in a world-class art institution like the de Young Museum,” artist Marie Cameron told Hyperallergic. “It’s made even better when you can share this with hundreds of fabulous artists from your community.”
