Pio Abad’s solo exhibition begins, paradoxically, with a work by another artist: The Bridge (To Sonny Rollins), a hard-edge painting from 1981 by Leo Valledor. This prologue to the main act serves a number of purposes. It connects the show to its site through a local artist (Valledor spent much of his life in San Francisco). It reminds us of the impossibility of divorcing art from politics: while the painting is a formal, abstract work with no apparent agenda, the accompanying text posits that Valledor’s lack of wide recognition as compared to his (white) peers was most likely related to his race (like Abad, he was of Filipino heritage). It also introduces Abad’s technique of deploying individual stories to deliberate on historical moments. Over the past seven years, Abad’s work has engaged, both directly and obliquely, with the cultural legacy of the kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist from 1965 to 1986. Themes of mythmaking, collective memory, and amnesia are explored in this exhibition without dogma. Instead, Abad expresses the absurd cruelties of authoritarianism through quietly persuasive, poetic works. He plucks objects from history and expands their meanings through shifts in form and …

The opening of a temporary exhibition space co-hosted by Andrew Kreps and Anton Kern, at a new gallery complex called Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco’s Dogpatch district, was timed to correspond with the arrival of the international art world elite to fête SFMOMA. These openings and reopenings come at a moment when the future of the Bay Area art scene seems uncertain. The new SFMOMA, billed after three years of refurbishment as the largest museum dedicated to modern art in the country, is a major tourist attraction—but what impact will it have on the local arts economy? The opening has already inspired galleries from New York to set up shop in San Francisco, but will it help make San Francisco’s existing scene more visible, or damage it as burgeoning collectors (read new tech wealth) buy established names rather than investing in young Bay Area-based artists? Will these developments help keep artists in San Francisco or force them out? Designed by Snøhetta, the new SFMOMA’s spacious galleries are empty containers suited to the blue-chip work within. The impetus for the expansion was the 100-year-loan of the private collection of Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher. During the press preview, Donald’s son …