Dec 1, 2025
Best shows about cities
‘So The City Can Exist’
Rebecca Camacho, San Francisco
Aug. 7–Sept. 5, 2025
‘Like a City’
Slash Art, San Francisco
Sept. 13–Dec. 13, 2025
These two exhibitions did a magical kind of handoff, while narrowing focus to one particular place. The first, a group show at Rebecca Camacho curated by Nick Makanna and MacKenzie Stevens, included works that very literally represented a city’s structures (Malcolm Kenter’s one-to-one replica of a breaker box), alongside pieces that gestured at a commingling of multitudes (Mary Lum’s painting of abstracted framework). It was an elegant, materially expansive exhibition filled with discoveries and delights, not the least of which were three “brick” stools made by Makanna to support people and city-related books.
At Slash, Like a City turned its attention to Los Angeles. Curator Sophie Appel, formerly of SF’s Delaplane and now running Melrose Botanical Garden down south, stages a scene, sculptural props included, of a dreamy sun-drenched place. But each artwork, on close inspection, tells a deeper story of LA’s history and self-styling. See: John Tottenham’s drawings of Manson girls; Carlos Agredano’s lonely parasol, now symbolic of the city’s missing immigrant vendors; and Anais Franco’s ceramics, pressed with plant life. In a full-circle moment for 2025, Franco’s pieces evoke, in their own lovely way, the craftsman tiles that volunteers chiseled away from the fireplaces of Altadena’s burned homes.
