ArtSpan at the Ferry Building

SF Art Galleries - Openings & Events Event Link: see venue calendar above ^^ Arrivals Celebrates Immigrant Experiences at the Ferry Building San Francisco, CA, June 2026 — The Ferry Building has always been a place of arrival. Since 1898, it has stood at the edge of the bay as San Francisco's most enduring threshold, a place where the water ends and the city begins. For countless people over more than a century, stepping through its Grand Hall meant stepping into a new life. Arrivals honors that history, not as an abstraction of history but as lived truth. Six ArtSpan artist members, each shaped by the immigrant experience, bring their work to the very building where so many stories of migration began. Across mixed media prints, oil paintings, monumental ceramics, acrylic paintings, and hand-pieced quilts, the exhibition asks: What does it actually feel like to arrive? What do you carry? What do you leave behind? And what does it take, across months, years, sometimes generations, to build a sense of home? MK Wong draws on her life as a queer immigrant from Hong Kong, weaving the streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and its transit lines through memory-scapes of Lion Rock and childhood anime. Mariel Paat paints her Filipino family in the intimate scale of portraiture, honoring grandparents and nurses and the balikbayan boxes shipped across oceans to maintain connection with a world left behind. Pam Totah works in porcelain to claim space for Palestinian identity across generations of displacement, her grandmother once labeled "Miss Arabia" at a San Francisco maritime parade while her family rebuilt their lives piece by fragmented piece. Guillermo Navarrete Davis arrived from Santiago de Chile in 1998 and has spent 28 years finding in the Bay Area what his homeland couldn't give him: a place to be fully seen. He paints elders, children, laborers, and dreamers with an unflinching realism that lifts the overlooked into view. Kuntal brings the colors and mythologies of Rajasthan to figures caught in the in-between spaces of transition that are neither the old world nor the new but something that slowly becomes its own kind of home. And Regina Stadnick, who left Kyiv in February 1992 as a Jewish refugee, turns the view from her window into an act of belonging, her quilted and printed work built piece by piece, like home itself, from what is near. Together, these artists go beyond just illustrating Arrivals as an idea. They give immigration a face, a kitchen, a grandmother's hands, a passport stamp, a bus stop, a monstera plant leaning toward the light. Arrivals insists that this history is not past tense. It is present in every person who has ever come through a door and had to figure out, one step at a time, how to call somewhere new their own. Featured artists include: MK Wong , Mariel Paat , Pam Totah , Guillermo Navarrete Davis , Kuntal , Regina Stadnick Supported by the Ferry Building, Port of San Francisco, Grants for the Arts, SF Arts Commission and the Svane Family Foundation. Public Exhibition: July 19 - August 2, 2026 | Open Monday to Sunday, 8AM to 6PM, unless otherwise posted ArtLover Preview : Saturday, July 18, 1–4PM Silent Disco Exhibition Activation : Thursday, July 23, 6–9PM Urban Sketching + Membership Mixer : Saturday, August 1, 12–2PM Artwork available for purchase at: cohart.com/artspan/artworks?folder=860 Promotional Graphics: Arrivals Graphics Location: 1 Ferry Building, Grand Hall, San Francisco, CA ―――――――――― SF Stuff To Do Do not edit this event! changes will be overwritten