By Elisa Carollo
Now in its 12th edition, FOG Design+Art has become a critical proving ground for testing that connection. Beyond its annual, tightly curated international showcase, the fair has cultivated a local collector base while amplifying the strength of the city's existing cultural ecosystem. That ecosystem spans the ambitious programming of major institutions—from SFMOMA and the de Young to the now-nomadic ICA San Francisco and the recently opened Museum of the African Diaspora—alongside a gallery scene that is both resilient and increasingly self-assured, with established woman-led spaces like Jessica Silverman, Wendi Norris and Catherine Clark to newer, dynamic players such as Rebecca Camacho, Jonathan Carver Moore’s gallery and residency and the future-forward design gallery Future Perfect.
"Marie Wilson: A Poet of Forms and Colors"
Wendi Norris, through March 14, 2026
Wendi Norris is known for her acute eye and uncommon sensitivity in identifying and championing visionary artists whose work taps into the depths of the collective subconscious and the mythical and mystical realms, reviving archetypal and universal truths. She was among the first to foreground figures such as Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, well before the market’s current fascination with artists moving fluidly between worlds to produce works of revelatory imaginative power. On the occasion of San Francisco Art Week, Norris turns her attention to another receptive mind and singular creative spirit, presenting the first solo exhibition in the city of Marie Wilson’s work since Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s 1984 exhibition "Apparitions: The Mythical World of Marie Wilson" at City Lights Bookstore. Spanning five decades of Wilson’s career, the show reintroduces her revelatory and highly individual oeuvre through sixteen paintings and seven works on paper, tracing her evolution from the intuitively charged hazy landscapes, cosmic imagery and biomorphic forms of her early period to the meticulously executed symmetrical inner cosmologies and diagrammatic structures that defined her mature work.
Wilson grew up with a conviction that she had “been born an artist,” likely always feeling a call to be a vessel through which these timeless universal structures could reemerge. Her practice is rooted equally in the cultural and spiritual milieu of Northern California and the Bay Area of her youth and in the intellectual currents of European Surrealism, shaped in part by André Breton’s introduction to the mediumistic practices of Fleury Joseph Crépin and Augustin Lesage. Through this synthesis, Wilson expanded Surrealism’s horizons, forging a mystical engagement with universal structures articulated through ancestral and archetypal symbolic language as much as through a connection with nature and its circles.
