CULT / Aimee Friberg Exhibitions

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CULT / Aimee Friberg Exhibitions

CULT is a contemporary art gallery and performance space in San Francisco's mission district. CULT bridges formal, conceptual and process based works.

CULT is currently open by appointment only until further notice. calendly.com/cultexhibitions

New location: 1400 16th Street (at Carolina) Within Yves Behar’s award-winning global design firm Fuseproject. CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions is a contemporary art gallery for cutting edge work by emerging and established artists, founded in November 2013 by curator Aimee Friberg. CULT bridges formal, co

nceptual and process-based investigations, across all media. Since its inception, CULT has quickly become the leading gallery in San Francisco for rigorous work that is both experimental and forward-thinking. CULT engages a broad Bay Area and international audience with programming that encourages artists, especially from underrepresented groups, to take risks with their work. CULT is committed to supporting international and local artists, through onsite residencies, institutional collaborations, and a nutritive dialogue with the Bay Area public. Conceived as a commercial gallery that would engage its audience beyond the white cube, CULT has quickly become renowned for its provocative exhibition programming, as well as unorthodox performances, critical dialogues between artists, curators, and critics, and intimate dinners. CULT is not accepting unsolicited proposals or artist submissions at this time.

05/18/2026

🥀FLESH INTO BLOOM Opens Thursday 5/21🥀  Theresa Daddezio (New York)
Daniela Terroba (Mexico City)
Ruxue Zhang (SF)
Abby St. Claire (SF)

May 21 – July 11, 2026 Opening Reception on Thursday, May 21, 5–7 PM  CULT Aimee Friberg (1401 16th Street, San Francisco) 
“My body writes into your flesh… Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat I love you flesh into blossom”
 (Excerpt: Recreation from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde) 
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Flesh into Bloom, featuring work by Daniela Terroba, Theresa Daddezio, Ruxue Zhang, and Abby St. Claire. Opening May 21 and running through July 11, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage the botanical and the body, exploring transformation as a material condition and perceptual experience. The gallery will host an opening reception on Thursday, May 21, from 5–7 PM.

In this grouping of works, flesh is the seed, the root, the stem, the thorn, and the flower. We all bloom and decay with time as our witness. Across the exhibition, the female form and floral matter emerge as porous sites of investigation rather than fixed entities, where interior and exterior, structure and dissolution, sensation and memory remain in constant exchange. Forms swell, rupture, and recede. Boundaries become fluid, malleable, fertile. Surfaces hold traces of pressure, time, and touch, imprinting memory and documenting cycles. 
Organic and synthetic elements intermingle, complicating distinctions between the natural and the constructed. The works invite consideration of an ecosystem both created and earthly, unfolding to encompass multiple states of being. Rather than presenting the body as singular or contained, the exhibition approaches it as a shifting field that expands into landscape, collapses into texture, and registers both the intimacy of lived experience and the vastness of biological and psychological processes. In this space, bloom is not only a moment of flowering but a state of becoming, where growth and decay, beauty and unease are held in tension.

Artists will be present for the opening reception.
More information at the link in our Bio.

🥀🥀

04/18/2026

For our 2026 San Francisco Art Fair presentation, we are delighted to present a group of artists whose work holds tension between the immaterial and the material.

The presentation gathers a constellation of a dozen artists whose practices dwell in liminal space—between ephemera and ground, body and spirit, memory and myth. Across painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and installation, material is approached not as fixed substance but as a threshold: a site where perception shifts and the unseen takes form.

Featuring works by Miya Ando, Amy Lincoln, Nicki Green, Kajahl, Justine Di Fiore, Jessica Jane Charleston, Mary Fernando Conrad, Adrian Pally, Anna Sidana, Anthony Peyton Young, and Rhonda Holberton.

Also featured is a selection of bespoke, handmade functional design stools and a table by Robert Saltonstall. In addition, CULT Aimee Friberg has curated a selection of large-scale works by Miya Ando for the upstairs VIP lounge.

The SF Art Fair runs through Sunday, April 19 at the Festival Pavillion at Fort Mason.

This presentation is in response to our 12-year anniversary exhibition The Veil Between, on view through April 24.

03/21/2026

Pleased to announce works by AMY LINCOLN, NICKI GREEN, & JUSTINE DI FIORE in OPEN INQUIRY: UC ARTS at the Sausalito Center for the Arts from MARCH 14 to April 12, with an opening reception on  Saturday, March 21 from 4 - 6 PM.

OPEN INQUIRY: UC ARTS brings together new generation of artists from the renowned art programs at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Davis, and the University of California, Los Angeles. The exhibition is curated by Ginny Duncan and Jennifer Bailey Wechsler.

02/19/2026

Miya Ando’s work is rooted in the intersection of nature and impermanence. Her practice engages philosophical inquiry into time and natural cycles, constructing visual systems that give form to vanishing conditions such as seasonal transitions, atmospheric change, and the fading of cultural memory.

Central to her work is the Japanese aphorism mono no aware—an attunement to transience and the quiet poignancy of things as they pass. Time, in her work, is registered rather than depicted, emerging through gradual change and accumulation.

Across her practice, transformation is both method and subject: fire, metal, chemical reaction, and light act as collaborators, leaving visible traces of burning, oxidizing, fracturing, and reflection within the surface itself. Rather than concealing these processes, Ando allows material to record its own passage through change, binding permanence and impermanence within the same form.

Her work on paper Ama No Gawa (The River Of Stars Above/ The Milky Way) March 2, 2022, Bolinas, 2022 stems from her series Celestial Observations in Indigo, which evolved from Moon Almanac, a project created during the pandemic through nightly lunar observations. Over 904 consecutive days, Ando translated the moon’s phases into indigo-dyed drawings rendered in graphite and micronized silver.

Ama No Gawa expands this body of work in scale, registering eclipses and shifting lunar cycles. Executed in indigo on washi paper, the pigment acts as a natural clock—deepening in tone to quietly measure the passage of time.

Ando’s work is currently on view as part of The Veil Between, through March 14.

Miya Ando
Ama No Gawa (The River Of Stars Above/ The Milky Way) March 2, 2022, Bolinas, 2022
Natural Indigo Dye, Micronized Pure Silver, Kozo Paper
79 x 79 in (200.66 x 200.66 cm)

Miya Ando
Yakisugi 5.5.1, 2020
Charred Reclaimed Redwood, Silver Nitrate
5.5 x 5.5 x 5.5 in (13.97 x 13.97 x 13.97 cm)

Miya Ando
January 1 2021 Matsu Pine Shou Sugi Ban Silver, 2021
Charred Reclaimed Pine, Silver Nitrate
11 x 11 x 11 in (27.94 x 27.94 x 27.94 cm)

02/11/2026

Drawing from ritual, embodied perception, and storytelling, the artists in The Veil Between invite us to linger in moments of attention—where transformation, belief, and imagination quietly take shape. The Veil Between runs through March 14.

Artist include Anthony Akinbola, Miya Ando, Jasko Begovic, Ashwini Bhat, Jessica Jane Charleston, Mary Fernando Conrad, Solee Darrell, Justine Di Fiore, Nicki Green, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Kajahl, Adrian Pally, Anna Sidana, Ruxue Zhang

Photography by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy of CULT Aimee Friberg.

12/10/2025

A few more days to catch MARY FERNANDO CONRAD: Impermanence at our San Francisco location.

Fernando Conrad’s work is situated at the intersection of the built environment and the natural world—and at the threshold of abstraction and representation. In Impermanence, she explores the fleeting and fragile nature of perception, memory, and daily life through intimate, domestic landscapes and abstractions. Working from her studio, a converted stable in West Marin, California, Fernando Conrad has been painting two separate vantage points as a record of both place and time, engaging with these as abstracted concepts. “What is permanence in this moment when everything seems about to change?” she asks.
 MARY FERNANDO CONRAD: Impermanence is on view through December 12 with regular gallery hours, and by appointment December 15 - 18.

CULT Aimee Friberg | 1401 16th Street, San Francisco

Photographs by Nicholas Lea Bruno.

11/26/2025

2 CULT BUREAU EVENTS THIS WEEKEND
 ZEKARIAS MUSELE THOMPSON
Werk Day (Life Forms) Friday, November 28 · 1–4 PM

Closing Celebration & Performance with Psychic Charisma Saturday, November 29 · 6–8 PM Performance begins at 6:30 PM
 CULT Bureau · 482-D 49th Street, Oakland

This weekend, we invite you to join us for two closing events for Zekarias Musele Thompson: Divine Weightlessness at CULT Bureau. As Temescal Alley moves through a period of transition, we want to acknowledge the four years of events, performances, and gatherings to which we’ve been blessed to contribute—offering energy, connection, and presence to this special neighborhood.

Friday, Nov 28 — Werk Day (Life Forms) Thompson activates the gallery with a communal exploration of identity, presence, and exchange. Visitors are invited to bring an object of personal significance—something tied to an identity narrative they’re ready to release—to exchange for an object portrait drawn by the artist in oil pastel.
Drop-in hours 1–4 PM.

Saturday, Nov 29 — spatial facilitation (the artist is presence) #2. Beginning in Temescal Alley, the artist enters into dialogue with objects, materials, and beings through sonic exchange with their saxophone.

Psychic Charisma (Micah Morris / Zero Charisma + Phillip Laurent / Psychics Agree), whose enchanted vocals, synthesizer meditations, and drifting polyrhythms channel the diasporic musical commons of minimalist pop, will close out the evening.

As we come together, we honor the Ohlone people—the sovereign Muwekma Ohlone Tribe—on whose ancestral lands CULT Bureau stands. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating transitions, community, and the inspiration that artists so generously share with us.

Images:
Images: Zekarias Musele Thompson, spatial facilitation (the artist is presence), photo by Magda; Zekarias Musele Thompson, Detail of The Meeting Place (Methuselah), 2023, Clear gesso, gloss medium, oil, and archival pigment print on paper, 28 x 37 in; Detail of For Noah, 2023, oil on archival pigment print, 25 x 19.5 in; Psychic Charisma

10/29/2025

MARY FERNANDO CONRAD Impermanence  November 1–December 12, 2025 Artist Reception: Saturday, Nov 1 | 1- 3 PM CULT Aimee Friberg | 1401 16th Street, San Francisco  When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. — excerpt from Mary Oliver’s When I am Among the Trees 
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Impermanence, a solo exhibition of new paintings on canvas, linen, and paper by San Francisco and Marin–based artist Mary Fernando Conrad. This marks Fernando Conrad’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show runs from November 1 through December 12, 2025, with an artist reception on Saturday, November 1, from 1–3 PM.
 Mary Fernando Conrad’s work is situated at the intersection of the built environment and the natural world—this exhibition explores the latter—and at the threshold of abstraction and representation. In Impermanence, she explores the fleeting and fragile nature of perception, memory, and daily life through intimate, domestic landscapes and abstractions. Working from her studio, a converted stable in West Marin, California, Fernando Conrad has been painting two separate vantage points as a record of both place and time, engaging with these as abstracted concepts. “What is permanence in this moment when everything seems about to change?” she asks.

Questioning change is ever at the forefront as she watches the landscape outside her studio—land she has personally cultivated and lovingly restored to native species. She tends this land, once stewarded by the Coastal Miwok people and now threatened annually by California’s increasingly severe wildfire seasons. Through this practice of tending and painting, her observations become transmutations—an offering, an act of devotion to the place she calls home.

Full press release available on our website. DM for previews and availability.

10/09/2025

In Refugees R Us, Jasko Begovic has inverted the solo exhibition, collaborating with his community on works that foster empathy, connection, and creative solutions for societal challenges. This week, Begovic and collaborators activate the gallery with public engagements—interactive art-making, live performances, and discussions. His work is rooted in his experiences as a Bosnian refugee and a life of crossing borders.

Friday, Oct 10 | 2–5 PM – Last live sewing demonstrations & augmenting garments brought by the public
 Saturday, Oct 11 | 12–3 PM – Make and Move II: football-inspired program exploring art, movement, social justice, and fashion with Oakland-based Neighborhood Sports Club. Begovic and collaborators discuss the exhibition at 2 PM. Coffee and matcha by NSC.

REFUGEES R US — Solo Exhibition by Jasko Begovic (Sko Habibi) Open through October 24, 2025 1401 16th Street, San Francisco

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10/01/2025

🔗 Join us on Saturday, October 4, as we inaugurate Divine Weightlessness, a solo exhibition and residency by Oakland- and Reykjavik-based artist Zekarias Musele Thompson. The exhibition features photography, painting, etching, site-specific installations, and interactive performances, coinciding with the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Annual NEXUS week.

Thompson’s work explores how colonial systems shape identity and institutions while creating visual and sonic patterns that center the present body-mind experience. During the run of the exhibition and residency, Thompson will activate the gallery through participatory performances and a cultural marketplace. Visit the gallery website for an updated schedule of performances and artist talks.

ZEKARIAS MUSELE THOMPSON Divine Weightlessness October 4–30, 2025 Opening & Artist Reception: Saturday, Oct 4 | 12–2 PM CULT Bureau | 482-D 49th Street, Oakland

Zekarias Musele Thompson (b. 1983, Washington D.C.) is an Oakland- and Reykjavik-based artist working in sonic composition, mark-making, performance, photography, collaboration, and writing. Their work explores humanity’s conceptual and emotional structures and how these take material form. Thompson has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of the African Diaspora, The Lab, Gray Area, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, and participated in group shows and performances at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and CCA Wattis Institute, among others. They are the instigator of the Togetherness Ensemble and co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively organized institution supporting underrepresented practices. Thompson was a 2024 MoAD Emerging Artist Program cohort member and holds an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley.

Image credits in the comments.

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1401 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
94117

Website

http://cultexhibitions.com/

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