San Francisco transforms into a full-fledged art and design capital during SF Art Week, the annual festival celebrating the Bay Area’s dynamic creative landscape and headlined by the 11th edition of FOG Design+Art, which opens January 23–26 at Fort Mason Center. Beyond the fair, the Golden Gate City’s trove of museums, galleries, nonprofits, and project spaces are hosting timely exhibitions and pop-ups throughout the week that underscore the region’s stronghold of artistic ingenuity.

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It’s easy to overlook public benches. We take for granted that these humble spaces designated for relaxation and contemplation will simply be there when we need them most. As silent mainstays of urban and natural landscapes, however, there’s a lot more to the furnishing than meets the eye.

“Public benches are an everyday object, but they’re also deeply tied to memory, identity, and place,” says Kelley Perumbeti, co-curator along with Kate Greenberg of Works in Progress III, a design exhibition that opens during the now-official SF Art Week (January 18-26). By simultaneously representing individual respite and community interaction, public benches blur the line between the personal and the collective.

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Traveling to last month’s FOG Design+Art fair was a particularly charged experience for me this year — held two weeks after the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, where I’ve been hibernating all winter, it was something of a reprieve; a chance, both literally and figuratively, to take a breath after all that happened here. Of course I only had the privilege to do so because I was unaffected materially by the fires, unlike so many others facing horrible loss, but it’s just to say that traveling to a fair in the wake of a tragedy was not such a frivolous event as it may have been in past years. I was eminently more grateful just to be there.

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Eight Bay Area designers created interpretations of public benches for the Works in Progress III design exhibition during San Francisco's Art Week, using materials such as salvaged local wood and 3D-printed ceramics. Curated by designer Kate Greenberg and co-founder of studio Office of Tangible Space Kelley Perumbeti, Works in Progress III features work by eight local designers including Nick Polansky and Alex Schofield.

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‘Works in Progress’, a regrettably brief exhibition taking place at the American Industrial Center in San Francisco's Dogpatch district until 23 January 2024, is as much about local designers talking to each other as it is about local design – community-building as much as profile-building. Bay Area furniture design has long been overshadowed by Silicon Valley's virtual excellence, but it has always harboured its gems. In recent years, it's shifted from mass production towards a maker movement and bespoke craftsmanship, from minimalism and simple sustainability towards experiment and eclecticism, experience and storytelling, upcycling and circularity. It has become less niche and more diverse.

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Stools from local designer Caleb Ferris and design firm Prowl Studio were among the works displayed at a San Francisco exhibition centred around contemporary Bay Area design. The Works in Progress show displayed stools, chairs and other furniture from local designers to highlight the diversity in methods and backgrounds of an evolving Bay Area design scene.

"As the Bay Area creative scene evolves in real-time, there are boundless possibilities for how it might bloom," said curators and designers Kate Greenberg, Kelley Perumbeti, and Sahra Jajarmikhayat in a statement. "For now, we are here to acknowledge its depth and say: it's a work in progress."

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San Francisco’s techy reputation, notorious for its open-plan offices, would have us thinking that many Bay Area residents prefer a bean bag over an Eames chair. The new exhibition at the American Industrial Center, [Works in Progress] is setting the record straight. The show features 12 Bay Area designers who are part of the community of craftsmen, makers, and creators rewriting the language of California design.

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Despite most people’s complaints about San Francisco over the years — that it has no style, or too many tech people, or lately, that it feels too empty — there’s mostly just one thing that’s kept me from ever wanting to visit: Whenever I’m there, whatever I do, I’m always cold. Now that I live nearby in L.A. half the year, though, I’ve been trying to give it another chance, which led me to finally make the trip up in January for my first time attending the Fog Design+Art show. The design scene in SF seems to be picking up a bit these days, and we’ve been getting to know its talents…

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