Art lovers across San Francisco have a few more weekends to wander into working studios, chat with painters and printmakers, and maybe walk out with something for the wall. San Francisco Open Studios, now in its 52nd year, is running neighborhood tours from September 18 through October 25, inviting visitors into creative spaces they would otherwise never see.
The scale is hard to overstate. According to ArtSpan, the program has grown from a single 1975 showcase of 67 South of Market artists into an annual event. In 2026, hundreds of local artists are taking part across the city's neighborhoods. Two of those artists, San Francisco printmaker Ray Gonzalez and painter Shrey Purohit, joined host Jessica Wills on KRON4 to talk about what the open-studio experience offers both artists and the public, describing a chance for art lovers to step into creative spaces across the city, meet the people behind the work, and potentially discover a piece to take home.
Gonzalez brings a theatrical production background to his linocut prints, which draw heavily on the influence of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and illustrator Edward Gorey, according to ARCH Art Supplies. He also sits on ArtSpan's outreach committee and received a 2025 ArtSpan Equity Grant, the retailer notes. Purohit, for his part, is a Mumbai-born oil painter and curator who earned his BFA from California College of the Arts in 2020; per Saatchi Art, he is an urban landscape painter best known for paintings of San Francisco at night, with work exhibited at San Francisco City Hall and other venues.
How To Navigate a Month of Studio Visits
Because the event spans more than five weeks and hundreds of locations, ArtSpan marks the opening of the SF Open Studios exhibition with ArtLaunch; the 2026 exhibition is at SOMArts Cultural Center. Works by participating artists go on display, while the studios themselves are grouped by geographic region across consecutive weekends, letting visitors plan routes neighborhood by neighborhood rather than trying to cover the whole city at once.
Among this year's hubs, the Hunters Point Shipyard and Islais Creek artist complex stands out as the largest single studio cluster in the citywide event, run through a formal collaboration between the Shipyard Trust for the Arts and ArtSpan. Hoodline reported that the Shipyard Artists studio community includes more than 300 creatives, and that public art projections lit up the shipyard's 500-foot crane in conjunction with the site's open studios weekend.
Equity Grants
Behind the weekend studio crawls sits a nonprofit navigating its own growing pains. ArtSpan began informally in 1975 as a South of Market artist showcase and has managed Open Studios since 1991, according to ArtSpan's organizational history. Today, ArtSpan offers Equity Grants.
ArtSpan is also navigating a leadership transition. Executive Director Shamsher Virk has stepped down, and Ruth Nott was named Interim Executive Director. Equity Grants and the Hunters Point Shipyard hub together reflect how ArtSpan is using its flagship event to keep creative talent rooted in San Francisco even as real estate pressures continue to squeeze working artists out of the city.
