2014 in Bay Area Art Museums & Galleries

With few exceptions, 2014 was noteworthy for a lack of drama and knock-your-socks-off art shows, but there were pleasures to be found and events worthy of comment.

The opening of the newly constructed facility at Stanford University for the Anderson Collection, one of the finest privately-held assemblies of 20th-century post-war art, was certainly a high point. Right next door, with former CJM director Connie Wolf at the helm, the Cantor Arts Center, the little museum with a fat endowment and a splendid collection of Rodin sculpture, experienced a resurgence, with shows on Carleton Watkins, the great 19th-century photographer who captured the vastness and grandeur of the American West when the region was as remote as a distant planet; Elizabeth Murray, the New York abstract post-modernist painter who thought outside the box, plunging into adventures in 3-D in both printmaking and painting with zest and zaniness; and "Sympathy for the Devil: Satan, Sin, and the Underworld," which featured artists' evolving images of the devil over the past 500 years, from fallen angel and horned beast to suave Mephistopheles.

The year was also marked by what was missing. Despite a series of satellite exhibitions at host venues, SFMOMA's absence was keenly felt, and surprisingly, other Bay Area institutions failed to step in to fill the void and grab the spotlight. The Museum of the African Diaspora was largely MIA while undergoing renovation, and the Berkeley Art Museum closed its doors this month and won't reopen in its new digs until 2016. Alternative spaces, sometimes run out of storefronts or curators' apartments, proliferated in the city as well as in Oakland, fast evolving into the city's answer to Brooklyn for hipsters and artists.

In a disturbing ongoing trend, non-profits were displaced by San Francisco's astronomical rents, the highest-profile casualty being Meridian Gallery. Run by the beloved powerhouse Anne Trueblood Brodzky, it valiantly fought eviction from its gracious Powell Street home, but ultimately was forced to move its various programs to three different locations.

Herewith, more highs and lows of the year that was.

Best Blast from the Past: "Roads of Arabia." Enter a time capsule and journey back a million years to the outer edges of history on the Arabian peninsula, courtesy of this archaeology buff's dream of an exhibition, exquisitely displayed (per usual) at the Asian Art Museum, which consistently sets the bar high.

Triumph of Hype Over Substance: "@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz." It's difficult to recall another event in recent memory that arrived on such a tidal wave of publicity. It was an ambitious project with an irresistible premise: a Chinese dissident artist under house arrest in his native country creating a series of installations meditating on freedom of expression and prisoners of conscience for the storied ghost prison in San Francisco Bay. But the results didn't deliver on the promise, in part because the artist wasn't able to commune with this haunted atmospheric site in person.

Most Joy in a Public Space: "Keith Haring: The Political Line" at the de Young Museum. Though its themes and motifs were redundant, it was hard to resist the humanity and infectious vitality of this 1,000-watt gay artist who wanted to change the world and did; "Hofmann by Hofmann" at BAM, where a riot of color harmonized with lush gobs of impasto from an artist and respected teacher who was still going strong well into his 70s and 80s. To be in a gallery surrounded by his paintings was to be energized by his exuberant life force.

Maximum Exposure While Indisposed: SFMOMA kept their impressive collections on the radar and out of storage through "collaborative" exhibitions that yielded mixed results. The most successful venture was "Fertile Ground," a fascinating survey of communities of Golden State artists from the 1930s to the present, at the Oakland Museum, which integrated SFMOMA's contributions while remaining true to its historical, California-centric imperative.

A 15th Anniversary Shout-Out to the wonderful folks behind Modernbook Gallery. Established by a pair of college pals, the enterprise began life as a bookstore in Palo Alto before moving into the 49 Geary St. complex in 2010 as a full-blown art gallery. Mounting (primarily) photography exhibitions and publishing limited-edition monographs, they've cultivated a stable of strikingly original artists such as Fan Ho, Maia Flore, Frank De Mulder and Tom Chambers, some of whom mine their dreams, the surreal and magical realism to weave enigmatic visual narratives rich in dark psychological subtext.

Best Gallery Show: "Annie Kevans: Women and the History of Art" at the Jenkins Johnson Gallery addressed the disparity between the representation of female artists and their male counterparts in galleries and museums, as well as in the public mind and the sexist annals of art history. The work itself, uniformly sized, bust-length, oil-on-paper paintings based on the artists' self-portraits, may have been traditional, but it was the stories accompanying the pictures of these women artists who were recognized in their lifetimes, but then largely forgotten, that gave the show its punch. The same gallery mounted another favorite: "Romare Bearden: Storyteller," an array of dazzling collages, watercolors and prints that sang out in a jazzy ring-a-ding-ding rhapsody of color.

Best Museum Exhibition: "Intimate Impressionism from the National Gallery of Art," the gathering of gem-like small-scale beauties at the Legion of Honor, was as close to heaven as one could get this year. Could this many Frenchmen -- and Berthe Morisot -- be wrong?

Happy Holidays, all!