Bay Area Art World, 2015

The time has come to look back on the year that was with a mixture of bemusement, pleasure and regret.

In 2015, SFMOMA offered a sneak peak at its expanded building, sans the beloved Mario Botta slate-toned atrium and gracious marble stairwells. Ah, the wages of progress. While it's true nothing remains the same, some things should; OK, we'll reserve judgment until the grand opening in May. Commercial galleries continued their exodus from downtown; some lost their spaces to tech companies and nearly all were driven out by the city's skyrocketing rents. Rena Bransten left her base of over 30 years at 77 Geary, as did George Krevsky, who set up operations at his home in Oakland; Stephen Wirtz Gallery, now Wirtz Art, functions online and by appointment. Other players may resurface at Minnesota Street Project and elsewhere in the spring. Also, in the transitions department, the Cartoon Art Museum closed its Mission Street location and is searching for a new home

The de Young Museum marked its 10th anniversary in its new building, a milestone somewhat overshadowed by the instability and ongoing melodrama at the Fine Arts Museums. Accusations of financial impropriety leveled at FAMSF chairwoman Dede Wilsey, and the resignation of director Colin Bailey in April, less than two years after he assumed the post, threaten to undermine the institution's reputation both here and in the larger art world. And is it too much to ask for more shows in the coming year generated by talented in-house curators like Julian Cox and Tim Burgard?

Among the bright spots were two fine shows of Richard Diebenkorn's works on paper, a medium where the artist excelled: "Richard Diebenkorn Prints," at the de Young, consisted of 49 of the 160 prints FAMSF acquired last year, making it the largest repository of Diebenkorn's printmaking; and "Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed" at the Cantor Arts Center afforded a unique opportunity to get inside the mind's eye of the California artist.

Onward with more highlights and lowlights of 2015.

Most sublime immersive experience with a killer view: Janet Cardiff's "Forty Part Motet," a sound installation at the Fort Mason Center, which left many critics uncharacteristically speechless. Forty towering black speakers, arranged in a circle, broadcast a 1573 choral work in Latin by English Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, performed by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir. With San Francisco Bay as dramatic backdrop, sound and visual elements coalesce into an ecstatic experience. You had to be there, and you still can be. It's up until Jan. 18.

The 2015 Shoeaholics Fever Dream Award goes to "High Style: The Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection," a connoisseur's exhibition at the Legion of Honor that featured a dozen pairs of shoes by haute Parisian shoemaker Pietro Yantorny. The sign in his atelier window allegedly read: "The most expensive shoes in the world," and he wasn't kidding. A lace-lined trunk at the show held some of his surviving pointy-toed, stack-heeled, jewel-buckled amazements, an orgiastic display some have yet to recover from. The show also resurrected the legacy and body-conscious, architectural creations of Charles James, a notoriously mercurial, nearly neglected British virtuoso with scissors and fabric.

The two unlikeliest and most entertaining caballeros of the year: The avuncular family entertainment titan Walt Disney and the wild-eyed mustachioed surrealist Salvador Dali, whose trajectories and intersections were attentively charted in "Disney and Dali: Architects of the Imagination," the most impressive exhibition mounted at the Walt Disney Family Museum since its opening.

Most memorable encounters: James Tissot's "A Political Woman" (1883-85), a portrait of the grand entrance of a glamorous Parisian society woman as she sweeps into a glittering ballroom, on view at the de Young's "Jewel City: Art from San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition," which also includes a photograph of the interior of the Palace of Fine Arts, whose curved walls were stacked with paintings during the PPIE. Wow, what a venue!

All the watercolors at "J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free," and a thrilling oil painting, "Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich" (1842), a maritime masterpiece in which a ship is tossed about like a toy, sucked into a vortex of waves whipped up by an angry god. Apocryphal legend has it that Turner demanded the sailors lash him to the mast during a storm.

Installations that rocked: "28 Chinese," where youngish art-stars flaunted their aptitude for provocative imagined environments. The show was at the Asian Art Museum, which also takes the prize, as it does every year, for the best exhibition presentations of any local museum.

Missed opportunities: "Amy Winehouse: A Family Portrait" at CJM gave a sense of what it was like to be in the soulful singer's room, but gave us none of her heart-wrenching songs and little insight into what drove her to addiction and an early death. Without the music it was hard to understand what the fuss was about. Raising more questions than it answered, "She Who Tells the Story," at Cantor Arts Center, showcased the work of female Middle Eastern photographers while (too) discreetly sidestepping their second-class status in their countries of origin.

Talent to watch: San Francisco genie-in-a-bottle Jennie Ottinger.

Most vital center (and last bastion) of darkroom photography: Rayko Photo Center & Gallery.

Best gallery shows: "Letters to the Predator" at Johansson Projects, where Ottinger, who's justly lauded above, devised an amoral animal kingdom a long way from Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, as well as a series of disconcertingly unwholesome, slyly humorous oil paintings.

"Kal Spelletich: Intention Machines," a freaky yet fascinating interactive exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, noteworthy for a confluence of hubris, technology run amok and bizarre contraptions like the headless robotic mannequins hooked up to a mysterious apparatus one might find in a mad scientist's laboratory.

"Come with Me," at Gallery Wendi Norris, Tomokazu Matsuyama's solo show of exuberant paintings that recalled the paradisiacal color and lands of enchantment dreamt up by master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. The artist integrated an urban new world order and the ancient past, blending Eastern and Western aesthetics with verve and hallucinatory energy.

Watch this space next week for what's around the corner in 2016.