Art of Manga Exhibit at San Francisco de Young Museum Is a First for North America
San Francisco’s de Young Museum opened the first large-scale manga exhibition in North America, and from its very first day the galleries were full of excited visitors. The exhibition, called “Art of Manga,” presents over 600 original artworks and brings together pieces from some of the most significant names in the history of the medium.
Ten manga artists are featured throughout the exhibit: Tetsuya Chiba, Fujio Akatsuka, Rumiko Takahashi, Jiro Taniguchi, Mari Yamazaki, Hirohiko Araki, Kazumi Yamashita, Gengoroh Tagame, Fumi Yoshinaga, and Eiichiro Oda. Additional works from Ito Junji, Agi Tadashi, and Tite Kubo are woven into the main gallery. The breadth of the selection spans wildly different genres and sensibilities, making it genuinely rewarding for longtime fans and newcomers stepping into manga for the first time.
The exhibition is designed to teach visitors how to read manga as well as admire it. The first gallery is decorated entirely in black, following the manga convention that black frames signal a flashback or the past. From there, each room guides visitors through panels in the proper reading order, so guests leave with a richer understanding of how the medium works. The wall panels from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure proved to be a particular crowd pleaser, drawing enthusiastic reactions and no shortage of posed photos.
The museum is hosting Cosplay Days on select Saturdays throughout the exhibit’s run, welcoming fans who want to dress as their favorite characters and add another layer of participation to the experience. For anyone within reach of San Francisco, it sounds like a visit well worth planning around.
My take: Having a major art museum dedicate a full exhibition to manga and approach it with this much genuine care feels like a meaningful moment for the medium. The decision to teach visitors how to read manga alongside showing them the art shows real respect for the craft. This is exactly the kind of institutional recognition that manga has always deserved.
