The Arts at CIIS | CIIS Skip to Content The Arts at CIIS A renowned San Francisco exhibition center, where people from different identities and communities connect through the arts and culture. Image: Zora J. Murff's Remaking the Mark exhibition in the Desai | Matta Gallery (2018). In this Section About the Arts at CIIS The Arts at CIIS is rooted in the belief that arts and culture advance civic participation and engagement in our communities, nourish curiosity, and foster discourse across differences about the challenges we share and the future we’re creating. Image: Karla Diaz' exhibition, While You Were Sleeping in the Desai | Matta Gallery (2022). Learn more our impact Archive We have been curating evocative exhibitions for a decade and a half. Image: Chaksam-Pa Tibetan Dance and Opera Company, performed in front of Ang Tsherin Sherpa's exhibition, Himlayan Contemporary (2017). View past exhibitions Exhibitions Learn about our current exhibitions and those that are upcoming. Image: Photo of curator Kija Lucas at Karla Diaz' exhibition, While You Were Sleeping (2022). View exhibitions Chroma Publications An exhibition and publications project that fosters pluralism within the field of photography and lens-based media by supporting the work of emerging and mid-career artists of African, Latino, Native American, Middle Eastern, North African, Asian, and Pacific Island heritage. Learn More → American Places In American Places , Palacio brings an outsider’s perspective to his keenly observed America, and we discover a landscape both expansive and contained, delimited and unbounded. Manifest Wendel White’s Manifest makes historical objects intimate yet monumental, reflecting the U.S.’s overlapping histories of slavery, abolitionism, and segregation and the struggle for freedom and equality. Skin June Yong Lee’s Skin creates photographic images intimately and arrestingly corporeal. They are traces of histories to which we aren’t privy, at which we can only guess, inserting our own experiences and queries to interpret the markings.