Building the stand: The San Francisco Fall Show 2026

We’re at Fort Mason this week, building for the Fall Show. Gala night is Wednesday 14 October; the show runs Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 at the Festival Pavilion.

We’ve taken a centre stand this year B2 — walls on all four sides, right in the middle of the floor. It’s the biggest space we’ve had here, and it changes how you hang. There’s no back wall to put the quiet things on. Every side faces an aisle, so every side has to work on its own and still read as one stand when someone walks around it. We’re hanging more pictures than usual as a result.

The first photo is build day, before anything of ours existed. The Pavilion is an empty shed at that stage — white trusses, bare floor, contractors and forklifts, registration desks going up along one side. It takes a day and a half before it looks like a show.

By the second day our walls were in and the grasscloth was on. We’ve split the stand between pale walls and a deep navy, which lets us separate the pictures that need space from the ones that work better grouped tight.

San Francisco is always a very good show for us. A large part of that is the people — it’s one of the fairs where we see the most familiar faces, and a lot of customers who come back to us year after year. We look forward to it for that as much as anything.

As of this morning there are still forty-odd frames stacked against the walls waiting to go up, and the labels aren’t written. That’s normal. It’ll be finished by Wednesday afternoon.

You can see the full collection we’re bringing here: San Francisco Fall Show 2026 collection

For show tickets, email zack@leightonfineart.com.

Come and find us in the centre of the floor on stand B2.