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In a symbolic first exhibition choice, the new director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Thomas P. Campbell, announced Tuesday that the blockbuster contemporary exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” will come to the Bay Area this fall.

Campbell told The Chronicle, “It’s important that we as a museum speak to the audiences that represent the full diversity of our city. As a leading cultural institution, we have a powerful voice and a responsibility to amplify existing conversations around the city’s struggles with race, class and identity. Art has always been a tool for social change, and we hope, always will be.”

In an earlier statement issued by FAMSF, he said, “The artists featured in ‘Soul of a Nation’ were on the front lines of creating social and political change. Their work changed the course of the art historical canon, and with this exhibition we continue to tell a truer, more holistic story of what American art is.”

During a time of heightened racial tension across the U.S., there is a sense of renewed urgency among art museum leaders around the need to diversify programs, collections and, crucially, audiences. “Soul of a Nation” is a deeply researched work of art history. It is, as well, a carefully assembled collection of significant works by 60 legendary artists through two explosive decades.

No museum exhibition will solve the problems or salve the wounds highlighted by “Soul of a Nation,” which I previewed in Los Angeles last week. But it has been received worldwide as a muscular response to that pressing imperative.

Organized by Tate Modern in London, where it was seen in 2017 by more than 136,000 visitors, the exhibition traveled to the Brooklyn Museum and to Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Ark. A glamorous opening crowd filled with many of the artists (and celebrities ranging from Angela Bassett to Jay-Z) packed an opening party on Friday, March 22, at the Broad contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles, which was to be the final venue.

A quick shuffling of exhibition schedules at the de Young Museum, however, and a frantic round of last-minute loan requests will now bring “Soul of a Nation” to the de Young from Nov. 9 through March 8.

One of the two Tate curators responsible for the exhibition, Mark Godfrey, was in San Francisco briefly last week to discuss details with de Young curator Timothy Burgard. In an interview, Godfrey told The Chronicle that one Bay Area woman played a role in the show from the earliest investigations.

“In that research we were very much supported both morally and financially by Pamela Joyner, who’s a great collector who lives here. Pamela has a lot of important artists in her collection, and we began to look at that,” Godfrey said. The presentation in Los Angeles opens with a massive work by the artist Sam Gilliam, given to the Tate by Joyner and her husband, Alfred J. Giuffrida.

The exhibition develops several major themes, even as it highlights the individual contributions of key artists like Elizabeth Catlett, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White and many others.

The tight and transcendent exhibition of the life’s work of Larry Sultan at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had to leave some things out. But the artist’s significance and his popularity in the Bay Area led to a desire to fill out the story elsewhere.

Two exhibitions at Minnesota Street Project attempt to take up that slack.

“Fake Newsroom” extends upon “Newsroom,” a project Sultan and Mike Mandel, frequent collaborators, presented in 1983 at what is now the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Both an online publication and an exhibition-cum-performance, it runs through April 29.

Meanwhile, the Casemore Kirkeby gallery is presenting “Larry Sultan: Editorial Works” through June 10.

When Mandel and Sultan installed news service satellite feeds at Berkeley nearly 35 years ago, newspapers were printed on newsprint—there were no digital platforms. Alongside a limited number of television broadcasters, they were the trusted source of visual news.

For five weeks, the artists gathered and sorted reams of Associated Press and United Press International images daily, transforming them into new narratives, unmoored from their original context.

“Fake Newsroom,” a tribute to the original, is being maintained and developed by Jason Fulford, Jim Goldberg and Dru Donovan at the invitation of Mandel and the estate of Larry Sultan. I saw it in its nascency, with some office and printer equipment around the room and a team of three poring over a scatter of small photos, spread on the floor. Fulford promised more to look at in the gallery in coming days. A diverting, newspaper-format website that changes daily based upon the artists’ research is at http://www.fakenewsroom.org. I hardly need to mention the timeliness of the theme.

An entry gallery presents photographs of a Mandel/Sultan collaboration over many years, a series of billboards conjured from orphan images and presented without explanation throughout California between 1973 and 1989. Perhaps the best known is the surreal “Oranges on Fire,” presented full scale in original, brilliant silkscreen color, and also on view in a different version at SFMOMA.

At Casemore Kirkeby, rarely seen excerpts from commercial and editorial assignments that Sultan accepted between 1993 and 2009 are on view. The connection to his personal work is clear and informative—and the pictures are original and riveting, even when they are designed to sell something.