Sculpture dominated the visual arts of the Bay Area in the 1960s.

Plastic, which had been used rarely by Bay Area sculptors (occasionally by Robert Howard and Alvin Light), became an accepted medium only in the 1970s. The pioneer of cast acrylic resin as a medium for abstract sculpture was Freda Koblick, a San Francisco native who had graduated in 1943 from the Plastics Industries Technical Institute in Los Angeles and went on to conduct plastic research at the Royal College of Art in London (1965-67) before her sculptures were exhibited at New York's Museum of Contemporary Crafts in 1968, thus legitimizing plastic as a legitimate artistic medium.

In 1966 Bruce Beasley developed an innovative process for casting large-scale transparent acrylic resin and used it for the five-meter tall "Apolymon" (1968). Jerrold Ballaine, one of the artists at the 1967 Funk Show, invented a vacuum-forming machine for a special kind of plastic (cellulosic butyrate) and sculpted his "Airtight" series (1969). Sam Richardson, who graduated in 1960 from the California College of Arts and Crafts, a landscape painter who moved to landscape sculpture, made plastic sculptures evoking geological forms.

San Francisco's glorious California School of Fine Arts was renamed San Francisco Art Institute in 1961. It housed its own school of sculpture, headed by Jeremy Anderson (a student of Robert Howard), and after the 1964 exhibition "Polychrome Sculpture" known as the "polychrome movement", whose main sculptors were often also painters: globetrotter Charles Mattox (active in New York and Santa Fe during the 1930s and destitute in Los Angeles with his friend Kenneth Patchen in 1937, in Hollywood during the 1940s, hired in 1950 at the California School of Fine Arts), maker of kinetic sculptures; Richard Faralla (who graduated in the 1940s); Arlo Acton (class of 1958), who made the funk assemblage "Moon Shot" (1965) of wood, rubber, metal and paint, and in 1969 provided spherical titanium sculpture for a televised concert of Terry Riley on saxophone and tape at the Dilexi gallery ("Music with Balls"); William Geis (class of 1963); Robert Hudson (class of 1963), who specialized in painted metal sculptures like "Space Window" (1966); etc.

Marvin Lipofsky, hired by UC Berkeley in 1964 and by the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1967, was the first major glass artist of the Bay Area, a disciple of Harvey Littleton (founder of the Studio Glass Movement in Wisconsin).

The Bay Area also became a center of textile art. The pioneers had been a Berkeley couple. The Los Angeles-born Katherine Westphal (UC Berkeley class of 1945) specialized in quilts such as "Pieced Batik Quilt" (1950), before becoming professor at UC Davis (1966) where she pioneered "wearable art". Her husband Ed Rossbach taught at UC Berkeley from 1950 until 1979. Local artists were encouraged that fiber art was being recognized in New York with exhibitions such as "Woven Forms" (1963) at the Museum of Contemporary Craft and "Wall Hangings" (1969) at the Museum of Modern Art, which included the three-dimensional fiber sculptures (later known as "Abakans") that Magdalena Abakanowicz had been making in Poland since 1965. Trude Guermonprez, who had studied textiles in Germany and Holland and had been teaching weaving first at Black Mountain College (1947) and then at Pond Farm (1949), was hired in 1954 at the California College of the Arts. One of her students (class of 1949) was fiber artist and San Francisco native Kay Sekimachi, who had spent months in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans. She created a series of hanging, woven, monofilament sculptures in 1963-74 like “Ogawa II” (1969). Another of her students was the British-born Barbara Shawcroft, who made double-weave stuffed figures.

There was also interest in kinetic art. Victor Royer, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 1965 and then taught sculpture there for ten years, became famous for the five kinetic sculptures titled “Sun Machine” (1964-70). Fletcher Benton, who was hired at San Jose State College in 1967, made kinetic metal sculptures (first exhibited in 1964) and later (after 1974) constructivist bronze and steel sculptures of the series titled "Folded Circles" (e.g. "Double Folded Circles Red", 1977).

There were only a few thousand computers in the world. They were big and expensive. Many of them were programmed in Fortran. Only large corporations could afford them. Most universities and government agencies couldn't. Some scientists at the famed Bell Labs of New Jersey were experimenting with "computer art": Michael Noll programmed a computer to generate black-and-white drawings in 1962 and Edward Zajac programmed a computer to generate a one-minute film in 1963. Joan Shogren, who was a humble secretary in the Chemistry department of San Jose State College drafted a couple of students, programmed a computer with some rules of artistic creativity, and then in May 1963 exhibited the resulting computer-generated drawings. Technically speaking, that was the first public showing of computer art in the world.

In that climate, when the three-dimensional object reigned supreme, it’s no surprise that the very notion of “painting” grew increasingly fluid. Charles Garabedian, who was raised in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA in 1961 only at the age of 38, was a painter who employed a wild array of materials: oil on canvas for "Jean Harlow" (1964), paint on paper for "Assassination" (1966), resin, acrylic and ink for "Man Holding a Piece of Glass" (1971), acrylic on canvas for "Ulysses" (1984), etc.

Nevertheless, abstractionist painters still thrived, some influenced also by Minimalism and the Color Field movement, such as David Simpson, one of the founders of the Six Gallery, who predated the Light and Space movement with his series of geometric abstractions "Rainbows" (1966-69), and Sam Tchakalian, born in an Armenian family in China who escaped the revolution in 1947 and in 1966 was hired by the San Francisco Art Institute.

However, the Bay Area also boasted a vibrant school of photo-realist painters. A forerunner of the movement was Nathan Oliveira's student Robert Harvey, who focused on ordinary people ("Aunt Dovie Comes to Visit", 1966). Most of them were alumni of the California College of Arts and Crafts, such as Ralph Goings, who painted ordinary vehicles ("Town and Country", 1966), Robert Bechtle, another painter obsessed with cars ("'60 T-bird", 1968; "'61 Pontiac", 1969), Richard McLean, who started painting horses in 1966, and the younger Jack Mendenhall, who specialized in interiors ("Interior with Yellow Flowers and Monumental Lamp", 1973). These meticulous paintings were blatant imitations of photography. This sounded like an oxymoron, since painting had been moving towards the "unrealistic" precisely to differentiate from photography. Vija Celmins, based in Venice since 1962, and Paul Staiger were the leaders in southern California. Celmins, a Latvian who had just graduated from UCLA, painted "Time Magazine Cover" (1965), which simply copied the cover of the magazine issue devoted to the 1965 Watts riots.

Art was regularly exhibited at the Jazz Cellar, at Vesuvio's, at Dilexi Gallery, at the East-West Gallery. Leo Riegler turned the old lesbian club Miss Smith's Tea Room into the Coffee Gallery in October 1965 (and Grace Slick's band Great Society performed at the opening).

Keith Sanzenbach’s monumental mandala pictures that he painted in 1960-61 on the roof of an old firehouse in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco were rarely exhibited but were harbingers of psychedelic art (which he never saw because he died in poverty in 1964 of an overdose).