Kinetic and/or robotic art has been around for a century, but few of its makers have had Alan Rath’s prodigious gifts as both artist and engineer. Works in this memorial exhibition—Rath died at the age of sixty in 2020—included examples from some of the series for which he is best known: pieces incorporating digital animations of running figures, eyes, mouths, hands, and numbers; speakers that pulse rhythmically like hearts or wheezing lungs; and graceful orchestrations of oscillating feathers.

A tinkerer since childhood, Rath was interested in circuitry from the beginning, wiring his first switch

A bronze cast of Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, 1880–81, has long welcomed visitors to the exterior courtyard of the Legion of Honor, a faux-French edifice built in the 1920s through the efforts of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of sugar magnate Adolph B. Spreckels. The city-affiliated museum primarily focuses on European art. Its sister museum, the de Young, is where collections of art from the Americas, Oceania, and Africa are housed. Like many cultural repositories of its era, the Legion is steeped in constructed narratives.

Given its setting, at the coastal edge of San Francisco, this museum