The San Jose Museum of Art has a permanent collection of 1,400 twentieth and twenty-first century artworks including paintings, sculpture, installation, new media, photography, drawings, prints, and artist books. Objects from the permanent collection are often installed in the Museum's galleries, and are periodically used to curate entire exhibitions. Through this web site, the Museum offers the public 24-hour a day access to some of the highlights of the permanent collection, as well as some recent acquisitions to the collection. Over time, the online permanent collection offerings will increase.

In this section of the web site, you can also learn about how to donate artwork to the Museum's collection.

Below, you will find some suggestions from the Museum's education department about how to approach the permanent collection, whether online or during your next visit to the Museum.

recent acquisitions highlights how to donate art

The permanent collection is the backbone of any museum. With it, a museum both defines itself and reflects the community in which it exists. We invite visitors to our web site to actively respond to the art on view and open up an exchange of ideas. By engaging our visitors in the interpretation of our collection, the Museum and its community can develop a stronger, more meaningful relationship. After all, while the collection is the Museum's backbone, the community it serves is its heart.

Visual art communicates something that words cannot - in a way that words cannot. Its absence of language renders it both shrouded in mystery and entirely open for interpretation. It allows both artist and viewer the opportunity to explore those things in us that words cannot describe.

Investing time in looking at art is rewarding because its very reason to exist is to be seen by an audience - just like a performance or a conversation, an art exhibition's meaning is derived from those who experience it. Meaning is not defined by the artist alone, nor does it magically emanate from the object itself.

Meaning develops over time from our experience with looking. And like anything else, we get what we pay for. Invest a few seconds each with a hundred paintings, and you will probably have a forgettable experience and take away nothing of value. Only have a half-hour? Better to choose 2 or 3 artworks in the same gallery and spend the entire time with them.

It has been said that only through art can we get outside ourselves and know another's view of the universe. But art also reveals us to ourselves and at some point in the viewing process, we begin to understand why we respond to certain works the way we do. And when we engage other viewers in this process a conversation ensues, perhaps a debate, and a body of knowledge is born. This exchange of ideas, this sharing of dreams, this diversity of experiences, and this investigation into the unknown is what makes a difference in all our pursuits - it is what makes us human.

Without reading a word of label text, museum visitors know the curator's first message is that the work on view is good. After all, they are in a museum! Of course, "good" can be defined in many different ways, and is subject to the curator's individual opinion and taste. Like the rest of us, curators' decisions are based on their personal and professional experiences.

Museum visitors often look to labels and wall texts to find out the curators' opinion and interpretation of the work. On the web site, we invite you, the viewer, to share your ideas about the art on view. While the rewards are many, the truth is looking at art takes time and energy. Artist Constantin Brancusi once reminded his viewers, "It is pure joy I am giving you, look until you see."

If you're a little unsure of how to get started, here is a list of questions that might help. Consider one or two questions, or use them all. Take them in order, or jump around - whatever seems to work best. And if you devise your own looking strategy, tell us about it so others can give it a try. Have fun!

• What are you looking at?
• Why did you stop here?
• What's the first thing you noticed? Why?
• What colors, shapes, and lines are used?
• How do they lead you through the work?
• What are your head and heart telling you?
• What or who are you reminded of?
• Does it move you? How?
• What do you see that makes you think and feel this way?
• What's it made of?
• Does it absorb, generate or reflect light?
• Where is it still? Where do you see movement?
• What "rules" have been followed, bent or broken? To what effect?
• Who made it?
• Who was it made for?
• Where were you when it was made? Where are you now?
• What else was happening in the world when it was made?
• What do you see that reflects or rejects its time?
• How does it differ from your experience? Are you reflected in this work?
• What do you see?