San José Museum of Art

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Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection

  • A painting of a garden with trees, flowers, succulents, cacti, and imaginary plants that reach to the blue sky. The plant shapes and colors are delightfully and playfully unnatural.

    Patssi Valdez, The Imaginary Garden, 2003. Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 84 inches. Collection of San José Museum of Art. Museum purchase with funds contributed by cb and Dick Watts, Lisa and John Kohler, Mary Mocas and Marv Tseu, Elaine and Rex Cardinale, Arpi Djenguerian, and Margaret and Gibson Anderson, in honor of the San Jose Museum of Art's 35th anniversary.

    March 7, 2025 – ongoing
    Exhibition Celebration: Friday, March 7, 6–9pm • Member Reception: Friday, March 7, 6–7pm

    Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, the Museum invites a deeper sense of community pride in the collection. 

    Initiated in 1973 under the guidance of San José artists, SJMA’s collection has grown to reflect our international point of convergence, where dynamic cultural diversity and high-tech industries mix in California soil. SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process. Organized into thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the works of almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond, including  Ruth Asawa, Martha Atienza, Shilpa Gupta, Yolanda López, and Elias Sime, among many others.

    Support

    Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection is made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous support from Ann Marie Mix, Rita and Kent Norton, and Elizabeth and Byron Ryono.

    Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by principal support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, and the Lipman Family Foundation; by lead support from the Adobe Foundation, the California Arts Council, Toby and Barry Fernald, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tammy and Tom Kiely, the Knight Foundation, Evelyn and Rick Neely, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Skyline Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100; and with significant endowment support from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

     

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