Wayne Thiebaud’s lushly painted glimpses of everyday life—from a slice of pie to a steep San Francisco streetscape—are icons of American Pop Art. This exhibition spans the course of his prolific career, from the early paintings he made as a young student to the vibrant beach scenes on which Thiebaud, now 89, has been working most recently.
For centuries, people have admired artists’ magical ability to depict reality—the virtuoso dab of paint that becomes a pearl in a Vermeer painting, for example. What is realism in the 21st century, when our world has taken on a virtual as well as physical dimension? Real and HyperReal contrasts traditional realism rooted in careful observation of our immediate, visible world with new riffs on realism that mirror the expansive realities of the information age.
From buttery brushstrokes to massive, sculptural buildups of surfaces, many contemporary artists—like the impressionists and fauves before them—let the paint tell the story.
Close made his first print as a professional artist in 1972, and his innovation in printmaking is now legend. In addition to including finished prints, this exhibition featured full suites of Close’s preliminary proofs and various states of editions. The exhibition also included woodblocks and etching plates for several of Close’s more complex images.Chuck Close Prints premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the San Jose Museum of Art was its only northern California venue.
Ansel Adams—photographer, musician, naturalist, explorer, critic and teacher—was a giant in the field of landscape photography and a native Californian. This exhibition focused on the masterful, small-scale prints made by Adams from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Trained as an engineer, Calder challenged the long-held notion that sculpture was static and monumental, and his inventive, colorful, animated “mobiles” epitomize the innovative, optimistic spirit of early 20th-century modernism. This exhibition included mobiles, jewelry, and works on paper drawn from Bay Area collections, including the holdings of several of the Museum’s founders and longtime supporters.
The Los Angeles–based artist Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoonbased movement, dubbed “pop surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. This exhibition was Schorr’s first mid-career retrospective.
This expansive presentation of works by more than 30 contemporary artists (most based in California) showcased pivotal works in a variety of media from the SJMA collection, some of which had never before been on view, and highlighted the Museum’s commitment to supporting the work of California artists.
This exhibition presented a broad range of prints from the previous 35 years by some of the foremost contemporary women printmakers at work in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Collectively, the 56 prints included in Women’s Work testify to the innovation and breadth of printmaking approaches taken by women since the early 1970s.
Kaneko works primarily with graphic, yet painterly, lines and dots to create rhythmic designs that correspond with Japanese Shinto concepts. This exhibition was an extensive representation of Kaneko’s work, featuring approximately 40 ceramic sculptures, drawings, and paintings from the past two decades.
For the past 100 years, artists have increasingly explored unconventional materials and invented new art-making techniques. This exhibition challenged visitors to pay close attention to how artists have manipulated everything from generic ballpoint pens to unusual found objects like snake bones, inviting the viewer to experience the imaginative artistic transformation of materials through diverse creative acts.
Sonoma-based painter Stuppin creates landscapes that celebrate nature. According to SJMA’s Oshman Executive Director Susan Krane, “Stuppin’s landscapes are amplified, as if quick glimpses that he has forever exalted and memorialized. The scenes he offers the viewer are held taut, orderly patterned and captured in brilliant Technicolor. They may remind us of the modernist masters of metaphorical landscapes (from Grant Wood to Marsden Hartley to Arthur Dove), and of images that are part and parcel of Americana.”
Bronze, marble, stainless steel . . . cardboard? In fact, many of the most highly esteemed artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Gehry, Joan Brown, and Manuel Neri, have experimented with cardboard as an artistic material. Both relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous, cardboard affords artists the ability to work on a large-scale that might not be otherwise possible. This exhibition revealed ways that artists challenge the limits of cardboard by investigating topics ranging from formal concerns to social commentary and engineering.
A collaboration between artist Adam Silverman and MIT Architecture Professor Nader Tehrani, Boolean Valley (2008) is a room-sized installation comprising 400 clay objects glazed in a colorful compound of cobalt blue and black, each with silicon carbide added. Together they form a sloping, sculptural landscape derived from the principle of “Boolean logic,” which calibrates the geometry of intersecting objects. Cast from a single mold, each clay vessel is intersected with a variable cut, sliced in two and redistributed over the floor to produce the topography of the landscape.
From the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, San Francisco provided the setting for an important group of abstract expressionist painters. This faction is often considered a second-generation spin-off from the New York “action painters” like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who worked in gestures and drips. Yet this assumption ignores the powerful culture of spontaneity that permeated the arts on both coasts in the years surrounding the Second World War. This exhibition brought together the work in the Museum’s collection of artists only now being recognized as pioneers of this movement, including Elmer Bischoff, Ernest Briggs, Edward Corbett, Edward Dugmore, James Kelly, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington, John Saccaro, and Hassel Smith.
This exhibition focused on a selection of collages from Satty’s most ambitious series, Visions of Frisco, which interpret San Francisco Gold Rush history from 1848 to the 1890s.
Imagine one hundred lifesize monkeys made out of cardboard dangling from each other and swinging from trapezes. This is what Grashow did to transform the SJMA lobby with his whimsical and lively site-specific installation, creating a visual cacophony just above the viewers’ heads.
This exhibition presented recent works by Harrington, a painter who is known for his large scale abstract canvases activated by horizontal lines. Harrington paints with his canvas flat on the ground, using tools such as a saw blade to inscribe the surface and painstakingly expose under layers of paint. The contrast in color between the lines and the surface builds a dynamic sense of space and depth.
Shedding light on the life and art of Kahlo (1907–54), this exhibition featured approximately 50 photographic portraits of the legendary Mexican artist. Drawn from the collection of Spencer Throckmorton, a specialist in Latin American photography, the exhibition included works by renowned photographers as well as Kahlo’s close friends and family.
The lead exhibition of the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge featured work ranging from printed leaflets to algorithmic films to kinetic sculptural installations to address questions about technological progress and its consequences.
Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon examines the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years. In 1920, the term robot was coined from a Czech word robota, which means tedious labor. Since then, the image and the idea of a robot have evolved remarkably from an awkward, mechanical creature to a sophisticated android with artificial intelligence and the potential for human-like consciousness. As robotic technology catches up with the wild imagination of science fiction novels, movies, and animation, dreams and fears anticipated in these stories may also become reality. Artists included in the exhibition have responded to the technological innovation with optimism, pessimism, and humor, presenting work that ultimately explores our ambivalent attitudes towards robots.
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This exhibition examined the development of robot iconography in fine art over the past 50 years and featured sculptures, paintings, photographs, digital media, and installations created by more than 20 artists. While some of the artists meticulously create portraits or representational sculptures of robots, others address a range of social and cultural issues through robot iconography.
Download the iPod Tour for this exhibition at iTunes.
