San José Museum of Art

See what you think.

Past Exhibitions

Local Color

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Local Color, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, explores the primacy of color in a range of works, from Alexander Calder’s whimsical mobiles to Elmer Bischoff’s luscious, light-filled canvases to David Levinthal’s slick, color-saturated photographs of Barbie dolls.  Also featured are works by artists who consider the quiet, meditative nuances of black and white.  This exhibition encourages viewers to look at color as content.  How does color play into your intuitive experience of a work of art?  What are some of the ways artists use color as the subject of their work?

Mexicanisimo through Artists’ Eyes

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Traditional versus cutting-edge, high-brow versus low-brow. A new generation of Mexican and Mexican-American artists is fascinated by these potentially contradictory concepts. The artists whose works are featured in this exhibition draw inspiration from Mexico’s deep well of visual culture.

Frank Lobdell: Wonderland

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Frank Lobdell conjures dreamlike landscapes of mystery and longing. His images—vibrantly colored and fantastical—are simultaneously mechanical, yet anthropomorphic. Though best known for his intense, brooding paintings and personal symbology, Lobdell has in recent yearsgiven color primary importance in his work. Frank Lobdell: Wonderland will examine the evolution of the artist’s work and the ways in which he organizes his forms and figures in space.

To Hell and Back: Sandow Birk’s Divine Comedy

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This exhibition features a selection from the museum’s permanent collection of Birk’s series of lithographs. Each meticulously drawn image incorporates a descriptive caption written in contemporary American vernacular. Birk transformed a centuries-old classic into an imaginary narrative with political relevance for today’s audiences.

Renegade Humor

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Bawdy irreverence, iconoclasm, parody, and puns are hallmarks of the work spawned by the art department at the University of California, Davis, in the 1960s and 1970s. In keeping with the counterculture of the time, the tone of this humor was often aggressive and transgressive. Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Peter VandenBerge, William T. Wiley, and others took new artistic license with the Bay Area’s figurative traditions. They jettisoned what they viewed as the pretension of the East Coast art world and adopted an earthy approach wholly authentic to the West Coast. Their laid-back, flippant attitudes reflected the shifting values of the time and often belied deeper social messages. 

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown

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Enter exhibition website

This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown is the first in-depth examination of this beloved Bay Area artistʼs painting in over a decade. The exhibition is the first to explore Brownʼs art in the national context of the womenʼs movement: the movement paralleled her career, yet she has been largely excluded from its history.

Book-ish

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The book as we have known it for centuries is challenged today by the rapid growth of digitization and e-books. This trend raises tough questions about the future of conventional books and the once-beloved printed page. In the midst of such radical change, this exhibition looks at the influence of the book on visual artists. Book-ish includes works from the Museum’s permanent collection that have been inspired by books, literature, language, and the artists’ reverence for reading. 

So, Who Do You Think You Are?

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As fellow inhabitants of the earth, we are united by the shared conditions of our humanity. Through portraiture and the figure, artists explore the notion of individual identity and the commonality of our human nature.

Beta Space: Anna Sew Hoy

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Artist Anna Sew Hoy will create a new sculptural installation using cast-off materials and detritus from our local corporate culture. In Silicon Valley, start- up companies pop up and disappear on a steady basis, while established firms regularly upgrade IT inventory and office fixtures. How can electronic and office equipment be critical to the function of an organization one day and useless the next? Sew Hoy (who has long worked with found objects and everyday materials such as jeans and beer cans) will recycle—and take inspiration from—our communal, locally sourced e-waste.

Braving the Elements: Let’s Look at Art

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Just as weather is made up of basic elements such as wind, cloud, rain, snow, fog and heat, works of art consist of line, shape, color, texture, and space.  Possibilities are endless when artists use these formal elements, a wide variety of art materials, and their imaginations. Feeling brave? We invite you to look, play, draw, and build in the family gallery.

Bill Owens: Ordinary Folks

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“Ordinary folks doing ordinary things”—that is how photographer Bill Owens described his subjects. Like a visual anthropologist, Owens astutely recorded the customs, symbols, and social relationships that characterized American middle-class culture in the 1970s. Owens adopted an air of objectivity that recalls the New Topographics, a generation of photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Joel Deal, who portrayed the built environment with detachment.

The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb's Book of Genesis

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Thousands of comic aficionados know Robert Crumb as the grandfather of the groundbreaking underground “commix” movement in San Francisco and as a legendary 60s counterculture character. Crumb’s influence as an artist and an illustrator has spread far beyond the world of comics and graphic novels: many of his images are now icons of our visual culture.

Beta Space: Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa

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Like the legendary Silicon Valley “garage,” Beta Space serves as an experimental laboratory for artists, collaborative ventures, and catalytic ideas. In this first installment of SJMA’s new exhibition series, artists Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa rethink our everyday experience of the built environment.

Robert Mapplethorpe: Portraits

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American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) captured the essence of the New York cultural scene in the late 1970s and 1980s through his portraits of artists, writers, musicians, designers, dealers, actors, and actresses. Though known to many for his controversial sexual images, Mapplethorpe’s most lasting legacy--and the largest portion of his oeuvre--is his striking portraiture.

Let’s Look At Art: Build It

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The Let’s Look at Art exhibitions in the Koret Family Gallery inspire imagination. This fall, see works by Wayne Thiebaud, Michael Wolf, Richard Shaw, and others.

Leo Villareal

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September 9 – December 30, 2012: Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin

Leo Villareal (born 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a pioneer in the use of LEDs and computer-driven imagery and known both for his light sculptures and architectural, site-specific works. This exhibition, his first major traveling museum survey, seeks to place Villareal’s body of work within the continuum of contemporary art.

Degrees of Separation: Contemporary Photography from the Permanent Collection

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Degrees of Separation illustrates a touchstone among photographers—the fragile nature of our connection to other human beings and to the world around us. Featuring several key new acquisitions, the story unfolds through images ranging from portraits to landscapes, grainy vintage snapshots to large-scale digtital photographs. 

Retro-Tech

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The artists represented in this exhibition grapple with the potential of technology as they “build their own world.” They re-purpose and manipulate technologies of the past and present in ways that range from playful to ironic to analytical. 

Vital Signs: New Media from the Permanent Collection

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The patterns of nature find reflection in the functions of human life—the motion of ocean waves echoes the measured inhalation and exhalation of breath; flower petals reach for the sun, unfurling and then collapsing, more slowly but similarly to the way a heart contracts and expands. The new media artists in this exhibition use technology to replicate these vital signs, but also to explore the inner source of life, those elements unseen but often sensed. 

New Stories from the Edge of Asia: Plastic Life

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This exhibition is the first in a new series that features recent work by artists from Pacific Rim countries and cultures who explore new narrative territory using animation, digital techniques, video, and film.

Wayne Thiebaud: Seventy Years of Painting

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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.

Real and HyperReal

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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.

Juicy Paint

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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.