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.
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.
Roots in the Air, Branches Below is a landmark exhibition, drawn entirely from private collections in the San Francisco Bay Area, and one of a very few surveys of modern and contemporary art from India in this country.
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.
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.
