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. 

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Hassel Smith (1915-2007) was one of the most influential abstract expressionist painters in San Francisco during the seminal years of the late 1940s and 1950s. Teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA, now the San Francisco Art Institute) alongside Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, Smith developed a spontaneous, jazz-inspired style of gestural abstraction. Smith’s approach differed from the solemn sensibility of his peers with an exuberant, lightening-fast draftsmanship that led San Francisco Chronicle critic Allan Temko to describe his canvases as “Thunderbolt Paintings.”

Spratt’s paintings are studies of intensity, flatness, saturation, and hue. His largely monochromatic square and rectangular works respond to minimalism, an extreme form of nonrepresentational art that emerged in the late 1960s. Using colors ranging from vibrant orange to muted grey, Spratt investigates the properties of his materials, demonstrating the endless invention possible with limited means. Viewed as a whole, his paintings create a scintillating interaction of color and space.

Using satire and a dark imagination, Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya published Los Caprichos, a series of 80 etchings in 1799. Goya was stone deaf; he relied on his keen observation to represent Spain during a period of social and economic hardship. Los Caprichos portrays goblins and aristocrats alike, enacting the excesses of the nobility and the corruption of the church.

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