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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Picasso (1881–1973) was fascinated by themes of love and desire. Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso studied art in Barcelona and Madrid. In 1904 he settled in Paris, where he became associated with avant-garde artists and writers. Picasso created paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramics, and theater designs in an unprecedented variety of styles, yielding cubist collages, neo-classical figure paintings, and expressive drawings. This exhibition included 40 etchings produced between 1966 and 1971 that are unique in their expressiveness and tonal depth.
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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Love and desire are themes that fascinated the twentieth-century master Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973). Born in Malaga, Spain, Picasso studied art in Barcelona and Madrid. In 1904 he settled in Paris, where he became associated with avant-garde artists and writers. Picasso created paintings, sculptures, prints, ceramics, and theater designs in an unprecedented variety of styles, yielding cubist collages, neo-classical figure paintings, and expressive drawings.
Over the course of the California College of Art’s 100 years, many notable artists have passed through its doors and their exceptional work has entered into the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art. On the occasion of the college’s centennial, SJMA presented a selection of works on paper by CCA alumni and faculty, including Squeak Carnwath, Richard Diebenkorn, and Laurie Reid.
This exhibition featured the work of pioneer European modernist Miró, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Highlighting the artist’s exploration of printmaking toward the end of his career, this exhibition showcased approximately 60 works.
Featuring works by artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Roy DeForest, David Hockney, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, and Richard Diebenkorn, De-Natured presented a sampling of the many ways that artists have engaged with their changing environments. At a time when we are increasingly “growing up denatured,” as one New York Times writer recently described the divide between urban and pastoral life, these artistic collisions with nature (or its absence) have much to tell us about our own relationships with the environment, both natural and urban.
The American painter and printmaker Richard Diebenkorn is regarded as one of the leading artists of the twentieth-century due to his significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism, Bay Area Figuration, and his highly acclaimed Ocean Park series. Diebenkorn in New Mexico: 1950 – 1952 is the first exhibition devoted entirely to the artist’s New Mexico work. In 1950, Diebenkorn enrolled in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, leaving behind a teaching position at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Arts Institute). Over a two-year period, Diebenkorn created a body of work that represented the region’s desert terrain through aerial views, linear planes, and a palette of rusty earth tones. His unique rendition of landscapes continued in his later works, including the Berkeley and Ocean Park series. Highlighting a little-known period of Diebenkorn’s work that had a lasting impact on his career, the exhibition brings together 50 paintings, works on paper, and sculpture that have never been seen together before. Diebenkorn in New Mexico: 1950-1952 is organized by the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, University of New Mexico with major support from the Thaw Charitable Trust and the Richard Diebenkorn Estate.
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