San José Museum of Art
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Past Exhibitions

Sam Smidt: A Career in Graphic Design

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This exhibition featured a selection of graphic designs produced by leading West Coast graphic designer Smidt over the course of his career—including the San Jose Museum of Art’s 2004 permanent collection catalogue. It also included a group of Smidt’s recently published photographs from the series Gifts of the Street, a series of photographs Smidt took on his daily walks to work.

Art of Zines 04

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Art of Zines 04 explored the creative and often subversive phenomenon of the zine, which is typically defined as a modest art book publication produced by an individual or small group. For the three years prior to this presentation, San Jose’s Anno Domini Gallery played a vital role in the zine community by organizing an annual zine exhibition. SJMA partnered with Anno Domini to mount Art of Zines 04.

Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens

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Adored by everyone from art critics to punk kids, Nara's figures haunt galleries and museums, and adorn T-shirts, CD cases, ashtrays, and clocks. SJMA presented the Tokyo- based artist’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States.

The Koret Foundation was a major sponsor of the San Jose presentation of Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens, which was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. The traveling exhibition was sponsored by an anonymous donor with the additional support of the Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, The Japan Foundation, Toby Devan Lewis, The Peter Norton Family Foundation, Nancy and Joel Portnoy and Jennifer McSweeney Reuss.

The Art of Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Long admired as a prolific poet, author, and iconic publisher, Ferlinghetti is also a well-established and respected painter. A selection of Ferlinghetti’s most recent works were on view in the SJMA Koret Gallery.

Domestic Odyssey

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This exhibition featured work by national and international artists who use metaphors of domesticity—and actual household items such as furniture and appliances—to explore issues of gender, class, and culture. Major sponsorship of Domestic Odyssey was provided by The Mercury News. Additional support was provided by Aspect Communications and Vintage Wine Merchants.

Jack Fulton: On the Origins of Everything

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This selection of photographs and photo-based works by Jack Fulton were drawn from the course of Fulton’s career. Fulton is known for his hand-annotated photos that range from intimate family portraits to striking travel photographs.

Hortus Contemplatonis Nature Morte

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Shirley Alexandra Watts’s mixed-media installation Hortus Contemplationis / Nature Morte was on view in the Cathedral Sculpture Court at SJMA. The site-specific installation is Watts’s contemporary interpretation of the hortus contemplationis, or garden of reflection, the space where earth and sky converge with the mass of a building.

Keeping Company: A Painter and Three Poets

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Patrick Surgalski, associate professor of printmaking and drawing in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University, has collaborated, and kept company, with a number of distinguished poets—including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nils Peterson, and Robert Bly over the last several years. The lithographs and etchings that Surgalski creates juxtapose a poem with the artist’s own images on a single sheet on paper.

The Not-So-Still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture

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Today's still life is no longer still. It has not only moved off the table, but off the wall and into three dimensions. This exhibition traced the intriguing evolution of still life in California from the turn of the century until about 2000, investigating the great variety of media the theme now engages—from the assemblage tableaux of George Herms to the oversized stacked plates of Robert Therrien.

Beyond Tradition: Permanent Collection Photographs

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Using photographic processes that range from experimental to vintage, and addressing both individual and societal concerns, the artists who were featured in Beyond Tradition represent a wide range of approaches and techniques in their work. Over the course of the year that the exhibition was on view, new acquisitions were rotated into the presentation.

Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing

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This major exhibition surveyed the connection between the visual arts and surfing and filled the entire second floor of the Museum’s New Wing. Organized by the Orange County–based Laguna Art Museum, the exhibition was featured in the New York Times as well as numerous other national publications throughout its tour with stops in Hawaii and Virginia.

Saul White: A Memorial Exhibition

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Under the mentorship of Willem de Kooning in the early 1960s Saul White became convinced of the permanent viability of expressive abstraction, regardless of the dictates of fashion. In the ensuing decades, even though painting itself became anachronistic in the eyes of the art world, White continued to explore his chosen style of abstraction. This exhibition presented a small group of White’s work from 1980s and ’90s, selected in conjunction with the artist shortly before his death in May 2003.

Keith Carter: Poet of the Ordinary

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Texas-based Carter creates compelling images that speak to the inherent beauty in the people, places, and things we see every day. This exhibition featured 65 black-and-white photographs by this master photographer and was organized by the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. In addition, SJMA augmented the exhibition with a selection of photographs by Carter drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection.

Un/Familiar Territory

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Un/Familiar Territory addressed the interface of cultural place and personal identity through a wide range of viewpoints and media as explored by ten artists: Ruth Boerefijn, Enrique Chagoya, Albert Chong, Allan deSouza, Cia Foreman, Arnold J. Kemp, Bari Kumar, Dinh Q. Lê, Juan Carlos Quintana, and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood.

Tales of Yellow Skin: The Art of Long Nguyen

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This mid-career survey of work by Los Angeles–based artist Long Nguyen included 15 paintings from his monochromatic Tales of Yellow Skinseries, as well as six contextual paintings and a selection of his sculpture and works on paper.

McManis Faulkner & Morgan was the lead sponsor of the exhibition and catalogue. Aspect Communications was a corporate sponsor of the exhibition, and Viet Mercury was the media sponsor.

Tino Rodriguez: The Darkening Garden/El Jardín al Anochecer

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Tino Rodríguez: The Darkening Garden/El Jardín al Anochecer was the first solo museum exhibition for the emerging San Francisco–based painter and included nearly 40 exquisite small-scale paintings ranging from 5 × 7 to 2 × 4 inches.

LA POST-COOL

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Moving beyond trends set in New York, much of the great LA art of the last 20 years has emphasized an irony and distance that, in essence, can be characterized as “cool.” Recently, however, a new West Coast attitude has emerged, one interested in more direct statements and more heartfelt modes of communication. This exhibition featured 43 artists and included approximately 70 works that offer routes back to direct expression and away from the “art about art” that has alienated so much of the mainstream art audience.

Collection Highlights

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This ongoing exhibition of works from the Museum’s permanent collection rotated every six months and occupied the Gibson Family Gallery and the Plaza Gallery on the lower floor of the Museum’s New Wing through the year 2004. Collection Highlights marked the first time in the Museum’s 30-year history that the permanent collection went on long-term display, giving viewers an idea of what SJMA values in the visual arts of the day—and why.

Evocations: Sharon Ellis, 1991-2001

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This was the first in-depth study of the work of noted Los Angeles–based painter Sharon Ellis. Ellis, best known for her modestly sized paintings of expansive, visionary landscapes, juxtaposes epic subjects such as brilliant night skies, vast roiling oceans, and distant solar systems with intricately depicted details of nature—a tangle of blossoms, a single twig, or silhouetted tree branches. These subjects from nature, while painstakingly rendered, are significantly altered through the artist’s highly inventive imagination.

Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950-2000

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This exhibition documented a compelling range of work produced by more than 90 women artists working in California during the last half of the 20th century. It was the first survey exhibition to highlight the historical implications of the period and included a range of artists diverse in age, background, and formal training.

The works presented in Part I reflected the impact of a direct engagement with technology by some of California's most inventive and adventurous women artists, including Margaret Crane, Sharon Grace, Theresa Hak Kyung-Cha, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sharon Lockhart, Sherrie Rabinowitz, Jennifer Steinkamp, Christine Tamblyn, and Victoria Vesna. The exhibition included video documentation of performances, as well as historic, single-channel video works from the 1970s and 80s.

Part II of the exhibition focused on painting, sculpture, and mixed media. It included seminal works by artists such as Ruth Asawa, whose intricate woven wire shapes, created in the 1950s, reconcile aspects of nature and geometry. Also on view were works from the late 1950s and early 1960s by such early trailblazers as Vija Celmins, Karen Carson, Jay DeFeo, Mary Lovelace O’Neil, and Deborah Remington, all of whom broke the prevailing mold of male-dominated and accepted formalist theories.

Beaware: Teens Aware - Teen Art Council Exhibition

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Consisting of four collaborative installations created by ethnically diverse groups of San Jose teens, this exhibition was the second show at the Museum featuring artwork created through SJMA’s arts education outreach program—Museum Youth Initiative—funded by the James Irvine Foundation.

Eye.Contact: Photographs from the Permanent Collection

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Eye-Contact is an exhibition that spotlights exceptional photographs drawn from SJMA’s expanding permanent collection. The majority of the stunning works on view, which are the gift of Bay Area collector Arthur Goodwin, demonstrate the expressive potential of the human eye and hand. Captured in compelling black-and-white images, simple gazes and gestures reveal powerful emotions within the context of a variety of subjects. The exhibition comprises approximately 15 works by renowned contemporary artists such as Eve Arnold, Keith Carter, Ruth Bernard, Walker Evans, and Sebastião Salgado. 

Organized by Hillary Helm, former SJMA Curatorial Assistant