This mid-career survey included approximately 50 paintings by Oropallo, who has achieved national renown for her remarkable ability to transform mundane objects into striking images of poetic resonance.

Traveled: Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art, Tacoma, WA, November 10–February. 2, 2003 and Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA, April 2–June 29, 2003

This exhibition surveyed the impressive growth of the Museum's permanent collection over the past two years in an exciting new format allowing visitors to actively engage in a discussion about the art on view. Viewers were asked to express their ideas, opinions, and observations about the contemporary art on display. At the discretion of SJMA's curator of education, many of the response cards became the interpretive labels for works in the exhibition. New comments were added as they come in, creating a continually changing dialogue with the curators, and with others in the community. Artists in SJMA's permanent collection who were represented include: Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, Jay DeFeo, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder, David Ligare, Erle Loran, Roger Shimomura, Inez Storer, James Albertson, Carmen Lomas Garza, Raymond Saunders, Mildred Howard, and others.

This exhibition featured 34 large-scale Polaroids and chromogenic prints by the NEA Fellowship-winning artist Whaley. Created between 1991 and 1996, the photographs in the exhibition represented the largest presentation of her still life series to date.

Jack Jefferson, a much-revered artist in the Bay Area for over fifty years, died November 5, 2000 at the age of 79. Jefferson's powerful brooding abstractions and his imperviousness to changing art fashions justify his reputation as a "painter's painter." As art critic Thomas Albright noted, Jefferson managed to keep his "underground credentials fairly well intact" by quietly pursuing his own idiom forged during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s.

This exhibition showcased the finest and most extensive United States museum collection of Mexican retablos—jewel-like devotional paintings on tin. It was presented in conjunction with Contemporary Devotion, a survey of contemporary work inspired by the retablo tradition.

The West Coast premiere of this exhibition drew from the finest and most extensive United States collection of Mexican retablos - jewel-like devotional paintings on tin. The nineteenth-century popularization of the tin retablo was examined and contextualized within a 500-year tradition of religious art in Mexico. El Favor de los Santos featured approximately 200 objects, including more than 100 exquisite retablos. 

Chandler creates visionary works of art that provide glimpses into the outer reaches of space. This exhibition highlighted Chandler's intricate colored-pencil drawings on paper. Chandler, who received his B.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts, has exhibited his work throughout the state. In addition, his paintings have been reproduced as illustrations in numerous magazines, including Time and Omni.