San José Museum of Art

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Past Exhibitions

Catherine Wagner: Cross Sections

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SJMA presented the culmination of internationally recognized artist Catherine Wagner’s two- year visual arts residency. Featuring over 30 large-scale, black-and-white photographs produced between 1998 and 2001, this exhibition was the first to present Wagner’s most recent body of work in its entirety.

Blind Vision: Video and the Limits of Perception

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A compelling exhibition of video-based artworks, Blind Vision showcased the work of both Bay Area and international artists—Bill Viola, Peter Campus, Smith/Stewart (Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart), Jonathan Fung, Marie Sester, and Tran T. Kim-Trang—whose videotapes and installations explore the dynamic between perception/cognition and surveillance/control in an effort to reveal the ambiguity at the core of visual representation.

Urban Invasion: Chester Arnold and James Doolin

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Realist painters Arnold and Doolin present two distinct but complementary visions of the urban landscape. Urban Invasion, the first major museum exhibition for each artist, included 33 large-scale paintings. In fantastical works dating from 1973 to the present, Doolin turns the concrete freeways and car-congested city of Los Angeles into visions of unexpected beauty. In contrast, Arnold's richly colored paintings from 1992 to 2001 caution of man's destructive relationship with his fellow man and his intrusion upon the natural environment.

Chris Alexander: Unnatural Disasters

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San Jose artist Chris Alexander creates immaculately crafted, mixed-media constructions that address the paradoxical relationship between man and the natural world.

Collecting Our Thoughts: The Community Responds to Art in the Permanent Collection

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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.

Jo Whaley: Natura Morta

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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.

Tony DeLap

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This retrospective of works by Southern California–based artist DeLap included 60 works in a wide range of media, including 21 of DeLap’s signature painting/sculpture hybrids, early collages, drawings, and freestanding large-scale sculptures.

Jack Jefferson (1920 - 2000); A Memorial Exhibition

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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.

Contemporary Devotion

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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. 

El Favor de los Santos: The Retablo Collection of New Mexico State University

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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.

Contemporary Devotion

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Contemporary Devotion was an exhibition of nearly 40 works by 14 contemporary artists who incorporate or reflect the imagery and style of traditional 19th-century Mexican retablos and ex-votos—Catholic devotional paintings on tin—in their art. The exhibition ran concurrently with El Favor de los Santos: The Retablo Collection of New Mexico State University.

Duane Hanson: Virtual Reality

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This exhibition showcased 29 of Hanson's hyperreal, lifesize figures created between 1976 and 1995, in which Hanson enhanced polychromed fiberglass, vinyl, or bronze casts with real clothing, accessories, and props. The exhibition, which was organized by the Palm Springs Desert Museum also went on a national (West Coast) tour.

Geoffrey Chandler: Spacescape Drawings

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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. 

Carmen Lomas Garza: A Retrospective

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The first retrospective of this San Francisco–based artist featured work from the mid-1970s to the present. In addition to more than 30 paintings, the exhibition included a large-scale Day of the Dead altar installation—the centerpiece of the retrospective—12 papel picado (paper cutouts), and an artist’s book.

The Eureka Fellowship Awards: 1999 - 2001

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The Eureka Fellowship Awards: 1999–2001 marked the third presentation of works by artists awarded Eureka fellowships from the San Francisco–based Fleishhacker Foundation and reflected SJMA’s shared commitment with the Fleishhacker Foundation to support Bay Area artists. The 12 fellowship winners were among 113 artists who applied from a candidate pool created by 49 local visual arts organizations, serving as nominators. The fellowships are awarded every three years and are the Bay Area's largest monetary grant for individual artists.

Kim Turos: An Installation

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Described by the San Diego–based Turos as a "three-dimension collage," the installation combined living, tropical foliage and large, organically shaped forms, all within the confines of the sculpture court at SJMA.

Dale Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection

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This exhibition of 350 brilliantly colored glass objects and vessels by Chihuly was drawn from the private collection of Portland, Oregon–based collector and businessman George R. Stroemple.

An American Diary: Paintings by Roger Shimomura

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A series of 30 recent paintings and 10 prints by Shimomura provided SJMA visitors with an intimate glimpse into one of the most tragic periods in American history—the Japanese- American internment during World War II.

The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration

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This compelling exhibition presented approximately 70 works that deftly examine the historical, social, cultural, and aesthetic development of humorous Bay Area art.

National Affairs: Recent Work by Robbie Conal

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In anticipation of an upcoming US presidential election, the San Jose Museum of Art featured an exhibition of ten original drawings and two mixed-media paintings by Los Angeles–based political artist Robbie Conal.

Michiko Kon: Still Lifes

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Michiko Kon: Still Lifes, the first major exhibition of the photographs of Japanese artist Kon to be shown in the Western hemisphere, included approximately 70 black-and-white and color photographs.

Innuendo Non Troppo: The Work of Gregory Barsamian

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Innuendo Non Troppo (innuendo, a subtle implication and non troppo, in music, not too much) included six of Barsamian’s large-scale kinetic sculptures that explore the artist’s complex dream world.

Joseph Beuys: Multiples

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Joseph Beuys Multiples, the largest and most comprehensive museum exhibition in the United States to focus on this body of work, was drawn primarily from the Alfred and Marie Greisinger Collection of multiples, which was acquired by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in 1992. Organized by the Walker, the exhibition traveled on a two-year international tour. The San Jose showing was the final stop on the tour and the sole West Coast venue.

The Suburban Seventies: Photographs by Bill Owens

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This exhibition included approximately 80 of Owens’s classic black-and-white and color photographs—a treatise on the suburban sprawl that occurred across America in the 1970s.

Carioca: A Year among the Natives of Rio de Janeiro, Work by Sandow Birk

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Carioca: A Year among the Natives of Rio de Janeiro, Work by Sandow Birk presented a wryly intelligent group of drawings and paintings that record the contemporary landscape and inhabitants of Rio; in so doing, Birk parodied the 19th-century artist-explorers’ pseudoscientific documentation of “exotic locales and their “savage” inhabitants.