For Immediate Release

SAN JOSÉ, California (September 26, 2018) —

One of our most elemental behaviors as human beings—like eating, sleeping, and breathing, is walking. It’s an amateur activity. But what happens when we become explicit, inquisitive, and deliberate about what is as natural to us as eating and breathing? Walking is both universal and idiosyncratic; we all walk but choose different paths, peppered by unique interactions and experiences. Opening November 2, 2018 and on view until March 10, 2019, Other Walks, Other Lines considers what walking means in a contemporary context, touching upon topics such as urban planning, immigration, and the dérive.

Organized by the San José Museum of Art, and curated by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator; Rory Padeken, associate curator; and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate, Other Walks Other Lines focuses on artwork made during the last thirty years by artists around the world who use walking as a mode of making the world, as well as being in it. The exhibition is divided into six sections: Meaning of Ordinariness; Pilgrimage and Psychogeography; A Body Measured Against the Earth: Immigration and Land Wars; Access/Ability; Street Life: Processions and Protests; and Other Walks: Gabriel Orozco (November 2, 2018–February 17, 2019). A show within a show, Other Walks: Gabriel Orozco highlights Orozco’s photographs and videos.

In conjunction with the exhibition, SJMA commissioned new works of art by Lordy Rodriguez, Brendan Fernandes, and Lara Schnitger that activate the gallery and take the exhibition outside of the Museum. Lordy Rodriguez created walking tours based on the routes taken by two recent marches in San José: the Women’s March in 2017 and March for Our Lives in 2018 (copies of which are available at SJMA’s front desk). Choreographer and artist Brendan Fernandes addresses the borders that are constructed within a museum’s walls. In Inaction, Fernandes choreographed the movements of dancers to explore boundaries and thresholds within the gallery. Lara Schnitger’s Suffragette City—a participatory procession and protest—is an example of a street demonstration that begins at the Museum and walks through downtown San José.

“As we reflect on what it means to be a borderless museum, San José Museum of Art is thrilled to present an exhibition that focuses on accessibility, immigration, procession, and protest. SJMA strives to work across cultural boundaries and to be a cultural hub for the community,” says Oshman Executive Director S. Sayre Batton. “With this exhibition, we are thrilled to partner with over 30 community organizations as part of New Terrains: Mobility and Migration, a cross-disciplinary collaboration that explores how bodies move through social and political spaces.”

Artists featured in Other Walks, Other Lines include Yuji Agematsu, Francis Alÿs, Ginny Bishton, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Brendan Fernandes, Ana Teresa Fernández, Regina José Galindo, Hiwa K, Brad Kahlhamer, Glenn Kaino, Suki Seokyeong Kang, Kimsooja, Pope.L, Omar Mismar, Paulo Nazareth, Gabriel Orozco, Wilfredo Prieto, Lordy Rodriguez, Michal Rovner, Lara Schnitger, Clarissa Tossin, and Charwei Tsai.

EDUCATION

Take a Walk. Leave a Walk.
Visitors are invited to provide descriptions, drawings, and/or GPS coordinates of their favorite meaningful, cathartic, or exciting walks and pin them to a color-coded map. They can review walks left by other visitors and take one to experience outside of SJMA. They can share their actual walking experience on social media using #TakeAWalkSJ. These crowdsourced walks will not only be an in-gallery, visual representation of where people walk in the region but will also provide an exhibition-linked activity that takes place beyond the borders of SJMA.

The Other Walks, Other Lines Reading List is curated by Frankie de Vera, librarian at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library and will be available online, at sjmusart.org/other-walks-other-lines-reading-list.

The interpretive space features a reading area with select publications from de Vera’s list.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Other Walks, Other Lines Opening Celebration
November 15, 2018 | 6–7:15pm

Celebrate the opening of Other Walks, Other Lines. Remarks at 7pm.
Admission is $5 after 5pm (free to members). No-host bar.

Artrage: New Terrains
November 15, 2018 | 7–10pm

Celebrate the new exhibition Other Walks, Other Lines and experience a showcase of New Terrains: Mobility and Migration, a cross-disciplinary collaboration among dozens of organizations throughout the region. See performances and presentations presented by Montalvo Arts Center, Mosaic Silicon Valley, San Jose Jazz, and others.
Admission is $5 after 5pm (free to members). No-host bar.

Gallery Talk: Other Walks, Other Lines
December 13, 2018 | 12:30–1:30pm

Tour the exhibition Other Walks, Other Lines with Rory Padeken, associate curator and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate. 
Free with Museum admission (free to members).

Creative Minds: Lara Schnitger, Suffragette City, a participatory procession and protest
January 12, 2019 | 9:30am–1pm
A march from the San José Museum of Art through downtown San José

Join Dutch American artist Lara Schnitger in a celebration of female empowerment in a culture of patriarchy. In her ongoing traveling procession and protest piece, costumed marchers parade Schnitger’s bold and vibrant portable sculptures and banners—some bearing slogans and others more abstract. Embracing the variety of historical feminist dress in the Western world, from the conservatively clothed suffragettes at the turn of the twentieth century; to the T-shirts and jeans of second-wave feminism; to the topless activists of the Femen and SlutWalk movements in Europe; Schnitger uses lace, rhinestones, leather, and silk to create abstracted figures balanced between dress and undress. Colored quilts are emblazoned with protest slogans from T-shirts, bumper stickers, and buttons.

Suffragette City has been enacted in New York City, Basel, Dresden, Los Angeles, Berlin, and at the Women’s March on Washington, DC last year. It will be enacted in San José in conjunction with Other Walks, Other Lines.

For details on how to participate, please visit: sjmusart.org/suffragette-city
Free and open to the public.

Art 101: Street Photography
January 12, 2019 | 1–4pm

In conjunction with Other Walks, Other Lines, explore the technique of street photography in this walking workshop. Participants will spend an hour touring the exhibition and the remaining time outside SJMA capturing downtown San José. Learn the principles of street photography, including both film and digital practices. Artist and instructor Emilio Banuelos teaches how to capture action, motion, and compositions with impact. Participants of all levels of experience are welcome. Bring your own digital camera; all other materials will be provided. Walking shoes are strongly recommended.

This Art 101 is limited to 15 participants ages 13 and up. Space is limited and advance registration is strongly recommended.

Brendan Fernandes performance Inaction, 2018: performed by New Ballet Studio Company dancers
February 21, 2019 | 6pm
February 23, 2019 | 1pm and 4pm

Choreographer and artist Brendan Fernandes, a former dancer, is acutely aware of the particular way in which ballet dancers are trained to walk. Their gait broadcasts an authority, a calculated deliberateness, which Fernandes notes is “not unlike the presented authority of the museum.” In Inaction, Fernandes has choreographed the movements of a team of dancers to explore boundaries and thresholds within SJMA’s building. Blocking entryways, restricting doorways, and disrupting normal circulation, the dancers draw attention to borders and bodies within the Museum, and by extension to the growing tension surrounding borders and bodies in the world at large.

Inaction is a new commission by SJMA as part of the exhibition Other Walks, Other Lines.

Creative Minds: a conversation with Brendan Fernandes
Thursday, February 21, 2019 | 7pm

Join us for a conversation with the artist directly following Thursday’s performance of SJMA new commission Inaction.

Art 101: Urban Sketching
March 2, 2019 | 1–4pm
Join local artist Suhita Shirodkar as the workshop moves outside the Museum into downtown San José. Shirodkar challenges participants to look at the world around them and provides detailed instructions on how to sketch urban environments. All materials will be provided, walking shoes strongly recommended.

This Art 101 is limited to 20 participants ages 13 and up. Space is limited and advanced registration is strongly recommended.  

NEW TERRAINS: MOBILITY AND MIGRATION
The exhibition is part of the cross-disciplinary collaboration, New Terrains: Mobility and Migration, presented in collaboration with community partners including Art Ark Gallery; Art Object Gallery; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Chamber Music Silicon Valley; Children’s Discovery Museum; Chopsticks Alley Art; City Lights Theater Company; College of Adaptive Arts; Consulado General de México en San José; the de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University; FWD.us/Welcome.us/; genArts Silicon Valley; History San José; ICA/San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art; MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana; Montalvo Arts Center; New Museum of Los Gatos; Pajaro Valley Arts; Palo Alto Art Center; Play On Words; Research Center for the Americas/UC Santa Cruz; Sangram Arts; San Jose Jazz; San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles; San José Public Library; Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History; SETI Institute; Soul Focus Sports; South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition; Teatro Vision; The Tech Museum of Innovation; Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz Arts Division and the Arboretum at UCSC; Walk San Jose; Works/San José; Yu-Ai Kai Senior Community Center; and ZERO1. 

Visit newterrains.org for more information and partner programming.

SAN JOSÉ MUSEUM OF ART

The San José Museum of Art celebrates new ideas, stimulates creativity, and inspires connection with every visit. Welcoming and thought-provoking, the Museum rejects stuffiness and delights visitors with its surprising and playful perspective on the art and artists of our time. SJMA is located at 110 South Market Street in downtown San José, California. The Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11am to 5pm and until 8pm or later on the third Thursday of each month. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, $6 for students, and $5 for youth ages 7–18. Members and children ages 6 and under are admitted free. For more information, call 408.271.6840 or visit SanJoseMuseumofArt.org.

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Programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous operating support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José, and the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation.

Other Walks, Other Lines is sponsored by Applied Materials Foundation and Melanie and Peter Cross. In-kind support for equipment is provided by BrightSign. Supported, in part, by a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José.