Recognized for his bold, abstract compositions of western landscapes and natural forms, Brett Weston was a leading photographer of the early twentieth century. Spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, Brett Weston features fifty-one photographs drawn exclusively from SJMA’s permanent collection that highlight the photographer’s enduring motifs and technical experimentation.
SJMA’s newly dedicated gallery space celebrates the Museum’s collection as both a gift to and a product of its community and provides ongoing access to San José’s only publicly held art collection. Located in the Museum’s historic building, the gallery presents select holdings that highlight the growing collection and the numerous San José stories it tells.
Kelly Akashi is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and conceptually. Originally trained in analog photography, the artist is drawn to fluid, impressionable materials and old-world craft techniques, such as glass blowing and casting, candle making, bronze and silicone casting, and rope making. The exhibition encompasses artworks made over the past decade and features a newly commissioned series in which Akashi explores the inherited impact of her family’s imprisonment in a Japanese American incarceration camp during World War II.
A Point Stretched highlights artworks in a variety of mediums that stretch, compact, and warp the viewer’s sense of time. Drawn primarily from SJMA’s permanent collection, artworks by Diana Al-Hadid, Chitra Ganesh, David Huffman, Ranu Mukherjee, Maia Cruz Palileo, and others position human existence within broader timescales from long-ago ecologies to distant possible futures.
