Past
Wayne Thiebaud’s lushly painted glimpses of everyday life—from a slice of pie to a steep San Francisco streetscape—are icons of American Pop Art. This exhibition spans the course of his prolific career, from the early paintings he made as a young student to the vibrant beach scenes on which Thiebaud, now 89, has been working most recently.
From buttery brushstrokes to massive, sculptural buildups of surfaces, many contemporary artists—like the impressionists and fauves before them—let the paint tell the story.
Close made his first print as a professional artist in 1972, and his innovation in printmaking is now legend. In addition to including finished prints, this exhibition featured full suites of Close’s preliminary proofs and various states of editions. The exhibition also included woodblocks and etching plates for several of Close’s more complex images.Chuck Close Prints premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the San Jose Museum of Art was its only northern California venue.
Ansel Adams—photographer, musician, naturalist, explorer, critic and teacher—was a giant in the field of landscape photography and a native Californian. This exhibition focused on the masterful, small-scale prints made by Adams from the 1920s to the 1950s.
Trained as an engineer, Calder challenged the long-held notion that sculpture was static and monumental, and his inventive, colorful, animated “mobiles” epitomize the innovative, optimistic spirit of early 20th-century modernism. This exhibition included mobiles, jewelry, and works on paper drawn from Bay Area collections, including the holdings of several of the Museum’s founders and longtime supporters.
The Los Angeles–based artist Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoonbased movement, dubbed “pop surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. This exhibition was Schorr’s first mid-career retrospective.
This expansive presentation of works by more than 30 contemporary artists (most based in California) showcased pivotal works in a variety of media from the SJMA collection, some of which had never before been on view, and highlighted the Museum’s commitment to supporting the work of California artists.
This exhibition presented a broad range of prints from the previous 35 years by some of the foremost contemporary women printmakers at work in the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Collectively, the 56 prints included in Women’s Work testify to the innovation and breadth of printmaking approaches taken by women since the early 1970s.
Kaneko works primarily with graphic, yet painterly, lines and dots to create rhythmic designs that correspond with Japanese Shinto concepts. This exhibition was an extensive representation of Kaneko’s work, featuring approximately 40 ceramic sculptures, drawings, and paintings from the past two decades.
This exhibition, culled from the extensive collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, provided an overview of Andy Warhol’s career through more than 60 lithographs and screen prints dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.
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