Past
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown is the first in-depth examination of this beloved Bay Area artistʼs painting in over a decade. The exhibition is the first to explore Brownʼs art in the national context of the womenʼs movement: the movement paralleled her career, yet she has been largely excluded from its history.
The book as we have known it for centuries is challenged today by the rapid growth of digitization and e-books. This trend raises tough questions about the future of conventional books and the once-beloved printed page. In the midst of such radical change, this exhibition looks at the influence of the book on visual artists. Book-ish includes works from the Museum’s permanent collection that have been inspired by books, literature, language, and the artists’ reverence for reading.
As fellow inhabitants of the earth, we are united by the shared conditions of our humanity. Through portraiture and the figure, artists explore the notion of individual identity and the commonality of our human nature.
Artist Anna Sew Hoy will create a new sculptural installation using cast-off materials and detritus from our local corporate culture. In Silicon Valley, start- up companies pop up and disappear on a steady basis, while established firms regularly upgrade IT inventory and office fixtures. How can electronic and office equipment be critical to the function of an organization one day and useless the next? Sew Hoy (who has long worked with found objects and everyday materials such as jeans and beer cans) will recycle—and take inspiration from—our communal, locally sourced e-waste.
“Ordinary folks doing ordinary things”—that is how photographer Bill Owens described his subjects. Like a visual anthropologist, Owens astutely recorded the customs, symbols, and social relationships that characterized American middle-class culture in the 1970s. Owens adopted an air of objectivity that recalls the New Topographics, a generation of photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Joel Deal, who portrayed the built environment with detachment.
Thousands of comic aficionados know Robert Crumb as the grandfather of the groundbreaking underground “commix” movement in San Francisco and as a legendary 60s counterculture character. Crumb’s influence as an artist and an illustrator has spread far beyond the world of comics and graphic novels: many of his images are now icons of our visual culture.
Like the legendary Silicon Valley “garage,” Beta Space serves as an experimental laboratory for artists, collaborative ventures, and catalytic ideas. In this first installment of SJMA’s new exhibition series, artists Kevin Appel and Ruben Ochoa rethink our everyday experience of the built environment.
Roots in the Air, Branches Below is a landmark exhibition, drawn entirely from private collections in the San Francisco Bay Area, and one of a very few surveys of modern and contemporary art from India in this country.
American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) captured the essence of the New York cultural scene in the late 1970s and 1980s through his portraits of artists, writers, musicians, designers, dealers, actors, and actresses. Though known to many for his controversial sexual images, Mapplethorpe’s most lasting legacy--and the largest portion of his oeuvre--is his striking portraiture.
This exhibition of modernist photographs and photogravures from the first half of the twentieth century emphasizes the role of the photographer as an eloquent, purposeful observer and as a masterful editor of everyday experience.
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