Exhibitions On View

Photos by JKA Photography

Won Ju Lim: California Dreamin’ June 22, 2018–September 30, 2018

In haunting tableaus and otherworldly environments, Won Ju Lim unleashes the psychic dimensions of time and space. Inspired by Baroque architecture, science fiction films, and the urban landscape, Lim explores the intersections between reality and fantasy, real and imagined space. Her vivid and colorful rooms are filled with found objects, miniature models, and prefabricated structures that reflect, absorb, and transmit light. Shadows cloak her mesmerizing, spectacular interiors in deliberate mystery.

California Dreamin’ (2002), recently acquired by SJMA, had never before been seen in the United States. It was inspired by sixteenth-century Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo’s fictional account of California as an earthly paradise and by the fantastical metropolises of classic science fiction films Blade Runner and Logan’s Run. Lim located work within mythical and historical contexts to conceptualize her idea of “futuristic ruins”—cinematic cityscapes that unite the classical past with Hollywood fantasies of the future.

Lim created California Dreamin’ while living abroad in Germany and feeling intensely homesick for Southern California. Her empty, multicolored Plexiglas constructions are bathed in soothing yet elusive imagery of Los Angeles. Picturesque sunsets, swaying palm trees, and glittering street lights dissolve as quickly as a desert mirage, casting this ethereal urban oasis into the imaginary sphere. By enveloping the gallery in cinematic wonder and spatial incongruity, Lim transforms clichéd images of the city into an experience of the sublime.

Also on view were softly illuminated lightboxes from Lim’s series “Memory Palaces, Terrace 49” (2003), which create ghostly silhouettes of homes and trees perched along a hillside. In Piece of Echo Park, from the series “A Piece of...” (2007), yellow Plexiglas encases a topographic profile of this East Los Angeles neighborhood where homes sit above brilliantly colored melted layers of the earth. Both series reference Los Angeles’s hilly terrain and neighborhoods, thus geographically linking these works to the room-size California Dreamin’. In all these works, Lim explores the ideas of interiority and exteriority, illusion and allusion, expansion and contraction that give shape to memory and imagination.

Organized by Rory Padeken, associate curator.

Sponsored by the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation.

Photos by Benjamin Blackwell

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return

September 14, 2018–April 7, 2019

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return was the largest solo exhibition in the United States in more than a decade of the work of the internationally-renowned artist. The exhibition featured five major video and photography installations that entwined rarely heard narratives of war and migration from people in North Vietnam, the Vietnamese diaspora, and refugees who, like Lê, returned to live in their home country.

Prior to this exhibition Lê was best known in the United States for his unique photo weavings—interlaced vertical and horizontal strips of documentary photographs and Hollywood films stills about the Vietnam War. Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, by contrast, highlighted the artist's ongoing experimentations in video and photography installation, which focused on stories seemingly on the verge of being erased from historical memory. Whereas Lê’s iconic photoweavings were borne of the artist’s personal relationship to Vietnam's complicated cultural and political history, the video and photography installations marked a significant shift outwards towards engaging other Vietnamese voices, perspectives, and experiences. Lê assembled these obscure stories through collections of found photographs, artists’ war sketches, and oral histories. The resulting works collectively presented a multifaceted story about Vietnamese life before, during, and after the Vietnam War.

The exhibition also included a selection of rarely seen images of flowers photographed by Lê in Saigon’s flower market. Abstracted through the artist’s signature photo weaving technique, these beautiful yet elegiac floral compositions memorialized lives lost to war and violence in Vietnam while also symbolizing a promising and bountiful future for the country.

Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return was presented as the fourth exhibition in SJMA’s ongoing series New Stories from the Edge of Asia, which features work by artists from Pacific Rim countries and cultures who push the boundaries of narrative in contemporary art.

Organized by Rory Padeken, associate curator.

DinhQ.Lê:TrueJourneyIsReturn was made possible in part by grant support from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Asian Cultural Council, and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. The exhibition was sponsored by The Lipman Family Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell, Lucia Cha and Dr. Jerrold Hiura, and Evelyn and Rick Neely. Additional support came from Lisa and Keith Lubliner. In-kind support for equipment was provided by Genelec, NEC Display Solutions, and BrightSign.

Photo by JKA Photography

Pope.L, The Great White Way, 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street, 2000–09 performance, courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NY, © Pope.L

Other Walks, Other Lines

November 2, 2018–March 10, 2019

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. As Rebecca Solnit says, “walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.” This project examined the variety of ways in which artists reflect on this specific, mundane activity, and use it to make meaning.

Other Walks, Other Lines considered 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 focused 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 was 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. In conjunction with the exhibition, performances activated the gallery and took the exhibition outside of SJMA’s building. Choreographer and artist Brendan Fernandes addressed the borders that are constructed within a museum’s walls. In his commissioned work Inaction, Fernandes choreographed the movements of dancers to explore boundaries and thresholds within SJMA’s building. Lara Schnitger’s Suffragette City—a participatory procession and protest—extended the exhibition's focus on artists using street demonstrations as another form of public art.

Artists included were Yuji Agematsu, Francis Alÿs, Ginny Bishton, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Brendan Fernandes, Ana Teresa Fernandéz, 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.

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

Photo by JKA Photography

Gabriel Orozco, Right couple, 2010, chromogenic print, 16 × 20 inches, courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. ©Gabriel Orozco

Other Walks: Gabriel Orozco

November 2, 2018–February 17, 2019

A show within a show, Other Walks: Gabriel Orozco was an in-depth look at the photographs and videos of Gabriel Orozco, who since art school has walked the streets and experimented with what he encounters. For Orozco, photography is less a medium than a tool for collecting his interactions with circumstances and objects. He sees his straightforward photographs—rainwater collected in an umbrella, fleeting footprints embalmed in concrete, steam rising from a grate—as containers of events or phenomena that are still occurring, still being experienced, through the viewers’ act of looking. The photographs were accompanied by three rarely shown videos shot on the streets of Amsterdam and New York and in a London supermarket.

Other Walks: Gabriel Orozco was part of the larger exhibition, Other Walks, Other Lines, on view until March 10, 2019.

Organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator.

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

Photo by Phil Bond Photography

Jay DeFeo, Untitled, 1971, gelatin silver print, 2 5/8 × 4 3/4 inches, Estate no. P1284. Courtesy of

The Jay DeFeo Foundation; Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris & Dallas, © 2019 The Jay DeFeo Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Undersoul: Jay DeFeo March 8, 2019–July 7, 2019

Jay DeFeo (born 1929, Hanover, New Hampshire, died 1989, Oakland, California) was relentlessly experimental. Though known primarily for her monumental painting The Rose (1958–66), her visual and poetic associations played across a remarkable array of media and material. This focused exhibition highlighted DeFeo’s prolific use of photographic practices as an under-examined but critical facet of her transmutative process. Building upon four works in SJMA’s permanent collection as guiding linchpins, the exhibition drew largely on previously unpublished and unexhibited works from the rich holdings of The Jay DeFeo Foundation to consider this important element of DeFeo’s practice within the context of her multimedia work, significantly deepening and extending her important legacy beyond painting and drawing.

Though used throughout her career to record, compose and revisit, DeFeo’s photographic output increased dramatically during the 1970s. DeFeo famously produced no artwork from 1966 to 1970, resting and recovering after the emotional, physical, and creative toll of The Rose. It was the camera that facilitated her return to artmaking. As DeFeo herself put it, for three years from 1973 to 1975, “I did nothing but photography.” (Despite the inaccuracy of this statement, her enthusiasm for the medium is clear.) Rather than signaling a new direction, however, the large body of photographs DeFeo produced during the 1970s was both reflective of and integral to her painting and drawing process. “More so than most artists, I maintain a kind of consciousness of everything I’ve ever done while I’m engaged on a current work,” DeFeo wrote in 1978. Her photographic work operates within a prolonged consideration of primal forms and elemental symbols, an exploration of the mythological and symbolic links that unite the cosmos with studio objects and life around her: the undersoul, as her friend, the Beat poet Michael McClure, termed it. DeFeo used the camera to capture symbolic resonances in formal qualities—texture, line, and shape—of objects and artworks in her studio and the world around her, which then transmute across media.

Undersoul: Jay DeFeo featured unique photographs, photo collages, photocopies, drawings, and paintings from the 1970s and 1980s that tracked the artist’s visual vocabulary across media and subject matter.

Curated by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator, and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate.

Sponsored by the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation, the Jay DeFeo Foundation, and Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell. Additional support provided by Sotheby's and M. Bernadette Castor and David Packard. Supported, in part, by a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José.

Elena Damiani, Intersticio, 2012 (video still), two-channel video, running time 5 minutes, 25 seconds. Image courtesy of the artist.

Screen Acts: Women in Film and Video

April 5, 2019–June 30, 2019

This series highlighted women artists and filmmakers whose works draw on the histories of representation and performance in film and video to address some of the most pressing social issues of our time. Topics ranged from representations of African Americans in vernacular culture to the politics of space and collective memory.

Artists in this program included Elena Damiani, Steffani Jemison, Jazmín López, Carrie Mae Weems, and the Ethnocine Collective (Emily Hong, Miasarah Lai, and Mariangela Mihai).

Curated by Rory Padeken, associate curator and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate.

Photos by Phil Bond Photography

Catherine Wagner: Paradox Observed

April 5, 2019–August 18, 2019

Catherine Wagner: Paradox Observed presented the monumental installation Pomegranate Wall (2000) along with stunning photographs of plant, animal, and cosmic matter from Wagner’s visual investigation of science. Taken behind the closed doors of distinguished laboratories, her photographs capture the mystery and beauty of the scientific endeavor—the desire and struggle to empirically understand the nature of our being. With analytical clarity and larger-than-life scale, the works in the exhibition evoked the parallel pursuits of science and art to decipher the codes and structures of human existence though observation.

With scientific matters as her subject, Wagner adopted its tools of observation using imaging devices typically reserved for scientific study as she would her camera. Working with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and scanning electron microscopes (SEM), she captured organic materials like the cross section of an onion and the textured surface of a shark’s tooth with crisp precision. At the center of the exhibition was Wagner’s immersive installation Pomegranate Wall, a glowing eight-by-forty-foot arc of photographs taken with an MRI machine.

The crisp precision and compositional structure of Wagner’s photographs are characteristic of the scientific process. Just as a Petri dish isolates its contents for study and a microscope frames a researcher’s view, Wagner’s compositions contain, classify, and sequence visual information. A sixpart typology of meteorites depicts various modes of visual analysis, including x-ray, chemical, and topographic studies, to make meaning of cosmic specimens. Obsolete three-dimensional molecular models encased within glass vitrines show historic attempts to visualize the complex relationships in order to understand our biological makeup. As alluded to in the title of Wagner’s "Frankenstein" series, which depicts anthropomorphic looking ultra-high vacuum chambers used in state-of-the-art physics research, the tools of science shape society. As new technologies open up possibilities for a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us, Wagner’s photographs look critically at how scientific knowledge and the systems through which we interpret the essence of being are created.

Curated by Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate.

Sponsored by Casey Jack Carsten and Tad Freese and Brook Hartzell. In-kind support provided by Anglim Gilbert Gallery and Gallery Luisotti.

Photos by JKA Photography

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World

May 16, 2019–October 6, 2019

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World was the first mid-career retrospective of the artist’s work. Co-organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and San José Museum of Art, the exhibition presented almost twenty years of Banerjee’s large-scale installations, sculptures, and paintings—including a re-creation of her work from the 2000 Whitney Biennial; sculptures featured in the 2017 Venice Biennale, and recent work for Prospect 4 New Orleans.

Banerjee creates vivid sculptures and installations made from materials sourced throughout the world. She is a voracious gatherer of objects: in a single sculpture one can find African tribal jewelry, colorful feathers, light bulbs, Murano glass, and South Asian antiques in conflict and conversation with one another. These sensuous assemblages reverberate with bright colors and surprising textures present simultaneously as familiar and unfamiliar.

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World focused on four interdependent themes in Banerjee’s work that coincide with important issues of our time: immigration and identity; the lasting effects of colonialism and its relationship to globalization; feminism; and climate change. Curated by Lauren Dickens, curator, SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, curator of contemporary art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Exhibition co-organized by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and San José Museum of Art. Sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, the Lipman Family Foundation, Tad Freeze and Brook Hartzell, Marsha and Jon Witkin, Melanie and Peter Cross, Hosfelt Gallery, Cheryl and Bruce Kiddoo, McManis Faulkner, Latham & Watkins, Shruti and Pawan Tewari, Peggy and Yogen Dalal, Elaine Cardinale, and Lisa and Keith Lubliner. Additional support provided by Leelade Souza Bransten and Peter Bransten, Lucia Chad and Dr. Jerrold Hiura, Christie's, Glenda and Gary Dorchak, Pamela Hornik, Wanda Kownacki, Elena Lebedev and Alvin Smith, Rachel and Simon Segars, and Sotheby's. Supported in part by a Cultural Affairs grant from the City of San José. The catalogue was supported by Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco, CA, and L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Photos by Jeff Bordona

Conversion: Art and Engineering

Wednesday, June 20, 2018–April 7, 2019

Conversion is the third installment of exhibitions in the Koret Family Gallery to focus on STEAM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math). The exhibition explored the intersection of art and engineering through artwork selected from SJMA’s permanent collection. In the Koret Family Gallery’s interactive Art Learning Labs, visitors made observations, asked questions, and participated in creative experimentation.

Organized by Jeff Bordona, director of education.

SponsoredbytheKoretFoundation.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.155, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Multilayered Interlocking Continuous Form with a Sphere-Suspended in the Top and Fifth Lobes), ca.1958, copper and brass wire. Gift of the artist in honor of the San José Museum of Art's 35th anniversary, 2003.28.01.