Letter from Oshman Executive Director

Photo by Gary Sexton

Strategic Plan 2019–23

Strategic Plan 2018–23 Launch

In November 2018, the Board of Trustees passed an ambitious new strategic plan with the overarching goal to “become a borderless museum, essential to creative life throughout the diverse communities of San José and Silicon Valley.” In FY19, the Museum made key accomplishments to advance the plan's three objectives:

OBJECTIVE #1: Develop a far-reaching creative presence throughout Silicon Valley and beyond. Desired Impact: Attract individuals from a variety of backgrounds and professions around the power of art to inspire connection, joy, and change. SJMA advanced this objective in FY19 with the following:

• Three major original exhibitions—Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, Undersoul: Jay DeFeo, and Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World—were accompanied by original catalogs with significant new contributions to scholarship that heightened SJMA’s stature in the local, national, and international art world.

• Two projects demonstrated SJMA’s new commitment to “borderlessness” with expansive off-site programming that increased the geographic reach of the Museum’s work. The community-wide series of programs on mobility and migration, called “New Terrains: Mobility and Migration,” encompassed programming by 39 partners spread out from Santa Cruz to

San Francisco. In conjunction with Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, SJMA presented

“Stories from the Farther Shore: Southeast Asian Film” a four-day film program at six venues in San José and San Francisco.

• SJMA’s arts education curriculum expanded its cross-disciplinary reach in FY19: its award winning STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math) classroom residency program, Sowing Creativity, expanded to include a fifth-grade art-and-engineering curriculum rooted in the principles of design thinking, which was beta tested with 2000 students in 72 schools.

OBJECTIVE #2: Rewrite the conventions of how museums operate Desired Impact: Become known throughout SJMA’s community and the field as a uniquely collaborative and empathic institution, internally and externally

SJMA advanced this objective in FY19 with the following:

• SJMA launched two new access programs. In February 2019, it started Facebook First

Fridays, a transformational new program supported by the Facebook Art Department that opens the Museum for free on the first Friday evening of each month. The program includes music, a cash bar, and open galleries. The first four events attracted 3,271 people, many of them first-time visitors to the Museum. In March 2019, SJMA launched a new access program that makes admission free for youth through age 17, college students with ID, and teachers. This significant reduction in admissions fees—intended to build closer ties with the community and to promote return visitation—resulted in a 60% increase in attendance from college students in the first three months.