Past
Eric Fischl’s art is grounded by his keen understanding of the historical language and the craft of painting. This fall, visitors to SJMA will see the world through the painter’s eyes—with sharpened powers of observation and insight.
Full Spectrum is the Museum’s signature fundraising event of the year and a gala like no other. It features an auction that brings you an amazing opportunity to acquire works by extraordinary Bay Area artists, many of whom are recognized nationally and are represented proudly in the Museum’s permanent collection.
MAD Magazine meets Versailles in Mark Dean Veca’s loud yet regal salon installation. Veca bridges the opulence of 18th-century Toile de Jouy wallpaper and the renegade attitude of 20th-century cartoons, comics, and street art.
Ranu Mukherjee is fascinated by the idea of the contemporary nomad and the experience of repeated relocation that is common for so many of us today. What better place than Silicon Valley—with its rich history of immigration, itinerant workers, dot-com booms and busts, and outsourcing—to explore this updated notion of the nomad.
Local Color, drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, explores the primacy of color in a range of works, from Alexander Calder’s whimsical mobiles to Elmer Bischoff’s luscious, light-filled canvases to David Levinthal’s slick, color-saturated photographs of Barbie dolls. Also featured are works by artists who consider the quiet, meditative nuances of black and white. This exhibition encourages viewers to look at color as content. How does color play into your intuitive experience of a work of art? What are some of the ways artists use color as the subject of their work?
Traditional versus cutting-edge, high-brow versus low-brow. A new generation of Mexican and Mexican-American artists is fascinated by these potentially contradictory concepts. The artists whose works are featured in this exhibition draw inspiration from Mexico’s deep well of visual culture.
Frank Lobdell conjures dreamlike landscapes of mystery and longing. His images—vibrantly colored and fantastical—are simultaneously mechanical, yet anthropomorphic. Though best known for his intense, brooding paintings and personal symbology, Lobdell has in recent yearsgiven color primary importance in his work. Frank Lobdell: Wonderland will examine the evolution of the artist’s work and the ways in which he organizes his forms and figures in space.
This exhibition features a selection from the museum’s permanent collection of Birk’s series of lithographs. Each meticulously drawn image incorporates a descriptive caption written in contemporary American vernacular. Birk transformed a centuries-old classic into an imaginary narrative with political relevance for today’s audiences.
Bawdy irreverence, iconoclasm, parody, and puns are hallmarks of the work spawned by the art department at the University of California, Davis, in the 1960s and 1970s. In keeping with the counterculture of the time, the tone of this humor was often aggressive and transgressive. Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Peter VandenBerge, William T. Wiley, and others took new artistic license with the Bay Area’s figurative traditions. They jettisoned what they viewed as the pretension of the East Coast art world and adopted an earthy approach wholly authentic to the West Coast. Their laid-back, flippant attitudes reflected the shifting values of the time and often belied deeper social messages.
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.
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