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Aging Report
The San Jose Museum of Art turns 35
By Michael S. Gant
THE BIG NUMBER for the fall visual-arts season is 35. That's how many years the San Jose Museum of Art is counting off. To mark the occasion, the museum presents "It's About Time: Celebrating 35 Years," which opens Oct. 2 with a caviar gala.
Katie and Drew Gibson chief curator Susan Landauer explains that the exhibit will showcase a wide selection of new acquisitions for the museum's permanent collection. "We nearly doubled the value of our collection in the past two years," Landauer notes.
The focus, as in the past, she says, "is on the West Coast art," and California art in particular, a special interest for Landauer, who wrote a major study on the Bay Area abstract expressionist movement of the 1940s and '50s. "We don't offer the same franchised experience that other cities havestrip mall art. We want to focus on the specialties of the area."
Those specialties include ceramic sculpture, which will be represented in the show by David Gilhooly's Ark de Triumphe, to mention one of the more notable among the UC-Davis-based ceramicists who elevated a craft form to an art form and injected large doses of satire and humor in the process.
In recognition of the museum's location in the heart of Silicon Valley, its collection also leans heavily toward new-media works. Landauer cites Tony Oursler's "creepy surrealistic fantasy" Slip, which combines fiberglass sculpture and DVD players, as a strong example of what the future holds. Jennifer Steinkamp's Untitled, a computer-projection piece, was created especially for the museum.
In a historical vein, the exhibit also highlights some of the major players of the West Coast scene, from surrealist Helen Lundeberg to Ruth Asawa and Joan Brown, from abstract figurist Nathan Oliveira (with two large paintings) to Stanford stalwart Frank Lobdell and usual suspect Wayne Thiebaud. Landauer is particularly pleased with Elmer Bischoff's Two Figures in Vermillion Light from 1959, which she calls "one of his best paintings."
The works-on-paper section of the exhibit will include pieces from the Shoe Tree series by Jay DeFeo, whose fame as the creator of The Rose, one of the seminal abstract paintings of the second half of the last century, makes her possibly the most famous artist ever to grow up in San Jose, where she attended high school and took some art classes at San Jose State.
Cantor Arts Center
De Saisset Museum
Legion of Honor
MACLA
Montalvo Gallery
Oakland Museum of California
Palo Alto Art Center
The center opens three deeply introspective shows simultaneously on Sept. 26: "Revisit the Mirror," an exhibit of artists' self-portraits; "To Mirror History," a joint show by Santa Cruz artists Ian Everard and Hanna Hannah; and "Other Selves," watercolor self-portraits by Dominic Di Mare of Tiburon.
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
Triton Museum of Art
WORKS/San Jose
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