San Jose Museum of Art | Past Exhibitions

PAST

	TODD SCHORR: AMERICAN SURREAL Saturday, June 20, 2009 through Wednesday, September 16, 2009 Todd Schorr: American Surreal is the first mid-career retrospective of the Los Angeles-based artist. Schorr is a leading figure in Southern California’s cartoon-based movement, dubbed “Pop Surrealism,” which embraces low-brow culture and a ribald graphic style indebted to pop sources such as Mad magazine. Schorr’s astonishing, highly polished realism, (inspired by Bosch, Brueghel and Dali), sets him apart from his best-known peers such as Camille Rose Garcia, Gary Baseman, and Mark Ryden. The exhibition, curated by SJMA’s Senior Scholar and Curator of Collections Susan Landauer, is accompanied by a book published by Last Gasp, San Francisco. Download the iPod Tour for this exhibition at iTunes.
	THE PRINTS OF ANDY WARHOL Saturday, February 14, 2009 through Sunday, May 31, 2009 Perhaps the best-known leader of the Pop art movement, artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol created iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Elizabeth Taylor. Drawing from a background in commercial art, he shocked the 1960s art world by elevating the mundane—comics, advertisements, and kitchen staples such as Campbell’s tomato soup—to the sublime. Fame was his elixir of choice. He originated the phrase “15 minutes of fame,” and, in his relentless pursuit of celebrity, Warhol wound up becoming famous in his own right. This exhibition, culled from the extensive collection of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, provides an overview of the artist’s career through more than sixty lithographs and screen prints dating from the 1960s through the 1980s.
	JUN KANEKO Saturday, February 28, 2009 through Sunday, May 10, 2009 Ceramicist Jun Kaneko was born and raised in Japan and moved to the United States to study at the Chouinard Art Institute. He studied with ceramics pioneers Paul Soldner and Jerry Rothman in California during the time now defined as the contemporary ceramics movement. Now based in Omaha, Nebraska, he works primarily with graphic, yet painterly, lines and dots to create rhythmic designs that correspond with Japanese Shinto concepts. This exhibition is an extensive representation of Kaneko’s work, featuring approximately forty ceramic sculptures, drawings, and paintings from the past two decades. The range of works in this exhibition reveals the artist’s technical and innovative abilities in glass, textiles, bronze, paper, and canvas.
	SONGS OF THE EARTH: LANDSCAPES BY JACK STUPPIN Thursday, January 8, 2009 through Sunday, April 5, 2009 Sonoma-based painter Jack Stuppin creates landscapes that celebrate nature. According to Oshman Executive Director Susan Krane, “Stuppin’s landscapes are amplified, as if quick glimpses that he has forever exalted and memorialized. The scenes he offers the viewer are held taut, orderly patterned and captured in brilliant Technicolor. They may remind us of the modernist masters of metaphorical landscapes (from Grant Wood to Marsden Hartley to Arthur Dove), and of images that are part and parcel of Americana.”
	JAMES GRASHOW: THE GREAT MONKEY PROJECT Thursday, October 16, 2008 through Sunday, January 4, 2009 Imagine one hundred life-size monkeys made out of cardboard dangling from each other and swinging from trapezes. This is what artist James Grashow will do to transform the museum’s lobby with his whimsical and lively site-specific installation, creating a visual cacophony just above the viewers’ heads. Grashow explains: “The more monkeys you have, the more the space between them starts to jump. The ceiling becomes an abstact painting.” Grashow dynamically activates the museum’s entrance and demonstrates the creative potential of an ordinary material. He carefully hand-cuts, bends, and glues corrugated cardboard, sculpting a zoo’s worth of monkeys in a fascinating variety of shapes and poses.