Goin’ South

Goin' South

Cantor Art Center & San Jose Museum of Art

As the weather starts to improve, consider visiting museums of the South Bay. Stop off at Stanford and enjoy free admission at the Cantor Arts Center.

Then travel just another 22 miles to the San Jose Museum of Art. If you time it right, you will arrive for it's Free First Fridays, from 6 – 9pm only. (SJMA offers a number of other ways to obtain free or reduced fare admissions. Check their website.)

Thirsty

Livien Yin

Cantor Art Museum at Stanford

Ongoing – February 23

     “Thirsty” is the first museum solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Livien Yin, a 2019 Stanford MFA. This single-gallery exhibition showcases new and recent paintings by Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments. In their paintings, Yin often casts their friends as models, collapsing the distance between the past and present to create new connective threads between Asian Americans across generations.

     Yin’s recent paintings are fictional scenes inspired by the Chinese-born “paper sons and daughters” who entered the U.S. during the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943) by obtaining forged documents that stated they were children of American citizens. The artist draws from historic photographs of Chinese immigrants and stages imagined vignettes in the absence of visual records, using the gaps in these archival sources as fertile ground to envision possible realities.

Cantor Arts Center is Open to the Public & Always FREE.

Yin's exhibition is part of Stanford's

For more information about Cantor Art Center, click here.

Kambui Olujimi

North Star

San Jose Museum of Art

Ongoing – June 1

     What does the Black body, freed from the gravity of white supremacy, look like? Kambui Olujimi’s "North Star" is an immersive exhibition that features his inquiry into the liberatory possibilities of weightlessness, a concept he has explored since 2019 as an alternative to the structuring forces of anti-Black racism. Olujimi’s projects implicate viewers in reimagining what is possible, often through elements drawn from history and everyday life. 

     At a time when hope is sorely needed, his works collectively imagine what new relationships we might chart between our bodies, the self, the planet, and the universe once deeply entrenched forces are destabilized and replaced by boundlessness and possibility. This installation spans multiple disciplines, from large-scale watercolor and ink paintings to film – North of Never – and audio, and a specially designed mural that turns the San Jose gallery into a celestial space.  

     Core to the experience is the idea of weightlessness and what this could look like for the African diaspora. Olujimi’s process for creating the various works in this exhibition included conversations with scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center, and chartering a parabolic flight for artists from the African diaspora to literally experience weightlessness. 

     “Olujimi’s work is deeply joyful,” said Lauren Schell Dickens, Chief Curator for the SJMA. “With his "North Star" installation, he’s offering us a way to navigate away from the entrenched politics of representation, to imagine possibilities of boundlessness, within bodies, between bodies, and with the universe.”

Calder at Home, Among Friends

&

Still in Motion

San Jose Museum of Art

Ongoing – August 3

"Calder at Home, Among Friends"

     During a prolific career of nearly six decades, from early wire portraits to groundbreaking mobiles to later monumental public sculptures, Calder’s artwork epitomized the optimistic spirit of modern America. His rigorous inventiveness was a state of mind and way of being in the world that contained equal parts dynamism and precision. That innovative spirit was echoed in his own home through the ingenious household objects and jewelry that he also made throughout his life.

     This exhibition celebrates this artistic giant from a different perspective:  Calder’s intimate objects and gestures, created abundantly and bestowed generously. These smaller works were just as vital to him as monumental public works, though they were often intended for personal use or close friends or relatives. The installation features such works as Big Red, a mobile which Calder gave to his sister to hang in her home while she recovered from an operation and a gouache that Calder gifted to the artist Louise Nevelson. A consummate innovator, Calder’s small-scale objects in this installation speak to a more intimate side of the artist, as he existed at home and among friends.

Big Red                                 Baby Rattle                   Gouache for Nevelson

"Still in Motion"

     Since 2005, the Calder Foundation has awarded the Calder Prize to contemporary artists whose innovative early works demonstrate their potential to shift how we think of art today. "Still in Motion" features the work of several Calder Prize awardees—Tara Donovan, Jill Magid, Tomás Saraceno, and Aki Sasamoto—who are pushing the limits of sculpture through materials and references that speak uniquely to the contemporary moment. "Still in Motion" honors the artist’s legacy as it continues to inspire artistic practice today. 

For more information about the San Jose Museum of Art, click here.