Art Learning Lab is a dedicated exhibition space inspired by Sowing Creativity, the Museum’s award-winning cross-curricular art program.

Pae White’s Noisy Blushes (2020) is a meditation on movement and time, light and color, material presence and the elusiveness of form. Commissioned by SJMA, the sculpture soars within the Museum’s thirty-foot high atrium and transforms its entrance into an experiential passageway, delivering a sublime experience for visitors.

Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection dedicates the entirety of the Museum’s downstairs Gibson and Plaza Galleries to collection display. By providing unprecedented community access to core works in San Jose’s only publicly held art collection, the Museum hopes to invite a deeper sense of community pride in the collection. The galleries will rotate infrequently—the inaugural installation will be on view for one year—inviting visitors to become familiar with artworks through repeat viewing.

In the inaugural installation of the collection galleries, Tending and Dreaming positions artists as storytellers and their artworks as stories, imagining the Museum and the collection we steward not as a repository of things with fixed meanings, but as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process.

a small ocean swallowed presents six artists whose work embodies states of ecological entwinement, poetically and experimentally reorienting human relationships to water. Presented in conjunction with SJMA’s Sowing Sustainability initiative, the exhibition threads together plant, animal, and human life and celebrates water as a model of interconnectivity across space and time.

Huma Bhabha. Receiver, 2019. Bronze and paint, 98 ¾ x 18 x 25 inches. Collection of San José Museum of Art. Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation, 2022.06.

Cultivator, Akashi presents a larger-than-life-sized bronze cast of her hand overgrown with glass flowers and vines. As a cast of the artist’s own flesh, the piece captures her hand in motion as if conjuring a natural world into existence. This sculpture affords a macroscopic perspective on her skin creases, cuticles, fingernails, and pores. Recreating two different living forms—flowers and flesh—this work dwells on our human interaction with nature. Incorporating plants during Aspen’s warmer months, Cultivator presents the possibility of growth from decay, and joins together materials that are at once delicate and durable. In doing so, Akashi’s sculpture takes on qualities that are at once uncanny, appealing, and familiar.

Motherboards explores the foundational contributions of women’s work to the technology industry. Featuring artists from California and beyond, the exhibition maps an extensive network of women’s work in technology, connecting Silicon Valley’s laboratories and garages to vital work performed at looms, desks, kitchens, and assembly lines across the globe.

Working with land-based materials, Christine Howard Sandoval excavates the conflicting knowledge systems and histories that are held in archives, architecture, and the land itself. Move the Plot brings the artist’s practice home to San José, where she grew up.