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.

In a materials-based practice that draws on Mexican handcraft traditions and a DIY sensibility, ektor garcia subtly challenges hierarchies ​of​​ ​gendered and racialized labor while undermining notions of static identity. This exhibit at SJMA repurposes new and existing sculptures into a single, original installation that is both intricate and psychologically charged. This is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in his home state of California.

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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.

Inspired by the unique ground that underlies the San Francisco Bay Area, known scientifically as young bay mud, this exhibition highlights artists with local ties who are using mud to explore ecological entanglement and belonging in the Bay Area.

Pao Houa Her’s practice engages with the legacies, potentials, and aesthetics of landscape and portrait photography traditions, examining the complex intertwining of desire, homeland, and artifice. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her’s work centers women as the knowledge bearers of both past and future. Using a formally rigorous photographic approach, Her explores constructions of homeland that resonate across diasporas.

The Imaginative Landscape: Pao Houa Her is an unconventional survey of over 20 years. Seen through the expansive titular series, it traces conceptual ties between past series, new work, and work still under development, connecting California agricultural landscapes to the jungles of Laos, poppy fields in Minnesota, and beyond. The exhibition is co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and will be presented at both organizations simultaneously.

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.