The exhibition Show Your Work: Art and Math spotlights the use of geometry, scale, proportion, and symmetry in artwork from SJMA’s permanent collection. It is inspired by the math-focused curriculum of the Museum’s award-winning education program Sowing Creativity.

The interactive learning labs in the Koret Family Gallery are a place to make observations, ask questions, and participate in creative experimentation. This installation reflects the math-focused curriculum of SJMA’s award-winning education program Sowing Creativity and includes artworks by Ron Davis, David Pace, Clare Rojas, Lordy Rodriguez, and Shirley Shor.

At the San Jose Museum of Art, learning is a lifelong pursuit for school children and their educators, multigenerational families, creative adults, university students and faculty, and community groups. The Koret Family Gallery is inspired by Let’s Look at Art—a free classroom program that annually serves more than 30,000 students—where volunteers lead K-12 children in engaging and interactive discussions about art.

 

About Mathematics and Art

Mathematics and art are related in a variety of ways. It can be discerned in arts such as music, dance, painting, architecture, sculpture, and textiles. Mathematics has itself been described as an art motivated by beauty. Mathematics and art have a long historical relationship. Artists have used mathematics since the 4th century BC when the Greek sculptor Polykleitos wrote his Canon, prescribing proportions based on the ratio 1:√2 for the ideal male nude. In modern times, the graphic artist M. C. Escher made intensive use of tessellations and hyperbolic geometry, Piet Mondrian explicitly embraced geometrical forms. Mathematics has inspired textile arts such as quilting, embroidery, Turkish and other carpet-making. In Islamic art, symmetries are evident in many forms as varied as tilework and pierced stone screens.

 

Mathematics has directly influenced art with conceptual tools such as linear perspective. Computer art often makes use of fractals. In art, mathematics is not always visible, unless you are looking for it.  But there is much symmetry, geometry, and measurement involved in creating beautiful art.