1. Initiated in 1973 under the guidance of San Jose artists, the permanent collection of the San Jose Museum of Art today comprises over 2,700 works of art that speak to the critical issues of our times. The Museum’s home in Silicon Valley uniquely positions SJMA at an international convergence, where dynamic cultural diversity and the high-tech ethos mix with California’s own rich history. Over the decades, the collection has grown from a regional focus to one that, while still intrinsically intertwined with local histories and communities, is now unbounded by geography, tracking ruptures of the digital age, and our collective, cultural, political and social struggles and triumphs as an interconnected species.

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. Structured into six thematic groupings, Tending and Dreaming offers poetic starting points for engaging with ideas woven through the Museum’s robust collection, rather than providing a set art.

Local Resonance

Through a focus on local materiality, the first section brings together artworks that explore the global resonance of working with what’s on hand —such as adobe in the case of rafa esparza and Christine Howard Sandoval, or recycled electronic parts in the case of Elias Sime, wire sculture for Ruth Asawa, or wood for The Propellar Group.

Self-Making
The second grouping features artworks that grapple with the stakes of Self-Making, such as when one migrates to another country as explored by Shilpa Gupta and Hung Liu, or by attending to ancestral histories as with the work of Binh Danh. This also includes artists such as Gauri Gill, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkl, and Danielle Mckinney.

Reclaiming Histories

Featuring artists such as Robert Arneson, Gauri Gill, Eamon Ore-Giron, Yolanda López, Judy Baca, Richard Shaw, Chitra Ganesh, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Richard Shaw, Enrique Chagoya, and Guadalupe Rosales, the third grouping includes artworks that reclaim or disregard dominant histories in American culture .

Connectivity

The next section explores the connectivity facilitated by technology, such as in Christine Sun Kim’s sound sculpture with recorded lullabies composed in collaboration with an extended network of parent friends, and Martha Atienza’s poetic address of globally rising sea levels. This also incluedes artists such as Ala Ebtekar, Dinh Q. Lê, Tiffany Chung, Rina Banerjee, and Sarah Sze.

More-Than-Human
The fifth grouping features a broad range of approaches to imagining the More-Than-Human world—such as by exploring the cultural continuities of human bodies and land in the case of Laura Aguilar’s photographs, or by attending to the lifespans and intelligences of other organisms as in Gail Wight’s time-lapse video of slime mold. Also featuring artworks by Woody De Othello, Tishan Hsu, Catherine Wagner, Felipe Baeza, Robert Arneson, and Josh Kline.

Transcending the Visible
Featuring artworks by Candia Alvarez, Lee Mullican, Louis Nevelson, Elmer Bischoff, Candida Alvarez, Arthur Okamura, and Harry Powers, among others, the final section explores how artists evoke or give form to what is otherwise imperceptible.

The inaugural installation will include veteran artworks from the collection, such as Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral (1957) and Hung Liu’s Resident Alien (1988), as well as recent acquisitions of major artworks by Tishan Hsu, Yolanda López, and Sarah Sze. Tending and Dreaming will feature paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations by almost fifty artists from the Bay Area and beyond.