Sir Isaac Julien’s moving image installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) interweaves period reenactments across five screens to create a vivid picture of nineteenth-century activist, writer, orator, and philosopher Frederick Douglass. Through critical research, fictional reconstruction, and a marriage of poetic image and sound, Julien asserts Douglass’ enduring lessons of justice, abolition, and freedom that […]

Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection launches the first dedicated collection galleries at the Museum. Providing unprecedented access to core works in San José’s only publicly held art collection, SJMA’s collection galleries position artists as storytellers to imagine the Museum as a space where culture and meaning are actively made and always in process.  […]

“Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’”: An Exhibition Curated by Children of the Colville Confederated Tribes is a collaborative exhibition co-curated with youth from the Colville Confederated Tribes in Washington State, on view from September 19, 2025–May 10, 2026, at the Clyfford Still Museum. It highlights the perspectives of Colville children on Clyfford Still’s depictions of […]

Wallflowers is a dialogue across time centered on one of art history’s most underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together eleven paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs from eleven contemporary artists, the exhibition explores how artists from the nineteenth century to the present have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground […]

Artist Robert The creates sculptural works in which books are transformed with subversive wit and scrupulous invention. Often working with remaindered volumes that were part of large-scale mass-market editions, the artist transfigures these objects through singular gestures such as through-slicing words and cutting out new iconic forms. Always uniquely appropriate to his source material, the […]