In the 1960s, artists in Northern California embraced an attitude towards art-making that was irreverent, bawdy, and free-spirited, which resonated with artists across the country who rejected the mainstream art world. Through objects primarily drawn from SJMA’s permanent collection, this exhibition focuses on the convergence of these artists around the Candy Store Gallery, and the […]

Liliana Porter’s surreal compositions using toys interrogate the boundaries between representation and reality. Liliana Porter: Actualidades / Breaking News is a focused presentation of Porter’s expansive conceptual practice, highlighting her skilled evocation of poignant philosophical and political questions through otherwise simple gestures and miniature objects.

Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist is the first solo museum presentation of the work of Yolanda López, the pathbreaking Chicana artist and activist whose career in California spanned five decades. The exhibition presents a compendium of López’s work from the 1970s and 1980s, when she created an influential body of paintings, drawings, and collages that […]

Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice explores her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. In a new commission for the ongoing Visualizing Abolition collaboration with the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz, Barnette proposes an alternate history of Black America, […]

The artworks of Sky Hopinka, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and a descendant of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, traverse the legacies of colonial oppression and Native resistance through meditations on the continuities between past and present. A new film by Hopinka was commissioned as part of Visualizing Abolition, an art initiative of the Institute […]