The San Jose Museum of Art is an art museum in Downtown San Jose

Downtown San Jose

Downtown San Jose is the central business district of San Jose, California, United States. The area is generally located north of Interstate 280 and east of Guadalupe Parkway, which roughly parallels the Guadalupe River. The region is bound to the north by U.S...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Founded in 1969, the museum hosts a large permanent collection emphasizing West Coast

West Coast of the United States

West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...

 artists of the 20th- and 21st-century. It is located next to the Circle of Palms Plaza

Circle of Palms Plaza

The Circle of Palms Plaza is located in downtown San Jose, California. It is the location of California Historical Marker 461, the site of California's first state capital from 1849-1851...

 and Plaza de César Chávez

Plaza de Cesar Chavez

Plaza de César Chávez is a 2.2-acre park in Downtown San Jose, California, USA, named after César Chávez in 1993. It is surrounded by South Market Street, across which is The Tech Museum of Innovation, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Circle of Palms Plaza and the Fairmont San Jose Hotel...

 park.

History

The museum's historic wing was originally designed by architect Willoughby J. Edbrooke

Willoughby J. Edbrooke

Willoughby James Edbrooke was an American architect and a bureaucrat who remained faithful to a Richardsonian Romanesque style into the era of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States, supported by commissions from conservative federal and state governments that were spurred by his stint in...

 and built as the San Jose post office

Post office

A post office is a facility forming part of a postal system for the posting, receipt, sorting, handling, transmission or delivery of mail.Post offices offer mail-related services such as post office boxes, postage and packaging supplies...

 in 1892, then served as the city's library

Library

In a traditional sense, a library is a large collection of books, and can refer to the place in which the collection is housed. Today, the term can refer to any collection, including digital sources, resources, and services...

 from 1937 to 1969. The building was then converted by The Fine Arts Gallery Association, reopening as the "Civic Art Gallery". In 1972 the building was named a California Historical Landmark

California Historical Landmark

California Historical Landmarks are buildings, structures, sites, or places in the state of California that have been determined to have statewide historical significance by meeting at least one of the criteria listed below:...

 (#854), and in 1973 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places is the United States government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects deemed worthy of preservation...

. The "New Wing", comprising the majority of the current exhibition space, opened in 1991.

Exhibitions

Many of the changing exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art focus on the West Coast and California. Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, a great many exhibitions are centered on the intersection of art and technology. Exhibitions and individual installations typically remain on view between 4 to 6 months.

The Museum is open from 11 AM to 5 PM Tuesday through Sunday. Public tours are available for visitors at 1:00 PM on weekdays and at 12:30 PM and 2:30 PM on weekends, and also by appointment.
Guided school tours tied to classroom curriculum are also available by appointment.

Collection

The permanent collection focuses on 20th- and 21st-century art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

, with a focus on US West Coast

West Coast of the United States

West Coast or Pacific Coast are terms for the westernmost coastal states of the United States. The term most often refers to the states of California, Oregon, and Washington. Although not part of the contiguous United States, Alaska and Hawaii do border the Pacific Ocean but can't be included in...

 artists and a growing emphasis on art of the Pacific Rim. The collection includes more than 2,000 works in a variety of media, including sculpture

Sculpture

Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard materials—typically stone such as marble—or metal, glass, or wood. Softer materials can also be used, such as clay, textiles, plastics, polymers and softer metals...

, painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

s, prints, digital media, photograph

Photograph

A photograph is an image created by light falling on a light-sensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic imager such as a CCD or a CMOS chip. Most photographs are created using a camera, which uses a lens to focus the scene's visible wavelengths of light into a reproduction of...

s, and drawing

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...

s by artists such as Robert Arneson

Robert Arneson

Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at UC Davis for four decades.- Career :...

, Milton Avery

Milton Avery

Milton Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City.-Biography:...

, Gregory Barsamian, Joan Brown

Joan Brown

Joan Brown was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a notable member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement....

, Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Butterfield

Deborah Kay Butterfield is an American sculptor. She divides her time between a ranch in Bozeman, Montana and studio space in Hawaii...

, Jim Campbell

Jim Campbell (artist)

Jim Campbell is a contemporary San Francisco based artist who primarily works with LED light installations. Cambpell began his artistic career in film making but soon switched to the LED pieces he is known for in the 1980s. His current work combines film, sound, and LED light installations...

, Enrique Chagoya

Enrique Chagoya

Enrique Chagoya is a Mexican-born painter and print-maker. His subject is the changing nature of culture.He was born in Mexico City in 1953. He was partly raised by an Indian nurse who helped him to respect the indigenous people of his country and their history. He studied economics at the National...

, Dale Chihuly

Dale Chihuly

Dale Chihuly is an American glass sculptor and entrepreneur.-Biography:Chihuly graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington. He enrolled at the College of the Puget Sound in 1959...

, Ron Davis, Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo

Jay DeFeo was a visual artist associated with the Beat generation who worked c.1950-1989 in the San Francisco Bay Area....

, Roy DeForest, Tony Delap

Tony DeLap

Tony DeLap in Oakland, California, is a West Coast artist, known for his abstract sculpture utilizing illusionist techniques and meticulous craftsmanship...

, Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn

Richard Diebenkorn was a well-known 20th century American painter. His early work is associated with Abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. His later work were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.-Biography:Richard Clifford Diebenkorn Jr...

, Jim Dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...

, Rupert Garcia, Philip Guston

Philip Guston

Philip Guston was a notable painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the Abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning...

, Oliver Jackson

Oliver Jackson

Oliver Jackson , aka Bops Junior, was an American jazz drummer.Jackson played in Detroit in the 1940s with Thad Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Wardell Gray, and had a variety show with Eddie Locke called Bop & Locke...

, Hung Liu

Hung Liu

Hung Liu in Changchun, China is a Chinese-American contemporary artist.Hung Liu was born in the People's Republic, China and emigrated to the United States in 1984. She attended Beijing Teachers College in 1975 and studied mural painting as a graduate student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in...

, Michael McMillen, Manuel Neri

Manuel Neri

Manuel Neri is an American sculptor, painter, and printmaker and a notable member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.- Biography :...

, Long Nguyen, Manuel Ocampo

Manuel Ocampo

Manuel Ocampo is a Filipino artist. His work fuses sacred Baroque religious iconography with secular political narrative. His works draw upon a wide range of art historical references, contain cartoonish elements, and draw inspiration from punk subculture.-Background:Manuel Ocampo was born in the...

, Nathan Oliveira

Nathan Oliveira

Nathan Oliveira was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to Portuguese parents...

, Deborah Oropallo, Alan Rath, Raymond Saunders

Raymond Saunders (artist)

Raymond Saunders is an American artist born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1934. He currently lives and works in Oakland, California. Saunders is currently a professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, Oakland, California. He is a visual artist, with a place in American art history...

, Richard Shaw, Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud is an American painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate...

, Bill Viola

Bill Viola

Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist. He is considered a leading figure in the generation of artists whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media...

, and William T. Wiley

William T. Wiley

William T. Wiley is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as Funk art....

.

Awards

In 2007 the San Jose Museum of Art won the prestigious MUSE award from the American Association of Museums Technology Committee. The award was for SJMA's Artist of the Week podcast and won in the category Extended Experience.

The museum was fortunate enough to win another MUSE award in 2009. The gold award for Public Relations and Development was given to the San Jose Museum of Art for its in-house produced "Road Trip" video (a.k.a Giant Artichoke video). The Giant Artichoke Video features a wild shoe-wearing traveler on a road trip to Castroville, CA who visits a quirky landmark and sends a postcard to SJMA. Created for the exhibition Road Trip and capitalizing on the common experience of a summer road trip, the goals of this hybrid marketing and interpretation project were threefold: to create buzz around the exhibition, sow the seeds for a participatory experience both outside and inside the Museum, and build connections between the Museum's online audience and onsite visitors.

View the video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_rmqKVOI-U

See also

• The Tech Museum of Innovation
  The Tech Museum of Innovation
  The Tech Museum of Innovation, or simply The Tech, is a museum located in the heart of Silicon Valley, in downtown San Jose, California USA.-History:...
  
  
• Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose
  Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose
  Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose is located on Woz Way in downtown San Jose, California. Woz Way is named after Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, whose nickname is "Woz," and who was the single largest private donor during the original capital campaign that funded the...
  
  

External links

• San Jose Museum of Art Web Site