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For the first time in the San Jose Museum of Art's 30-year history, selections from the museum's permanent collection have been put on long-term display instead of being displayed on a temporary basis. Since Nov. 2, the museum, which focuses on contemporary West Coast art, has spotlighted pieces from its permanent collection in the ongoing "Collection Highlights" exhibition.
Curated by museum curator Susan Landauer, "Collection Highlights" will occupy the Gibson Family Gallery and the Plaza Gallery on the lower floor of the museum's New Wing until September 2004.
"The beauty of a permanent collection exhibition is that it allows the visitors to come back and revisit their own personal favorites," says Daniel T. Keegan, the museum's executive director. "Great museums always have permanent collection work up because people love to come back and see things that are truly engaging."
The exhibition has been dedicated to the late artist James Doolin (19322002). His signature works were photorealistic L.A. cityscapes, such as 1998's Psychic, an oil painting of a fortune-teller's storefront window. The work's bleak style has been compared to that of Edward Hopper. Shopping Mall (1977) is another of Doolin's major pieces, an aerial view of the bustling Arizona Avenue/Third Street intersection in Santa Monica. "Collection Highlights" features both Psychic and Shopping Mall.
Other West Coast artists whose works are being featured in "Collection Highlights" include legendary photographer Ansel Adams and minimalist painters David Simpson, Ann Appleby and Tony DeLap.
Two of the most talked-about "Collection Highlights" pieces are Gregory Barsamian's 1991 three-dimensional animated sculpture Putti, which depicts a dream Barsamian once had about a cherub morphing into a military helicopter, and Tamiko Thiel and Zara Houshmand's virtual-reality installation Beyond Manzanar.
Beyond Manzanar depicts three-dimensional views of a World War II Japanese-American internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., which museum visitors can control with a joystick. Thiel, a new media artist of Japanese and German descent, and Houshmand, an Iranian-American writer and theater director, created Beyond Manzanar to show parallels between the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and anti-Iranian-American sentiment.
A key component of "Collection Highlights" is the Conversation Piece Gallery, a space for themed mini-exhibitions that will each be displayed for about six months. Comment cards have been placed next to the works in the Conversation Piece Gallery so that visitors can write down opinions, observations or suggestions.
The first Conversation Piece Gallery is the mini-exhibition "Disarming Parables," which will be on display until April 2003.
"It examines works by artists who are dealing with issues of war and conflict, which we felt was particularly pertinent, considering our current international situation," says assistant curator Ann M. Wolfe.
The works in "Disarming Parables" range from Hans Burkhardt's 1968 work My Lai, about the notorious My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, to Vietnamese refugee Long Nguyen's 1989 painting Homage to a Troubled Land.
Wolfe says "Collection Highlights" is a noteworthy exhibition because of the amount of Bay Area art on display.
"There seems to be a wonderful burst of creativity in the Bay Area that has often gone unrecognized on a national basis," Wolfe says. "It's very exciting for a museum such as the San Jose Museum of Art to have the opportunity to collect a lot of these Bay Area favorites."
The "Collection Highlights" exhibition will be on display until 2004 at the downstairs floor of the San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St., San Jose. For more information, visit www.sjmusart.org or call 408.271.6840.
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