Sky Hopinka’s visually striking and linguistically rich films, photographs, and poetry, explore the layered nature of contemporary Indigenous experience. A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation and descendent of the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, Hopinka’s personal work teases out legacies of both colonial oppression and Native resistance, illuminating continuities between past and present, the known and unknowable. Sky Hopinka will present a new film by Hopinka. Organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, Rachel Nelson, and Gina Dent as part of Visualizing Abolition, an art initiative of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz and San José Museum of Art. 
The multi-sited exhibition opens February 5 at the new Institute of the Arts and Sciences galleries, located in the city of Santa Cruz and will be on view through March 26.

Support
Sky Hopinka: Seeing and Seen is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous contributions from the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from the Museum's Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Yellow Chair Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100, the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

Kelly Akashi is known for her materially hybrid works that are compelling both formally and conceptually. Originally trained in analog photography, the artist is drawn to fluid, impressionable materials and old-world craft techniques, such as glass blowing and casting, candle making, bronze and silicone casting, and rope making. Encompassing a selection of artworks made over the past decade, Kelly Akashi: Formations is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work, and will feature a newly commissioned series in which Akashi explores the inherited impact of her family’s imprisonment in a Japanese American incarceration camp during World War II.

Through evocative combinations that seem both familiar and strange, Akashi cultivates relationships among a variety of things to investigate how they can actively convey their histories and potential for change. She often pairs hand-blown glass or wax forms with unique and temporally specific bronze casts of her own hand, each a unique record of the slow-changing human body. Akashi’s interest in time—embedded in the materiality of many of her processes—has led her to study fossils and botany, locating humankind within a longer geological timeline.

Kelly Akashi: Formations is the first major exhibition and catalog of Akashi’s work. The exhibition will be on view from September 3, 2022—May 21, 2023 in San Jose before touring nationally.
Exhibition Catalog

The exhibition catalog—the first scholarly monograph on the artist—will feature essays by Lauren Schell Dickens, Ruba Katrib, Dr. Jenni Sorkin; and a conversation between Akashi and painter Julien Nguyen. The book will also feature a special photography project by Akashi, created specifically for this publication.

Artist Biography
Born in 1983 in Los Angeles, Kelly Akashi currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. The artist graduated with a MFA from University of Southern California in 2014. Akashi studied at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2006.

The artist has presented solo projects at Aspen Art Museum (2020) and the SculptureCenter, New York (2017). Other notable group exhibitions include the Clark Art Institute (2021); Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made in L.A. (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (2017); Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France (2017); The Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Can’t Reach Me There, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2015). Winner of the 2019 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize the artist had a residency at the foundation in Ojai, California. Other residencies include ARCH Athens, Greece (2019) and at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2019) - both of which concluded with a solo exhibition.

Kelly Akashi’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Brooklyn Museum, New York; CC Foundation, Shanghai; M WOODS, Beijing; and Sifang Museum, Nanjing, China, among others.
Support

Kelly Akashi: Formations is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous contributions from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Kimberly and Patrick Lin, Lipman Family Foundation, Mr. Cole Harrell and Dr. Tai-Heng Cheng, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Rita and Kent Norton, François Ghebaly Gallery, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Melanie and Peter Cross, and Wanda Kownacki.

Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by generous support from the Museum's Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, the Lipman Family Foundation, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The Yellow Chair Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100, the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and The William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

Evergreen: Art from the Collection celebrates SJMA’s collection as both a gift to and a product of its community. This dedicated gallery space, which provides long-term access to the Museum’s collection, honors the community members who rallied together to establish the Museum; the artists who trust us to care for their visions; the generous donors who helped to build the collection; the generations of students who have visited; the volunteers and staff who have contributed; and the breadth of community experiences that give ongoing meaning to the works.  

Located in the Museum’s historic building—formerly the city’s post office and library—Evergreen highlights the Museum’s growing collection and the numerous San José stories it tells. The gallery features such works as rafa esparza’s Yosi con Abuela (2021), a recently acquired portrait on adobe of the East San José poet and activist Yosimar Reyes with his grandmother. Also on view are Resident Alien (1988) by Hung Liu, the beloved Bay Area artist and longtime friend of SJMA, and Louise Nevelson’s monumental Sky Cathedral (1957–58), a centerpiece of the Museum’s collection. The gallery also includes access points to the free digital collection catalog 50x50: Stories of Visionary Artists from the Collection, which highlights the stories and impact of artists in the Museum’s collection.   

Beta Space: Trevor Paglen will feature the artist’s first sound piece, a new public commission titled, There Will Come Soft Rains (2021), installed in SJMA’s historic clocktower and resounding into the streets of downtown San José on the hour from 8am–8pm, as well as sunrise, solar noon, and sunset. The year-long installation opens on First Friday, November 5, 2021 and will be up through November 6, 2022.

For the seventh installation of the Museum’s ongoing “Beta Space” series, a commissioning program that offers artists opportunities to experiment with and exhibit new ideas, materials, and modes of working, Paglen investigates the triangulation between sound, time, and truth. Several times a day, Paglen’s sound piece will emanate real-time temporal and environmental facts. Beginning with the current time and weather, a voice synthesizer reads dynamically generated text from “official” data sets like satellite navigation systems, the UN critically endangered species list, and Cal Fire updates. Resonating through the streets, aural information recasts the texture of the city for approximately 45 seconds each time the work sounds. This project joins other artworks such as The Last Pictures (2012) and Trinity Cube (2015) that explore the ethics and politics of human interventions into geologic time.
Support

Beta Space: Trevor Paglen is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous contributions from the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Wayfinder: Juan Carlos Araujo is a public art project that encourages visitors to explore the heart of downtown San José. Commissioned by SJMA, 40 streetlight banners designed by Araujo with bright, ebullient colors and dynamic imagery are installed along East Santa Clara Street between Market and 20th streets. Each banner features similar yet unique details of Serpiente Emplumada, a large mural painted by the artist in 2020. Araujo’s abstract and vivid patterns recall the dynamic underwater movements of schooling fish or the unfurled wings of a bird. Sited along the main traffic corridor connecting East San José with the city’s urban core, Araujo’s installation combines personal and cultural motifs to celebrate the energy of the area’s legendary lowrider car culture and to honor ancestral connections.

Launched in 2021, Wayfinder is a new commissioning program by SJMA that invites Bay Area artists to design streetlight banners for temporary display in downtown San José. Juan Carlos Araujo is the second artist invited for this series, which offers pedestrians, commuters, residents, and Museum visitors continuous access to contemporary art as part of SJMA’s overarching goal to become a borderless museum, essential to creative life throughout the diverse communities of San José and Silicon Valley. Wayfinder reimagines existing banner infrastructure as a venue for public art, enlivening city streets with cutting-edge art and design.

About the artist
Juan Carlos Araujo is an artist, community organizer, and director of Empire Seven Studios (E7S), a contemporary art space located in San José. Araujo cofounded E7S with his partner, Jennifer Ahn, in 2008, and together they have provided opportunities for local and global artists through public art initiatives, innovative pop-up shows, and gallery exhibitions. The artist grew up on East Santa Clara Street and remembers hanging out with friends and cruising the boulevard as a teenager. On Sundays, he would stand in line for a free meal at Roosevelt Park and then walk across the street to Chaparral Supermarket to buy groceries using food stamps. For Araujo, East Santa Clara Street was a lifeline and a lively, vibrant place. A self-taught painter with a background in graffiti and street art, Araujo creates large-scale public murals that often combine numerous small, painterly marks with striking colors to impart a sense of vitality, movement, and flow. His work evokes the spiritual energy of generations of people who have coursed through a place and honors the sacred, ancestral realms of nature.
Support

Wayfinder: Juan Carlos Araujo is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with a generous contribution from
First Tech Federal Credit Union.

Recognized for his bold, abstract compositions of western landscapes and natural forms, Brett Weston was a leading photographer of the early twentieth century. The second son of acclaimed photographer Edward Weston, Brett Weston devoted his entire life to photography, experimenting with various printing processes to create daring, high-contrast images that transcend comparison with his famous father’s images. In addition to the work of his father and other photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Charles Sheeler, and Paul Strand, Weston was also greatly inspired by artists working in painting and sculpture such as Constantin Brancusi, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Henry Moore. Throughout Weston’s extensive travels to make his work, his favored subjects—twisted branches, tangled kelp, rock formations, cracked mud, and knotted roots—remained enduring motifs.

Brett Weston comprises images of landscapes and seascapes near Big Sur and Carmel, California, where the Weston family has lived since 1929; the Oregon Coast; White Sands, New Mexico; and aquatic plants photographed on the shores of Baja California. Featuring fifty-one photographs spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, this exhibition is drawn exclusively from SJMA’s permanent collection. Fifty of these images were given to the Museum by the Christian Keesee Collection, which established The Brett Weston Archive with its extensive holdings of the artist’s works
About the Artist

Born in 1911 in Los Angeles, Theodore Brett Weston was the second of four sons of Flora Chandler and acclaimed photographer Edward Weston. At age thirteen, Weston became his father's apprentice and traveled with him to Mexico in 1925. Living in Mexico, he was surrounded by some of the revolutionary artists of the day, including Tina Modotti, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Jean Charlot, and José Clemente Orozco, and began making photographs there with a small Graflex 3 1/4" x 4 1/4" camera given to him by his father. For most of his life, Weston resided primarily in Carmel, California, where the family had moved to in 1929, and worked in Los Angeles, New York, South America, Europe, Japan, Alaska, and Hawaii. His photographs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions, publications, and films, and are held in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Honolulu Museum of Art; International Center for Photography, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Weston died in 1993 in Kona, Hawaii.
Support

Brett Weston is supported by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund.