In partnership with genARTS Silicon Valley, we are proud to announce the 4th Annual Experimental Exhibition, on view at NUMU from Fri, July 19 through Sun, October 6. In this juried show, artists from across Santa Clara County were invited to create a work of art exploring the Boundaries in their world

Each year the Executive Director, in partnership with the Curatorial Team, commissions a Bay Area artist to create a limited edition series of works as part of the Director’s Circle Program. The artist chosen to participate in this annual program also donates two pieces from the commission to the museum: one which stays in the Permanent Collection, the other is used for fundraising. In this way, the Director’s Circle program not only supports personal collecting, but also helps to build NUMU’s Permanent Art Collection. See past works in this retrospective exhibition and the reveal of this year’s work by artist Kiana Honarmand in an upcoming event (details coming soon)!

Taking time to reflect on the past, our personal and collective histories, challenges, and successes, grounds us as we look forward to the future. How does your past and present inform your future? What does it mean to evolve, to blossom, and to truly discover who you are and who you want to become?

New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) invites Santa Clara County high school students to create an original work of art that reveals the complex journey of being In Transition. Consider the significance of this chapter of your youth – a stage of metamorphosis from childhood into adulthood. Explore the subtle but powerful shifts in your personal development within contemporary societal culture and the stories of your ancestors. Transition is temporal, emotional, constructive, empowering, and a fundamental part of life.

“A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you're in and take advantage of it.” - Nikki Giovani, American poet, activist and educator

This year’s theme was co-created with the ArtNow Teen Council, an exciting step forward in elevating the program to be widely accessible and relevant to teenagers living across Santa Clara County. Through this meaningful partnership with student artists, teens are not only the beneficiaries of ArtNow, but its architects.

In partnership with Local Color, we’ve invited muralist Tomas ‘Wisper’ Talamantes into the museum for a dynamic look into his creative process. Wisper will create an original mural at the museum, exploring the untold stories, people, events, and variety of cultures that have contributed to Los Gatos and its surrounding areas. During three live sessions, visitors will enjoy the special opportunity to see Wisper in action and learn about his creative process and philosophy. Alongside the developing mural, visitors can see photographs of the artist’s past work, Freedom, as documented by photographer Buggsy Malone

A solo show featuring artist Liz Harvey.

the lost ones: iterations and murmurs is an exhibition centered on the artworks, artifacts, and ephemera behind creating the lost ones, a multi-year performance project by Bay Area artist Liz Harvey. For the lost ones performance project, Harvey worked with a range of collaborators, including choreographers Mary Armentrout, Cherie Hill, and Megan Nicely, as well as, science editor Lauren Muscatine. The project featured myriad performers rotating through an embroidered performance garment on which participants were invited to stitch images of endangered plants in order to highlight overlooked species, untold feminist histories, and little-acknowledged art practices.

The Greater Bay Area Open (GBAO) is a juried fine-art-only competition and exhibition presented by the Los Gatos Art Association (LGAA), designed to promote fine art and artists from the greater Bay Area. Starting in 2015 and held biannually, the GBAO is now in its fifth showing and is presented biennially. This exhibition forges an exciting and dynamic association between the LGAA and NUMU, host to this collaboration.

Spanning twelve Bay Area counties, from Sonoma to Monterey, this juried event draws artists to compete for awards and recognition but also brings exposure to respected jurors, galleries, and art collectors from the region. The GBAO embraces artistic excellence, accepting both two-dimensional and three-dimensional fine art into a premier venue.

In every moment of creativity, there is an option to explore one’s perspective and expression. For this exhibition, LGAA invites artists to push work past usual boundaries to embrace the movement between potentiality and actuality. All artists are encouraged to interpret the theme, “Potentiality / Actuality” in their own way.

A solo show featuring artist Linda Simmel.

Through evocative drawings, etchings, and paintings, Linda Simmel explores personal and cultural connections between landscape, memory, and history. The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning intertwines the story of being the daughter of an immigrant, with the sublime in nature. The works in the show are in part homage to landscape, trees, and the histories they’ve lived in, as well as Simmel’s immigrant father and the time in which he lived. For the artist, the work reveals the process of unraveling the burden of history that defines her, which ultimately presents a sensitive inquiry into intergenerational cultural identity, loss, and renewal.

As individuals, we tend to move through life as if we are the main character; going about our days with ourselves at the front of our minds. We know ourselves best. But what happens when we take a moment to pause and listen to our neighbor? How can someone else’s story help us unpack our own? Turning our stories into collective experiences and feelings allows us to heal both individually and as a community. The familiarity we know in ourselves is found in others, each of us working through unfamiliar transitions and moving beyond our comfort zones. Each of us is working to become more connected—familiar with the unfamiliar.

On view May 5 through Nov 12, 2023, In the Artists’ Studio: Featuring RREVV Studio will introduce visitors to the artists behind the Santa Cruz-based design studio, Rachel and Rigel Hunter. Dive into their shared creative process to develop and execute new works by following along with a piece of unique wearable artwork as it goes from concept to raw material, to a collectible object. RREVV Studio will discuss negotiating the tensions inherent in working between the realms of art and design, as well as the pressures that come with being practicing artists who manage businesses to support their work.

ArtNow is an annual juried Santa Clara County high school art exhibition and educational program, presented by New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU). The ArtNow Exhibition and supporting programs offer opportunities for high school student artists, from Palo Alto to Gilroy, to gain real-world experience in participating in a juried museum exhibition. Each year, a new theme is chosen for the exhibition and students are asked to submit works based on that theme. $10,000 in scholarships and awards are given to participating students.

NUMU is collaborating with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, San Jose State University, and Mosaic America on this art exhibition, featuring photography of their aboriginal ancestral homeland by Tribal Photographer Kike Arnal. Visitors to the exhibit can also explore with the Mosaic Atlas Cultural Mapping Project, an interactive map highlighting places of significance to local indigenous peoples and other regional cultural groups.

NUMU is collaborating with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and San Jose State University on this art exhibition about the vitality of the Muwekma, featuring photography of tribal members by their Tribal Photographer Kike Arnal. The project will promote deeper understanding of local indigenous art, culture, history, and contemporary issues in Los Gatos and the greater Bay Area, and preserve and share knowledge about critical issues of federal recognition that the Muwekma Ohlone continue to fight for.

Opening October 2022, NUMU is pleased to present Terra Firma, a group art exhibition guest curated by Marianne K. McGrath. Artists will explore our relationship with the land and present unique interpretations of meaning and connection through diverse media, including drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, and sound.

Kathy Aoki creates a faux-museum exhibit depicting a fictional character who collects and destroys artwork by Jeff Koons. The immersive satirical tableau, with a mesmeric diorama and new works on paper, brings the viewer in on the joke that reveals the hypocrisy and patriarchy of the art world, represented by Koon’s enormous financial success as a male artist who focuses on the banal.

Aoki uses humor to explore gender and beauty issues through mock historical artifacts and documentation. Leveraging the exaggerated authority of institutional settings, à la institutional critique artist Andrea Fraser, she includes wry, museum-style labeling to present the work.

In her series Marie Cameron | Critical Masses, A Very Low Tide (June 17—Oct 23), Los Gatos artist Marie Cameron presents views of human impact on our delicate ecosystem, with a series of 9 pieces that explode with color, dense pattern, and familiar objects colliding with natural elements. For this exhibition Cameron adds 3 new pieces to the growing series that reminds the viewer of the fragile, causal relationships that affect the fate of our shared ecosystems.

New Museum Los Gatos endeavors to continually engage and elevate artists who work in media, themes, or content that are new ground for NUMU. NUMU’s Artists in Residence is an initiative to support artists in telling their own stories, in their own words and media, for the audience of Los Gatos and the greater South San Francisco Bay Region.

During the development of the exhibition, NUMU invites the artist in residence to mine the NUMU collection for objects and stories to uniquely weave the sense of place and history into their contemporary practice, resulting in an exhibition that neither NUMU, nor artist, would have otherwise created.

ArtNow is an annual juried Santa Clara County high school art exhibition and educational program, presented by New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU). The ArtNow Exhibition and supporting programs offer opportunities for high school student artists, from Palo Alto to Gilroy, to gain real-world experience in participating in a juried museum exhibition. Each year, a new theme is chosen for the exhibition and students are asked to submit works based on that theme. $10,000 in scholarships and awards are given to participating students.

2022 is a blank slate. We feel tentative, but we have a chance to create something new, build new connections, and build resilience. Luz Donahue is an artist that has carved a practice by guiding people through unknown and sometimes difficult emotional pathways, towards unexpected insight.

Through In the Artist’s Studio, we get a glimpse at the creative process of someone who can reveal poetry from the chaos of the blank canvas. Her miniature watercolor paintings portray the richness that a universe of possibilities affords to those who are willing to listen.

This fine art juried exhibit is produced by the Los Gatos Art Association in partnership with NUMU, New Museum Los Gatos, where the exhibition will be held. It is open to all artists in the greater bay area from Napa to Carmel, CA. CASH PRIZES in each category. The theme is Listen, Learn, Change, Grow, matching the title of a recent campaign launched by the Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce. Our esteemed jurors include Preston Metcalf, Executive Director of the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, and Julie Ericsson, Art Curator at New Museum Los Gatos.

Trees have played a meaningful role in Jane Olin’s life since childhood. Climate change and human mismanagement now threaten trees across the globe, but new research reveals previously unknown information about their complex social structures and ecological relationships. With renewed curiosity and a sense of urgency, Olin embarked on a wide-ranging exploration of trees. In the Company of Trees features photographs from that undertaking—the most recent additions to her series, Intimate Conversation. Olin’s expressive approach and her innovative process prints reveal a haunting and singular perspective on trees. Her work conveys both the seeds of hope and the seeds of impending destruction, which only human beings can resolve.

Views of the T. House (1991-1992) opens in the Spotlight Gallery on January 15. The exhibition features San Jose artist Tony May’s meticulous photo-realist paintings that document the gradual progression of his idiosyncratic, functional, and on-going construction project, the T. House. This full scale backyard installation on May’s property, features detailed craftsmanship and Japanese-style carpentry. With each of the 18 paintings in the series, May deftly captures the details like the grit of cinder blocks in the T. house foundation wet after a rainstorm, and places each moment in context with graphic novel style captions on a crisp black frame.

In the Artist’s Studio: Featuring Tony May opens in the Michael and Alyce Parsons reception area on February 5th. The visitor follows May on his journey of creating the site-specific installation for the San Jose Museum of Art, Variable Book Construction (Bookmobile), (1991-1995). With behind-the-scenes photos of May's T. House, workspace, and drafting table, as well as a few select tools that help May get the job done, visitors will learn about the artistry in the time and the care that May dedicates to his tasks.

To further engage visitors and illuminate the process behind the creative concept, May’s Bookmobile Maquette, recently donated to NUMU’s permanent collection, will also be on view. This maquette is a component in the process of creating Variable Book Construction: Bookmobile, which is in the collection of the San Jose Museum of Art.

This exhibition is a fundraiser and an exhibition of artworks, in various mediums, that were created during and/or were inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and massive social and political upheaval the world over. This special exhibition will provide a rare opportunity to experience an eclectic range of art from NUMU’s network of creatives including previously exhibited artists, teaching artists, and our many artist friends and supporters.

This exhibition will showcase the work of this local metalsmith, jewelry artist, and glassblower.

Gaumer’s (Un)Wearable series fuses these ornate ancient crafts to broach sometimes painful conversations about expectations of beauty, feminism, power, and self-worth. The adornments she has styled combine materials that simultaneously project strength and fragility, inspiring the viewer to imagine how it would feel to be in the position of the wearer. NUMU visitors will get an intimate glimpse into the handbuilt workspace that Gaumer has fashioned, as well as the process she developed to create the lux glass respirator.

Exhibition curated by Julie Ericsson.

An exhibition exploring innovations in alternative process photography, featuring works by Bay Area artists, Chris McCaw, Moira McDonald, Klea McKenna, and Meghann Riepenhoff

New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) is pleased to present Image + Object, an exhibition that explores alternative process photography through the unique photographic works of four Bay Area contemporary photographers, each of whom challenges our notions of photography as reflection, documentation and separation.

Image + Object is curated by Allison Railo.

It’s that time of year again! Welcome the ninth annual ArtNow juried Santa Clara County high school art exhibition to the NUMU galleries! The exhibition and educational program give county high school students the experience of presenting artwork in a professional museum setting and the opportunity to participate in supporting educational and career development programs.

Spotlight on Local Residents’ Eclectic International Folk Art Collection

New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) is pleased to present A Call to Collect: Whimsy Around the World, an exhibition that celebrates and investigates the pursuit of collecting folk art, featuring prized pieces from the collection of Los Gatos residents Lee and Dr. Paul Quintana.

The Quintanas travel extensively as Paul provides pediatric medical services in underserved communities around the world, including Mexico, South America, Asia and the Pacific as well as West Africa and the Middle East. And after more than 40 years of traveling the globe, the Quintanas have developed a collection of hundreds of pieces, some of which are cleverly repurposed or utilitarian objects and others which represent the material cultures of ancient, traditional and contemporary arts of each locale. This exhibition is curated by Allison Railo.

This unique exhibition developed in partnership with Music at Kohl Mansion Burlingame, producers of the Violins of Hope San Francisco Bay Area Project, presents a virtual experience of the Tel Aviv violin workshop of Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein where the Violins of Hope are restored. The installation will share the story of the Weinstein family and the inspiration behind the Project, and highlight one of the 70 historic instruments in the collection.