The Los Gatos History Project is NUMU’s unprecedented effort to catalog and dive deeper into its permanent collection. This exhibition, the first to come out of the project, presents a selection of objects that have given the museum more questions than answers. By taking a critical look at these objects and the stories they tell, the exhibition will prompt visitors to ask: Who made these objects? Why did the museum collect them? What can we learn from them? And whose stories are missing? Through this exhibition, visitors will gain a greater understanding of museum collecting practices, and a greater appreciation for the hidden complexities of Los Gatos history.

Opened in September 2023, this demonstration and prep lab serves as a dedicated space to display artifacts, conduct conservation efforts, and present public educational programs. In this space, NUMU demonstrates that history is anything but static! The Collections Lab is open Friday-Sunday during museum hours.

Holly Lane—Not Enough Time to Love the World, showcases a range of Lane’s work garnered from the previous ten-plus years of a multi-decade career. As an art undergraduate, she began considering the relationship of frame to picture. She has since reimagined it into a new art form of her own invention, in which each component—painting and frame—is fundamental to the work as a whole.

Holly Lane—In the Artist’s Studio offers a rare opportunity for access into Lane’s meticulous step-by-step artistic process. Hiking photographs, along with sketchbooks, design layouts, color trials, preparatory diagrams, drawings, and paintings, plus painting and woodworking tools, and works in process will provide invaluable insight into the studio of a contemporary artist whose methods are more closely aligned with a Medieval-era artisan’s workshop.

New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) presents an exhibition of five women artists who explore concepts of memory as it pertains to generational and cultural experience, immigration and migration. Through various media, they explore their experience of inherited memories and unveil personal stories of family and heritage while inviting us all to consider the deeper themes that connect us with the past, and with each other. Engaging with culturally significant materials and symbolism, these works examine the vicarious nature of memory, and present implicit meanings carried in ancestral artifacts that are passed from one generation to the next. Each artist meaningfully conveys the idea that we are all shaped not only by our personal experiences, but by those of past generations.