Features & Columns

MIXED MEDIA: Rina Banerjee combines a variety of materials, including an emu egg, pigeon feathers, plastic netting and glass beads in this 2015 piece, now on display at the San Jose Museum of Art.

ANDERSON COLLECTION
Stanford | anderson.stanford.edu

Kerry Tribe
Thru Jul 29
Tribe's film Exquisite Corpse follows the Los Angeles River for 51 miles, from the San Fernando Valley to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way, she films the neverending stream of cars that border it and the Angeleno subcultures that mark Southern California as a region that contains multitudes.

CANTOR ARTS CENTER, STANFORD
Stanford | museum.stanford.edu

Katharina Fritsch's 6th Still Life (6. Stillben)
Thru Apr 27, 2020
Five brightly colored sculptures by Katharina Fritsch are now on display in the Cantor courtyard. There's a red Mary (Jesus's mother), a yellow skull, a purple egg, a green Saint Nicholas and a white snake (not the hard rock band). This symbolic collection with intimations of mortality and the devil screams, "It's selfie time!"

The Medium Is the Message: Art Since 1950
Thru Aug. 18
If you're on the lookout for an esoteric exhibit about "the relationship between subject and materials," try this one that's divided into three categories. "In the Abstract" featuring paint, metal and fabric; "The Sum of Its Parts" with nontraditional materials; and for portraiture there's "The Faces We Present."

NEW MUSEUM LOS GATOS
Los Gatos | numulosgatos.org

On the Shoulders of Giants: Selected Works from the NUMU Atelier Masters and Students
Thru Oct 13
NUMU's Atelier program teaches classical drawing and painting techniques to whoever wishes to learn the craft. This exhibition features work by aspirants and professionals alike.

SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART
San Jose | sjmusart.org

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World
Thru Oct 6
I was at SJMA a couple of weeks ago while they were installing the Banerjee exhibit and was transfixed by the flashes of color I saw peeking out from behind the black curtains. She makes elaborate sculptures in all manner of materials. An incomplete list of ingredients that went into her flamingo pink mini-mahal, Take me take me take meÉ To the Palace of love, includes foam balls, cowrie shells, quilting pins, fake birds and red-colored moss.

Pae White
Jul 18-Jan 19
SJMA's Beta Space gallery is about to feature Pae White's experimental work, which "focuses on the forgotten, the fleeting and ephemeral of everyday life." The museum's site shows a photograph of her 2017-18 installation Spacemanship, at the Saarland Museum in Germany. Since I didn't make it to that opening, I can only surmise that White loves textiles and patterns writ super large.

SAN JOSE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
San Jose | sjica.org

Tracey Snelling: Clusterf*ck 9
Jun 22-Sep 15
Getting cozy on your velvet-covered chaise longue is the thing to do after a stressful week at work. You've got your cold beverage, your slanket and the season finale of GOT. But that's not how Tracey Snelling pictures her immersive installations. They mess with familiar ideas of home life. She could teach classes on the art of hoarding. There are holiday lights, paintings, neon signs, toys, dollhouses, lamps and—I could go on, but the show's title gives you a pretty good indication of what you can expect to find.

Surreal Sublime
Jun 22-Sep 15
The mighty tradition of pastoral painting presents a bucolic picture of the world. Who doesn't love admiring the refreshing calm of both the forest and the trees? Apparently the artists in this group show. Their intense subjectivity totally distorts the known world — but in a really good, really surreal way. One example: Liz Hickock's sublimation print on aluminum, Preternatural, crystallizes roots and branches against a psychedelic blue skyline. "Surreal Sublime" promises pretty trippy representations of Mother Nature.

SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF QUILTS AND TEXTILES
San Jose | sjquiltmuseum.org

Kristen Martincic: Swim Club
Thru Jul 14
Martincic is as obsessed with water and the human form as David Hockney. In the past, she's painted series of pools in marvelous blues. "Swim Club" features women's bathing suits that she's made out of thin Japanese tissue paper. She's dyed and made patterns on them. The suits suggest the shape of women's bodies as they lay drying in the sun after a day of splashing and diving about in the welcoming waves of water.

STANFORD ART GALLERY
Stanford | art.stanford.edu

Somatic Fix: The 2019 Senior Exhibition
May 28-Jun 16
A dozen art practice students are about to graduate. Their group exhibit is inspired by "movement studies and dance." You'll find examples of their takes on the idea in a variety of media, including sculpture (Ali Vaughan), disruptive paintings (Miso Kim) and photo collage (Noah Hornik).

TRITON MUSEUM OF ART
Santa Clara | tritonmuseum.org

Kathryn Metz: From the Center to the Edges
Thru Aug 18
An abstract expressionist who tried to capture light itself on the canvas, Metz died last fall in Santa Cruz at the age of 86. She founded the UCSC Print Media area in 1972 and was an early pioneer of printmaking art. "From the Center to the Edges" is a survey of the landscape paintings she made from the 1970s to early 2000.

Sanaz Mazinani: Dark Bright
Thru Aug 11
Mazinani is not afraid to embrace bold colors in her work. For "Dark Bright," she's created "reflective surfaces and geometric patterns" that make optical illusions. She's interested in how the brain interprets what we see with our eyes. For her, the way we see color might not be as straightforward, or as unbiased, as we think.