RADICAL REGENERATION:
3RD ARTIST MEMBERS BIENNIAL
JULY 23, 2022 – OCTOBER 16, 2022
PORCELLA & HALLWAY GALLERIES

The San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is pleased to announce the 3rd Artist Member’s Exhibition in the Museum’s Porcella and Hallway Galleries. This theme of renewal, repair, and revitalization considers the changes we have collectively endured in the last two years, and, in many ways, the changes we are still processing. In light of lessons learned after times of perseverance, this exhibition considers how moments of cultural disruption can create opportunities for personal or collective change. With this concept as a point of departure, artists took the exhibition’s theme of ‘Radical Regeneration’ as a means of reflecting on what new ideas, practices, or politics might grow from this historic moment.

SJMQT is delighted to announce that Bay Area Artist, Adia Millett, is the juror Radical Regeneration: 3rd Artist Members Biennial.

45TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION: NEW DIRECTIONS
FEBRUARY 9 – SEPTEMBER 25, 2022

This special anniversary exhibition highlights recent acquisitions at San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in a series of thematic installations spanning three galleries. Both the specific artworks and broader themes explored in this survey reflect the diverse reasons our Museum seeks and acquires new works. New Directions prominently features recent artwork from SJMQT's Artist in Residence program. Established in 2016, this program supports local artists with on-site studio space and opportunities to exhibit work in the Museum’s Maker Space Gallery. This program has deepened the Museum’s commitment to supporting contemporary artists from or working in the Bay Area, including Alexander Hernandez, Liz Harvey, Amber Imrie, Carolina Cuevas, Tricia Royal, Mung Lar Lam, and more.

Works of art gifted by the Museum’s many donors and patrons appear in each section of New Directions. Their generosity and dedication allow us to expand SJMQT’s collections and cultivate curiosity, wonder, and excitement in our audiences.

COMING TOGETHER – A QUILT FOR HEALING
A COLLABORATION BETWEEN SJMQT AND KIDS & ART FOUNDATION
FEBRUARY 9 – JULY 3, 2022

SJMQT and the Kids & Art Foundation celebrate their first collaboration inspired by the historic Gee's Bend Quilts featured in author Tangular A. Irby's children's book Pearl and her Gee's Bend Quilts. The Kids & Art community project, "Coming Together, a Quilt for Healing," spotlights quilt squares created by pediatric cancer patients during an online art workshop lead by artist Caroline Robins and Tangular Irby. Volunteers and donors also contributed quilt squares as part of the community project in support of the Kids & Art mission to bring the healing power of art to children and families confronting childhood cancer.

ABOUT KIDS & ART FOUNDATION 

The Kids & Art Foundation is a national nonprofit organization that provides specialized, hands-on creative arts experiences for children with cancer and their families to help ease the stress, anxiety, and trauma experienced from diagnosis and treatment. Kids & Art programs are provided directly to pediatric patients and families in person and online, as well as through hospitals and treatment centers. 

LAYERED & STITCHED: 50 YEARS OF INNOVATIVE ART
SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 – JANUARY 2, 2022
TURNER, GILLILAND AND FINLAYSON GALLERIES

For more than 50 years, the art quilt movement has been breaking new ground. Today, thousands of artists and collectors around the world are passionate about this art form.

Layered & Stitched: 50 Years of Innovative Art, by Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA), is a showcase of 50 art quilts by renowned master artists around the globe. Seminal works show the evolution of the art quilt from the earliest pioneers to contemporary artists experimenting with new forms, materials, and digital technologies. This exhibition traces the development of this exciting art form as it started with isolated makers into an international movement involving thousands of artists. Featuring a balance of abstract and representational styles, these artworks represent the extraordinary range of talented artists working in contemporary quilt art.

MORE IMPACT: CLIMATE CHANGE
TAPESTRY WEAVERS WEST
SEPTEMBER 22, 2021 – JANUARY 2, 2022

More Impact: Climate Change, curated by Deborah Corsini and Alex Friedman, features tapestries from members of Tapestry Weavers West that reflect on our changing global environment and the detrimental consequences of climate change, woven in a variety of tapestry techniques and styles.

Tapestry Weavers West is a regional organization of tapestry weavers founded in 1985. It is currently a group of 85 active weavers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, and also includes members that span from British Columbia, Canada to San Diego, CA and several states beyond the West Coast. Members exhibit nationally and internationally, teach tapestry weaving and are advocates for the art of contemporary weaving practices.

Participating artists: Chelley BonDurant, Bobbi Chamberlain, Myla Collier, Deborah Corsini, Sharon Crary, Molly Elkind, Marcia Ellis, Alex Friedman, Susan Gangsei, Tricia Goldberg, Janette Gross, Jenny Heard, Barbara Heller, Jennie Henderson, Susan Hart Henegar, Stephanie Hoppe, Patti Kirch, Mary Lane, Martha Lightcap, Yonat Michaelov, Sonja Miremont, Janet Moore, Ellen Ramsey, Michael Rohde, Minna Rothman, Care Standley, Kathe Todd-Hooker and Sue Weil.

AMERICAN TAPESTRY BIENNIAL 13
JUNE 11 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
TURNER AND GILLILAND GALLERIES

American Tapestry Biennial 13 showcases the very best in international contemporary tapestry. The works selected for the exhibition by juror Nick DeFord, Program Director at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, highlight the variety of artistic expression practiced today in this hand woven medium. The pieces range from the subtle to the visually complex, and even break new ground in shape and surface texture. Tapestry's rich history and its unique ability to render images in the tactile medium of cloth offer contemporary artists a powerful vehicle for expressing both aesthetic and conceptual concerns.

Founded in 1982, the American Tapestry Alliance is a non-profit educational organization that offers support and exposure for contemporary tapestry artists around the world.

RYAN CARRINGTON: CONTRADICTIONS
JUNE 11 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
FINLAYSON GALLERY

Ryan Carrington’s work utilizes symbols of Americana to bridge issues of labor, class, work ethic and economics with his personal and family history.  His exhibition, Contradictions, investigates the rich conceptual history that pre-worn garments have to share.  Through using uniforms of blue and white-collar workers to recreate American flags, he prompts a conversation for how we value each other in our ever-changing society. 

STARS AND STORIES: AMERICAN ART FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
JUNE 11 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
HALLWAY GALLERY

Inspired by the themes of our current exhibitions, these works drawn from the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles permanent collection explore the representations and realities of American culture. From nostalgia-infused imagery of summer baseball, diners, and the Western frontier, to contemporary issues of immigration, social justice and political activism, these works address the disparity between Americana's popular symbols and American's lived experiences.

I WAS INDIA: EMBROIDERING EXOTICISM
KIRA DOMINGUEZ HULTGREN
JUNE 11 – SEPTEMBER 12, 2021
PORCELLA GALLERY

Bay Area-based artist Kira Dominguez Hultgren explores what it takes to make an Indian. Her work incorporates cultural and familial materials, as she opens up her grandmother’s cedar chest to reveal two Punjabi phulkaris embroidered by her auntie Dalip Kaur around 1925. Phulkaris, or saloos as her family calls them, are commonly seen as head-coverings and shawls that typify the material cultural practices of pre-partition Punjab. In this exhibition, they become the process or treasure map by which themes of colonial and contemporary exoticism, handwork, and the spectacle are surveyed. Through woven sculpture and installation, Dominguez Hultgren invites visitors to step with her into phulkari practice as a transgressive process that challenges both personal identity and global histories. 

LONE SOME
JUNE 1, 2020 – MARCH 2021
LOBBY OF SJMQT 

Montalvo Arts Center presents a new, multi-site public exhibition entitled lone some, appearing throughout the Bay Area. As part of this large-scale project, San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles is proud to feature artist Modesto Covarrubias's site-specific installation Hear, There and Everywhere in our lobby.

In association with its 2019-2020 programming initiative, SOCIAL: Rethinking Loneliness Together, Montalvo transforms traditional advertising and commerce medium spaces into catalysts for conversation and connection. Seeking to inspire and provoke questions about what it means to experience loneliness, local and national artists and poets were commissioned to create works for presentation on billboards and bus shelters in the East Bay, San Francisco, and the South Bay. Artworks will be featured on billboards located in Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and East San Jose, and on bus shelters throughout the Peninsula from San Bruno to Millbrae, Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, East Palo Alto, and Santa Clara.

INSIDE OUT: SEEING THROUGH CLOTHING
JANUARY 19, 2020 – MARCH 2021
TURNER AND GILLILAND GALLERIES

Clothing acts as both a boundary and bridge between the body and the world. At once utilitarian and deeply expressive, clothing offers protection from external conditions while extending our inner selves—our identities, desires and beliefs—to the surface of our bodies and beyond. This dynamic relationship between inside and outside will be explored in Inside Out: Seeing Through Clothing, featuring the work of 11 artists who investigate the boundary that clothing creates between the self and world. Working in the fields of sculpture, photography, installation and textile art, these artists consider themes of transparency, openness, interiority and visibility to create objects that invite us in while reaching out. Their works reimagine clothing as a radical and poetic form, capable of revealing hidden—and often uncomfortable—truths while dissolving boundaries between interior and exterior worlds.

Artists include Reiko Fujii, Claudia Casarino, Charlotte Kruk, Robin Lasser & Adrienne Pao, Victoria May, Kate Mitchell, Laura Raboff, Beverly Rayner, Rose Sellery, and Jean Shin.