San José Museum Of Art Debuts Dedicated Permanent Collection Galleries

When the San José Museum of Art debuts dedicated galleries to displaying works from its permanent collection on March 7, 2025, for the first time in its history, it will do so centering the understanding that every artwork tells a story. People who claim they don’t like art miss this, that every artwork is a story.

One of the few traits connecting all eight-plus billion humans on earth is that we all love a story. To say you don’t like art, is to say you don’t like stories. It would be like saying you don’t like songs. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, songs, poems, books, movies. All stories.

Artist Hung Liu (b. 1948 in Changchun, China; d. 2021 in Oakland, CA) has a story. That of a former immigrant fleeing political persecution. Having lived through wars, political revolutions, exile and displacement, Liu’s paintings present a complex, multifaceted picture–story–of not only an immigrant experience broadly, but an Asian Pacific American experience specifically, and an Asian Pacific American experience in California and the Bay Area even more specifically.

Liu’s Resident Alien (1988) will be one of the featured artworks in SJMA’s new permanent collection galleries. As the canon of 20^th century art continues taking shape, this painting will emerge–has been emerging–as one of the most important produced during the last century. The painting’s story is simultaneously straightforward, deep, optimistic, pessimistic, sarcastic, timely, timeless, and insightful.

Liu depicts herself on a U.S. Department of Justice Immigration and Naturalization Service “Resident Alien” card–a so-called “green card”–the kind she would have held at one time. Simple enough.

“Resident Alien,” however, is an oxymoron. And who refers to people as “aliens?” Only in America with its historically tortured relationship to immigrants. Since the nation’s founding through today, American has always held up immigrants as representing our ideals, while simultaneously doing almost everything in its power to terrorize, marginalize, and prohibit them. Particularly Chinese immigrants. Do as I say, not as I do. Never more so than now.

Deep.

Then there’s the name on the card: Cookie, Fortune. A send up of American cultural stereotypes.

Exactly the kind of story the San José Museum of Art is looking to share.

“We have always, in my tenure, focused on artists of the global majority and women,” Executive Director of the San José Museum of Art S. Sayre Batton told Forbes.com. “Our collecting and our exhibition program reflect the diasporic communities here in the Bay Area and California.”

Resident Alien would stand as a gem among the collection at any art museum in the world. It was acquired by SJMA in 2005 through the prescience and combined efforts of patrons, trustees, and the Museum’s then curator.

Another story Liu’s artwork tells–all of it–is one common to art history. Hung Liu is a celebrated contemporary artist today, but that recognition only came at the very end of her life. San Jose was way ahead of the curve on Liu, and a change to SJMA’s bylaws allowed for her to become the first artist on the Museum’s Board of Trustees in 2018.

One example of the countless stories being told as “Tending and Dreaming: Stories from the Collection” inhabits new galleries with art drawn from the Museum’s holdings of over 2,700 works. Highlighting artists as storytellers, the installation invites visitors to see the Museum not just as a repository of art, but as a dynamic, living space where culture is continually created, interpreted, reimagined, and hopefully reflected in their own story.

SJMA was founded by local artists and community members in 1969 to promote modern and contemporary art. While it has always displayed artworks from the permanent collection going back to its earliest acquisition efforts in the 1970s, new to this initiative is the duration key pieces from the collection will be on view. Visitors can expect the greatest hits like Resident Alien, Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral (1957), Laura Aguilar’s photographs, and Ruth Asawa sculptures, to be on view for them to enjoy time and time and time again.

Batton has supercharged SJMA’s collecting efforts in her eight years as director, increasing the number of acquisitions and raising the bar on caliber. Her achievements in that regard are a major reason why the Museum has decided to dedicate space for the long-term display of its choicest holdings, its favorite stories.

“Tending and Dreaming” will feature paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations by almost 50 artists from the Bay Area and beyond.

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