Go There! San Jose Museum of Art

Haven’t been the the San Jose Museum of Art lately? Go now. So many reasons to go: Right now there’s a thought provoking and more than a little scary show called Covert Operations : Investigation the Known Unknowns (a term borrowed from a Donald Rumsfeld phrase) . The show looks at post-9/11 issues related to surveillance and terrorist profiling, among others. The sketch below is of a piece by Kerry Tribe that films people who showed up to audition for a role that asked that they ‘look like terrorists’. Its eye-opening and sad to see what our idea of a terrorist is.

On a lighter note, there’s a show of William Wegman’s work, and although it doe have some of his dog portraits, sketched below, it is interesting to see his other work , especially his postcard series.

And from the museums’s permanent collection, a room full of work in clay, entitled Character Studies including Wanxin Zhang‘s disturbing Special Ambassador and Robert Arneson’s Colonel Hyena.

And for the kids, there’s always art packs and the fabulous Makers Space where they can create stuff. Here they are, with stuff they made, things they saw, and a sketch of a Chihuly piece by Kavya.