Each year the Executive Director, in partnership with the Curatorial Team, commissions a Bay Area artist to create a limited edition series of works as part of the Director’s Circle Program. The artist chosen to participate in this annual program also donates two pieces from the commission to the museum: one which stays in the Permanent Collection, the other is used for fundraising. In this way, the Director’s Circle program not only supports personal collecting, but also helps to build NUMU’s Permanent Art Collection. See past works in this retrospective exhibition and the reveal of this year’s work by artist Kiana Honarmand in an upcoming event (details coming soon)!

In partnership with genARTS Silicon Valley, we are proud to announce the 4th Annual Experimental Exhibition, on view at NUMU from Fri, July 19 through Sun, October 6. In this juried show, artists from across Santa Clara County are invited to create a work of art exploring the Boundaries in their world.

Holly Lane—Not Enough Time to Love the World, on view August 2 through January 5, showcases a range of Lane’s work garnered from the previous ten-plus years of a multi-decade career. The accompanying exhibition, Holly Lane—In the Artist’s Studio, on view August 23 through January 26, a part of NUMU’s innovative ongoing series, offers a rare opportunity for access into Lane’s meticulous step-by-step artistic process.

As an art undergraduate, Lane 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. In a striking symbiosis, she unites each of her paintings with an intricately ornamented wood frame that she designs and carves for it. Her work expresses a profound amalgamation of heartfelt respect for the natural world, particularly the animal kingdom, and architectural and painterly expertise, plus musings on the autonomy of women, world mythology and philosophy.

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.