Search Results

Cowell Gallery EXHIBITION Layers and Splashes Ayesha Samdani DATES: MAY 11 - SEP 1 YEAR: 2024 Previously on view in the Cowell Gallery < Back OVERVIEW ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. I find myself getting immersed in the beauty of nature’s colors. These colors have a very strong impact on my personality and paintings as they remind me of my cultural background. My art is inspired by nature therefore I see my reflection in leaves, trees and branches that changes modes and colors with the seasons. I use a various limited color palette for each painting to depict different moods of nature. Through variations of lines, layers and color palette, I explore the sensitivity and delicacy of changing seasons. Some paintings reveal the beauty of spring and fall and some impression of summer and winter. I arrange my composition by depicting organic forms, lines, colors, drips and brush strokes. On my painting surface, I look for interesting organic shapes and capture them. I explore the relationship between the loose marks and the developed shapes. My lyrical lines add a rhythm though out the piece. I leave the evidence of the painting process by adding translucent layers on top of each other. I add drips to ease the tension between shapes and colors. By adding the energy of brush strokes, I guide the viewer’s eye to each corner of the painting. The exploration of different shapes and marks continues to evolve until I reach the veiling process. The veil adds daintiness, softness and tranquility to the overall look. This cohesive body of work is a combination of my cultural and personal experience. Ayesha Samdan, Dried Leaves, 2023, oil on canvas. Previous Next

Unknown EXHIBITION Beyond 2D: Sculptures from the Permanent Collection Various Artists DATES: JAN 25 - FEB 20 YEAR: 2022 Previously on view in the Unknown < Back OVERVIEW ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Previous Next

Permanent Gallery EXHIBITION Salon at the Triton Museum Salon Recipients DATES: JUN 26 - SEP 12 YEAR: 2021 Previously on view in the Permanent Gallery < Back OVERVIEW ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. Previous Next

< Back Qiuwen Li AUG 30 - JAN 11 Echoes in Color Born in China, Qiuwen Li moved to the United States to pursue her education in Design, earning a BFA in Graphic Design from St. Cloud State University and a MFA in Visual Studies with a concentration in Graphic Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Now working as an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Santa Clara University, Li’s teaching and research focuses on the integration of typography, data visualization, and graphic design. Incorporating her knowledge and expertise into her art, Qiuwen Li seeks to delineate, deconstruct, and reconstruct the assumptions of multilingual communication and reframe them as more contingent on idiosyncratic understandings. Artist Statement: In my designs, graphic elements (shapes, colors, forms, and type) are constructed, deconstructed, and then reconstructed to create a richer experience and extend their meaning. As a designer, I understand the need for legibility, but I am more concerned with communicating something more visceral, expressive, and imaginative. My work engages viewers in a way that evokes playing games and figuring out puzzles; they simply can’t get enough of it, and that’s a good thing, because that’s the key to engagement. Previous Next

The Triton Museum of Art is a vital community resource that provides accessible exhibition and education programs, which promote a broad range of contemporary California art. Through our multi-faceted programs, we bring together the culturally diverse population of the Greater Bay Area. The Triton's Vision The Triton Museum of Art is a vital community resource that provides accessible exhibition and education programs, which promote a broad range of contemporary California art. Through our multi-faceted programs, we strive to bring together the culturally diverse population of the Greater Bay Area to foster a better understanding of art and its role in building a strong community. Mission Statement The mission of the Triton Museum of Art is to generate community dialogue, enhance cultural understanding, and increase creative and critical thinking through innovative programs and the vocabulary of art. Our Core Values ART Through its exhibitions and collections, the Triton Museum of Art showcases works by California artists that are aesthetically and historically significant to our region and which demonstrate the rich diversity of cultural traditions, influences, and ideas that make up our community. EDUCATION Education is central to the vision of the Museum and integral to the development and design of each exhibition. The Museum offers a learning environment in which curiosity, experimentation, and spirited dialogue are encouraged. Our aim is for each visitor to experience the Museum with enthusiasm, empowered by new perspectives and ideas. COMMUNITY The community is the life force of the Triton Museum of Art. Each exhibition and program is developed with the visitor's experience as a compass. The museum serves as a resource for the community through collaborations with local arts and service organizations, academic institutions, as well as local civic and corporate partners. CAREERS BOARD & STAFF CONTACT FAQ IN PARTNERSHIP WITH Official wine of the Triton Museum of Art

< Back Cynthia Ona Innis JAN 17 - APR 19 Seams Cynthia Ona Innis is a visual artist based in Berkeley, California. She holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA from Rutgers University. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Jose Museum of Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Crocker Art Museum, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among others. Innis has been recognized with numerous awards, including a 2025 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a James D. Phelan Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. She is represented by Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles. Artist Statement: My work begins with painting, then moves through disassembly and reconstruction—an ongoing exploration of connection and division. Where there is a seam, two or more things converge. These seams mark the joining of materials as well as the meeting of times, places and states of being. Moments such as sunrise and sunset, moonrise and nightfall fold into one another, revealing how change itself creates continuity. In a fractured world, the seam becomes both metaphor and method: a site where rupture and repair coexist. Seams explores the interplay of light, landscape and weather as a way to map perception and memory. The shifting glow of the sun, the stillness of the moon and the vastness of the night sky form a temporal and spatial framework for orientation and reflection. Informed by distinct weather patterns of coastal California, the marine layer, coastal fog and rays of light emerge as visual language that mirrors the mutable rhythms of the natural world. My approach to abstraction is rooted in a physical, process-driven practice. Pigments are poured directly onto fabric, or bleached to remove color, to create a dialogue between accumulating and editing, masking and unveiling, presence and absence. Materials such as cotton, canvas, nylon, and silver lamé hold equal weight to the pigments. Cut, reassembled and stitched, the surfaces echo tectonic movement and natural cycles of fragmentation and repair. Recent wall installations expand this practice through scale and suspension and the responsiveness of materials. Often beginning with recycled or discarded textiles, painted and sewn fabric panels are attached to wooden supports allowing them to hang freely and respond subtly to air and motion. In Fixing on a Horizon, multiple horizon lines reference sunrise and sunset as shifting points of equilibrium and orientation, while Blue Slip traverses gradients of blue, from pale to near-black that evoke twilight’s liminal expanse between clarity and obscurity. Across these works, stitching, knitting, layering, and suspension become meditations on connection and fracture—memory and material, permanence and impermanence. The resulting surfaces reflect the layered experiences that shape how we see and move through the natural world. Previous Next

Rotunda Gallery EXHIBITION Looking Beyond Ourselves: A Socio-Political Expression Exhibition Hadi Aghaee DATES: APR 29 - JUN 2 YEAR: 2023 Previously on view in the Rotunda Gallery < Back OVERVIEW ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. "Artist at a young age and absent from art for nearly three and a half decades, a few short years ago I returned to pick up where I had left! Upon my return, I experimented with various styles and subjects with the intention to preserve the memory and elegance of the past. With the state of the world we live in today, I have found my calling and feel obligated to focus on delivering thought-provoking and engaging messages as a platform to raise awareness about social issues and the current state of humanity. My self-taught background as an "Organic Artist" gives me the freedom to explore and express my thoughts and feelings without being limited by traditional art theory and rules. This approach leads to unique and powerful perspectives in my artwork." Hadi Aghaee Artist Statement "Daydreaming My Dream" Previous Next

Cul-de-sac Jonathan Crow JAN 10 - MAY 3 Will be on View in the Marquee: Woman and Five Cars, 2025, oil on canvas Cowell Room Gallery < Back Overview Born in Ohio in 1971, Jonathan Crow received his MFA in Filmmaking from the California Institute of the Arts in 2003. Before turning to painting, he spent many years working in the film industry—a background that continues to shape the cinematic atmosphere of his work. In 2013, following a career shift, Crow returned to his early love of drawing. His series Veeptopus—portraits of U.S. Vice Presidents with octopuses on their heads—became an online sensation and was featured in BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Since 2018, Crow has focused primarily on oil painting, developing a body of work that explores the uncanny beauty and quiet tensions of Southern California suburbia. His paintings—at once humorous, unsettling, and deeply observed—draw inspiration from Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, and the films of David Lynch. Crow’s work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area and beyond, including Arc Gallery (San Francisco), the New Museum Los Gatos, Marin MOCA, TAG Gallery (Los Angeles), and the de Young Museum. Crow is currently based in Santa Clara, California. Artist Statement When I was a child in the 1970s, my parents drove me from our home in rural Ohio to visit my grandparents in suburban California. I was struck by the mountains, the palm trees, the dusty colors of the hills—and especially the light. Those brief visits left a lasting impression, like an image burned onto film. Nearly fifty years later, I paint those same Californian suburbs. Working in oil, I use their tidy streets and manicured yards as a stage to explore form, color, and the tension between the familiar and the strange. My background in film shapes how I compose each scene—like a still from a forgotten movie—charged with a quiet sense of story. Through these ordinary landscapes, I create images that are at once amusing and unsettling, inviting reflection on race, gender, and what it means to live in this complicated country called America. Previous Next

Warburton Gallery EXHIBITION Palace of Leaves Michelle Gregor DATES: APR 27 - SEP 15 YEAR: 2024 Previously on view in the Warburton Gallery < Back OVERVIEW ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. While working on this exhibition, I was thinking about trees. Because they often experience life in a longer time scale than humans, trees can be felt as witnesses to our human achievement and our folly, our appreciation and our exploitation. With this new body of work, my abstracted human figures have taken on evolving shapes referencing arboreal forms. Before the silicon age, the Santa Clara Valley was blanketed with some of the most fertile orchards in the world and dubbed “the Valley of Heart’s Delight.” Before that, it was home to ancient native oaks and redwoods. Trees have accompanied us, and I have taken inspiration from our bonds with them. Beyond our tangible relationship with trees, I also think of my artistic practice itself as a ‘palace of leaves.’ For me it is a canopy of focus, rooted in purpose. The phrase is from a poem by Mary Oliver, “Crossing The Swamp” which emphasizes resilience and creative potential. My approach is improvisational. The materials/processes (clay, pigments, kiln firings, etc.) are partners in dialogue with me, rather than merely subject to my preconceived ideas. With each round of decisions I make during the forming, surface coloration, firings, I am responding to the changes the material presents. I highly value the geological impressions and subtle tonal changes as the clay body matures with each firing. The seasons pass very quickly and it’s important to enjoy what is there in front of you. You have to have a certain amount of faith that your process will reveal a path or a direction, even if you don’t know what the end point will be. You have to have faith that the water will be deep enough when you jump into it. Michelle Gregor, 2024 Michelle Gregor, Paloma , ceramic, 2023 (photo by J. Jones). Previous Next

< Back Stephanie Metz SEPT 14 - DEC 29 In the Glow Stephanie Metz is an accomplished Bay Area fiber arts sculptor. She has an affinity for the natural world, which is often echoed through her artistic creations. Her artwork is created through a sense of curiosity and her desire to explore the meaning of things around her. The Triton is pleased to present a new body of Metz's work in her exhibition In the Glow which will combine smaller works with a large scale immersive installation, specially created for the Cowell Room gallery. Artist Statement: I use fiber media to sculpt solid, freestanding forms that embody the complex experiences of womanhood within contemporary American culture. Created from wool fibers needle-felted into intricate, robust, writhing shapes or meticulously stitched from pieces of thick, smooth wool felt, my sculptures evoke the female form rendered in soft, tactile media to engage viewers on multiple sensory and intellectual levels. Current works incorporate subtle reflections of intense pink pigment, a color laden with cultural significance long associated with femininity. The organic forms I create are seductively approachable yet mildly alarming; they serve as vessels for exploring the multifaceted nature of living in a female-identifying body—a spectrum encompassing strength and vulnerability, the beautiful and the grotesque, pain and resilience, control and the lack of agency. "Soft power" refers to persuasion through indirect or non-confrontational means; it captures the way I learned to navigate my world as a girl growing up in 1980s America, as well as my visually alluring approach to feminist topics in a world that still undervalues women. I want to be part of the dialog that ushers in a future in which gender equality, positive body images, reproductive rights, and sexual empowerment are the norm. My sculpture invites audiences to reconsider their preconceptions and assumptions, fostering a sense of shared connection within the larger human experience through a visceral, visual language. Previous Next

Edge of Silence Jacqueline Boberg JAN 24 - APR 19 Will be on View in the Marquee: Chatter , 2024, acrylic on canvas Rotunda Gallery < Back Overview My work is deeply shaped by experiences growing up in London in the 60’s, when fashion and music were exploding, where clothing became art, and design burst into the everyday. I have a simple aim - to create dynamic, vibrant works that jump on and off the wall. When faced with a blank canvas, I seek out materials that will inspire my internal dialogue. Though I may gather my media, plan a color scheme, and start with a thumbnail of a design, I most often end up following the way the materials balance as they hit the canvas. While earning a living in tech in Silicon Valley and raising two children, I took every community college art course available in my spare time, and sought out teaching artists and mentors to help hone my skills in drawing, painting, and seeing. Artist Statement With thirty years of exploration across watercolor, pastel, oil, and acrylic, I’ve continually sought new ways to express light. A decade in abstract mixed media reshaped my artistic vision, and my recent return to landscapes and still lifes merges contemporary experimentation with timeless observation. My landscapes are born from fleeting moments — a slant of light, a shift in color, a spark of inspiration that demands to be caught in the mind’s eye before it disappears. Working in acrylic allows me to chase that immediacy and not fuss around as the paint dries instantaneously. Each canvas becomes a dialogue between instinct and experimentation, between what I see and what I feel. In the studio, joy lives in discovery — the thrill of pushing paint, of finding new challenges in every composition, of not knowing exactly where a brushstroke will lead. I embrace the possibility of failure as part of the creative process. Like Silicon Valley’s mantra, I believe in failing big and failing often — because each “failure” reveals something unexpected, something truer. My goal is simple: to capture not just the landscape itself, but the energy of the moment that inspired it — alive, imperfect, and full of wonder. Until I move on to the next thing… Previous Next

< Back Hana Lock SEP 14 - JAN 5 Anatomica Hana Lock is the Best of Show winner for the 2023 Salon at the Triton. Her work is an intriguing mix of bizarre and sublime, depicting in great detail our delicate anatomy alongside or combined with other wonderful creatures such as rabbits, frogs, mice, snakes, wolves, beautiful plants and flowers - our connection to the natural world. Her work displays our vulnerability and forces us to confront what is inevitable - that, along with all over living beings, we will all die and decompose. However, this fate is not portrayed as something to be feared, but rather embraced as part of the natural rhythm of life and death. This exhibition will include a selection of 2D works by the artist. Artist Statement: Anatomica is a collection of paintings and drawings that draw inspiration from my love of anatomy and fascination with the transience of life, the inevitability of death, and the mystery of what lies beyond. My work offers a holistic view of the body by highlighting the beauty of its internal structures without shying from the grotesque. Referencing visual and philosophical concepts from Buddhism and European medieval funerary art, my art often features anatomized bodies being strewn across the composition as their viscera intertwines with flora and fauna. In my practice, I primarily use ballpoint pen, watercolor, and acrylic to create intricate and precise line work and vibrant, flat colors reminiscent of Japanese woodblock prints and Art Nouveau. I strive for precision and detail, and I believe that in addressing the formal and conceptual qualities inherent in line, I am effectively capturing the delicate intricacies of the natural and imaginative world. Previous Next