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< Back Jacqueline Boberg JAN 24 - APR 19 Edge of Silence About the Artist: 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 Tim Guan AUG 22 - JAN 17 Here and There Tim Guan is an American-born painter living and working in San Francisco. Though he has been making art for as long as he can remember, he found his way to a committed art practice during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2025 he left his career in tech to devote himself to painting full time. Tim’s background in technology and life in San Francisco have shaped his artistic point of view. He is interested in the social and cultural conditions we create through our collective obsession with innovation and progress, and in how those conditions influence the way we navigate our reality and relate to one another. As a resident of the Bay Area for over a decade, he has borne witness to tremendous transformations of public and private life. And as a former "true believer" in the promises of the tech sector, he uses painting to wrestle with complicated feelings about his own complicity in those transformations. Working figuratively in oil, Tim is particularly drawn to painting because of its ability to hold a material record of human time and energy in a two dimensional object. His direct encounters with great works from art history have shown him the medium’s power to communicate care and attention across time and space. Against the relentless speed and chaos of modern life, he views this kind of “slow” connection as radical and necessary to preserve our humanity. He aspires to take part in this tradition by making attentive, resonant work that both reflects what it’s like to be alive today and inspires questions about where we’re headed. Tim studied painting at Studio Escalier in Argenton-Château, France. His work has been exhibited around the Bay Area at Wessling Contemporary, Decentered Arts Studio, The Drawing Room, Rosebud Gallery, and the Triton Museum of Art. You can learn more on Tim’s website and socials at timguan.art. About the Artist: Here and There presents paintings from the last two years that explore our relationship to embodied experience in the age of the internet. We live in a paradoxical time. The internet grants us unprecedented access to one another while causing us to feel isolated and estranged from our physical reality. As digital technologies have become inseparable from everyday life, our experience of the world and ourselves is increasingly shaped through layers of mediation. We work remotely, encounter art through screens, maintain relationships across networks, and rely on digital archives to construct and remember our personal histories. The default state of being is now to be in multiple places at once, physically present in one location while our attention, emotions, and identities circulate elsewhere. As so much of our lives shift online, the body can come to feel less like an essential dimension of the self and more like something to be managed, optimized, or transcended altogether. The figures in these paintings navigate this condition. Some appear absorbed in distraction or dislocation; others seek presence through attention to sensation or environment. Between these states lies a range of negotiations between the physical and the virtual. Together, the works explore how we inhabit our bodies in a world that seeks relentlessly to pull us out of them. Here and There invites viewers to reflect on their own relationship to embodiment. What remains unique, meaningful, or irreplaceable about physical experience? What is worth noticing, preserving, and honoring about life in a body? Previous Next

< Back Gabriel Coke MAY 3 - AUG 8 Unlimited Imagination Gabriel Coke is native to Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Gabriel is a father, a practicing artist, a teacher and advocate for his students. He enjoys teaching and giving lecture demonstrations. Gabriel pursued private studies in ateliers since the mid 1990’s. He began in Seattle, Washington and continued to Santa Fe, New Mexico, France, Norway and New York City. From those many years of study he acquired the knowledge to become a well practiced artist and teacher. Gabriel taught constantly in his own atelier from 2012 to 2020. For a decade Gabriel’s life has been devoted to working inside a studio that developed its own unique community. Knowledge, friendship and family have been combined with a world class field of professional teaching artists. As an Atelier Program Director Gabriel benefits from being a father to two incredibly gifted teenage children. Gabriel’s teaching philosophy begins with creating an ideal studio environment. He wants students to be in the best possible position to get the most of their potential. Gabriel is highly motivated to prepare for each class with a passionate love for detail and forethought. The atmosphere in the studio is part of a successful formula. Students are always given expert instruction by lecture and demonstration and they are given a healthy amount of personal space and freedom. Students focus and work for long spans of time. The results are truly remarkable as the achievements of young students are often far greater than is expected. Hundreds of students have worked for several years in small groups and many are currently attending art schools and colleges in the United States and abroad. Some have even finished college and have families, and still regard their time in Gabriel’s atelier as very fortunate. About the Artist: Gemini Jack Gabriel Coke Born 1969 Durango, Colorado The art of drawing and painting is a vital experience for human beings. When done well it leaves a trace of consciousness embedded in the artwork. Making art may be about finding the space to create. We have an artistic space in the corners of our mind, body and spirit. The freedom to explore and roam our imagination is a sacred and timeless activity. There is also a physical outward space we inhabit as artists. If not in nature, then in the special enclosure of an art studio. It may be a room in a house or a garage, or if we are fortunate, inside a lovingly arranged and functional art studio with great lighting, packed full of art supplies and inspiring objects. Where thoughtful care has been taken to create the best possible conditions, we feel more settled for exploring that space within ourselves. When we escape from the worry and haste of everyday life and responsibilities, we sense our lungs filling and releasing and then suddenly, like walking barefoot on a beach, we feel like ourselves again. That is how good it feels to be in the flow state at an easel drawing or painting for that peaceful time. Being creative is the best time in anyone's day, or week or life. It is the connection to thoughts and ideas that need our full attention. That is when creativity and imagination are in full bloom. That is when a pear or a rubber duck looks incredibly full of nuance and beauty. Things look more interesting. Music sounds better. Texture and color and light seem increasingly vivid and clear. Motion takes a break to be still for us to observe and capture. Noise and clamor subside and an apple or a wedge of cheese looks more beautiful. Studying nature and reality as an artist is the work we take on to enjoy the benefit of seeing the imaginary ideas floating inside our own minds. In the gallery here is a large painting I finished in 2011. I was just beginning my teaching years at what is now Art Students' Atelier. The painting has a foreground that is a still life of objects found in nature. I arranged it in my studio to paint from observation. The landscape in the distance was made completely from imagination. It was formed from memories of my younger days hiking and golfing in northern California. I made that painting as a leap of faith into my own imagination. The adventure for me was to rediscover drawing and painting from make-believe. It restored that joy I had as a child when everything I drew was made up. Years of practice with master teachers in ateliers had helped me build some skill but my paintings were not about anything. A painting can be beautiful and be a pleasure to create and still have no meaning or message. Leap of Faith was practice for getting back into a creative space inside my own imagination. I have taught for almost fifteen years now and I always tell younger students to keep their imagination alive. Use it. Figure out how it works. Practice your skills to make something look realistic, but incorporate something from an idea or a thought. Even if it is simple, it comes from you and your imagination is something to rely on for the rest of your life. Imagination can help you look ahead and create your future. Previous Next

< Back California Society of Printmakers AUG 30 - JAN 11 Expanding the Field; New Ideas in and Beyond Print The California Society of Printmakers is America’s oldest non-profit, member-run, printmaking organization. This exhibition will be a curated selection of works from artists across the United States; this is an opportunity for the selected artists to showcase their most innovative and evolving creations. In the national call for artists, entrants are highly encouraged to conceptualize works beyond the traditional bounds of printmaking - to embody structures that expand beyond the paper’s edge, extend off the wall, interlocks, and even express in multiples - telling a great story. About the Artist: For this exhibition, Expanding the Field; New Ideas in and Beyond Print, artists have been invited to submit work that incorporates any form of hand pulled printmaking, with end results including, but not limited to: large scale print work, innovative/experimental print techniques, modular assemblages, installation, sculptural elements, art book constructions, two-dimensional prints, and more. The juror for this exhibition, Monique Martin, is an internationally recognized, multidisciplinary artist from Saskatoon, Canada with a 25-year exhibition history who has exhibited her artwork in hundreds of significant solo, invited, and juried exhibitions in numerous countries. Previous Next

< Back Marc D'Estout JAN 18 - APR 19 A Singular Evolution: A 20 year survey of Marc D'Estout Marc D'Estout is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer who graduated with a MFA from San Jose State University. His extensive career includes exhibiting at numerous galleries throughout California and the United States, being featured in several art and design publications, and keeping an active art and teaching career. About the Artist: Marc D’Estout earned an MFA degree from San Jose State University and has had a long career as a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer. D’Estout is a Silicon Valley Creates Grant recipient and has also been awarded a Rydell Fellowship in Santa Cruz County. His work is currently represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, and he has exhibited at numerous venues including: San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Aqua Miami; University of Hawai’i Art Gallery; Red Gallery at Savannah College of Art and Design; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery; Palo Alto Art Center; Petersen Museum, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University; Richmond Art Center, California; Bedford Gallery/Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, California; San Jose ICA; NUMU (New Museum of Los Gatos); and the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz—as well as furniture and design galleries such and LIMN and Coup d’Etat in San Francisco and Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica. D’Estout’s works have been published in several art and design magazines, newspapers, books and catalogs. He is a featured artist in the Juxtapoz’ Car Culture book, and his work was used for the cover image and featured in the significant Graphis book Products by Design. The Thompson Gallery at San Jose State University produced a 48-page monograph chronicling 2-1/2 decades of Marc D’Estout’s art and design work. In addition to his studio work, D’Estout maintained an active design and teaching career. He most recently held the position of curator for the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. For ten years he served as Director for Art and Design for UCSC Extension. Prior to that he held positions as contemporary art curator and exhibit designer for both the Monterey Museum of Art and the Triton Museum of Art. He has also taught a variety of art and design courses at San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, various community colleges in the Bay Area, and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. D’Estout has also served as a juror and guest curator for numerous galleries and arts organizations throughout California. Previous Next

< Back Sieglinde Van Damme AUG 29 - JAN 10 - futility in three acts - Sieglinde Van Damme is a multi-disciplinary artist based in California, although she used to be an economist with European roots. Focused on abstraction as an open, undefined potential to new interpretations, her work reflects on the deep layers of our individual past histories and the complex dynamics behind big life choices. Her message:"re-imagine what else is possible.”™ Sieglinde holds both an MS Economics from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and a Master in Fine Arts from San Jose State University. As an award-winning artist, she participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions spanning the US, Europe, Russia, India, and Japan. Sieglinde’s art and writings have been published in various catalogs and media publications both in the US and in Europe. Her art is included in private and corporate collections around the globe, including Sotheby’s International Realty in France - Monaco. Award highlights include the Lorenzo il Magnifico Award for video art in Italy; the Belle Foundation Grant for artistic merit as well as the Leigh Weimers Artist Award in Silicon Valley, CA; a Grant from the San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs' Creative Industries Incentive Fund through the Center for Cultural Innovation; both a 2021 & 2022 Certificate of Artistic Merit from the jury at the Luxembourg Art Prize; and a 2024 Opulent Art Global Art Award. About the Artist: While currently focused on painting and mixed media, my broader interdisciplinary practice includes photography and video installation. Across all mediums, my work explores identity, adaptation, memory, and the ways we continually negotiate who we are as we move through life. Having immigrated from Belgium to California in 1998, I became interested in how identity is continually negotiated between personal history and social context. I realized that adapting to a new situation with intention asks us to consider what stays, what can be let go of, and what new choices become available in response to changing circumstances. The three videos presented in this exhibition approach these questions from different perspectives. Through image, sound, and movement, they explore what happens when life changes course. What remains? What evolves? And how do we stay connected to who we are while allowing new possibilities to emerge? Although these works were created during a period when my practice expanded beyond painting into video and photography, they reveal many of the ideas that continue to shape my work today. Whether through video, photographic traces, or abstraction, I am interested in creating spaces where multiple interpretations - and new possibilities - can coexist and where uncertainty opens the door to curiosity. At its core, this exhibition reflects a belief that life itself is a creative act. That identity is not fixed. That meaning is not singular. And that we often have far more freedom, possibility, and authorship in shaping our own lives than we realize. The thread connecting it all remains the same: “re-imagine what else is possible”™ - futility in three acts - What happens after something breaks? Structured in three movements - destruction, reconstruction, and re-imagination - this work examines the human impulse to create meaning from irreversible change. Empty wine bottles are shattered, gathered, reorganized, and painstakingly reassembled into new forms. Yet despite every effort, the original object can never fully return. The work reflects on transformation itself. Whether imposed from the outside or chosen from within, there are moments in all our lives when change carries a point of no return. We may attempt to repair what was lost or restore what once felt familiar. Instead, something else emerges: not restoration, but a new relationship with what remains. More than a collection of broken glass, the work asks what kind of meaning can be created from fragments. It suggests that value does not arise from returning to what was, but from engaging with what is and deciding what comes next. Viewed today, the piece feels especially relevant. We are living through a time of rapid change, uncertainty, and constant disruption. Old assumptions are being challenged, familiar structures are shifting, and many people find themselves navigating circumstances they never anticipated. In that context, - futility in three acts - becomes a reflection on our capacity to discover new possibilities and choose what to build from here. - futility in three acts – video with sound, total playtime: 22min 53sec visuals by Sieglinde Van Damme music/sound by Cole Ingraham & Sieglinde Van Damme Previous Next

< Back Futbol: The Art of the Game Group Exhibition MAY 16 - AUG 2 Fútbol: The Art of the Game Athletics and sports have been a part of human history for thousands of years. As time has passed, the games have changed but one thing remains constant – community. Sports provides us with another means to come together, to collaborate, to share something exciting and meaningful with each other. Art has also been around for thousands of years, and to celebrate the upcoming FIFA World Cup* soccer games coming to Santa Clara this summer, the Triton Museum of Art is hosting a special exhibition combining both sports and art – Fútbol: The Art of the Game. Soccer, also known as fútbol, is a sport played by millions of people around the world. It’s also a sport that combines passion and community. This special exhibition features one-of-a-kind artwork from a talented group of diverse Bay Area artists. The exhibition is also a special fundraiser for the Museum. These skilled artists have given their time and talents to provide the Museum with donated works that corresponds with the soccer theme – their art, in their style, will either incorporate an actual soccer ball or a recreated one. All works will be for sale through the Museum, starting at the artists’ reception on May 16, 2026 at 12:00 pm, and through the duration of the exhibition.** All funds received from the sale of these works goes directly back to the Triton Museum of Art to help support our mission of art, community, and education. We wish to thank all of the participating artists – it is because of you, our community, that we exist and thrive. *The Triton Museum of Art is not affiliated with FIFA or any professional soccer or sports association. ** Artwork will be sold on a first come, first served basis. We will not be reserving works for anyone; they must be purchased directly from the Museum in person starting at the artists’ reception. If artwork is not sold at the reception, it will remain for sale through the duration of the exhibition. Any sold works will remain on view in the Triton Museum for the duration of the exhibition and may be picked up by the buyer from the Museum once the exhibition has concluded. About the Artist: • Boyles, Sean • Cao, Trung • Crow, Jonathan • Dell’Aquila, Mei-Ying • Dell’Aquila, Ron • Dellicarpini, Steve • Diamond, Jemal • Engel, Mark • Foley, Donny • Harris-Sintamarian, Emanuela • Itzhak, Hila • Jimenez, Pancho • Larson, Dean • Lawson, Lorraine • Lock, Hana • Lost San Jose • Machuca, Miguel • Mertke, James • Metcalf, Preston • Owen, Jeff • Paluzzi, Peter • Perea, Jonathan • Ramirez, Francisco • Rana, Priyanka • Rezaei, Alieh • Samdani, Ayesha • Tandem Painting (McDonough, Suzette and Whitehouse, James) • Thompson, Kori • Vu, Cedric Artist Information PDF Previous Next

< Back Jonathan Crow JAN 10 - MAY 3 Cul-de-sac 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. About the Artist: 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

< Back Tamera Avery SEP 21 - JAN 5 Tamera Avery: Slipstream The Triton Museum of Art presents Tamera Avery: Slipstream by Bay Area Artist, Tamera Avery. At once surreal and sublime, Tamera Avery's monumental paintings feature masked and costumed figures situated in liminal spaces. From glacial edges to post-nuclear bunkers, these environments are imbued with both potential and uncertainty: within them, young individuals navigate unconventional paths, transforming everyday objects into symbolic armor. Tamera Avery: Slipstream will be showcased in the Permanent Collection Gallery. About the Artist: My work is a celebration of youth, where the young are the champions of change in flawed social, political, and environmental landscapes. Faced with ever-mounting global change, the young have the knowledge to understand what is at stake and—with their increasingly powerful voices—the ability to rearrange the balance of power. To shift this balance visually, my subjects wear masks and costumes that augment their agency and the space they take up. Originally prompted by folk carnivals celebrating the arrival of spring, I employ found images and objects along with homemade costumes to portray figures modest in composition but heroic in execution. Through a process starting with collage, isolated images function as vocabulary, deconstructing visual truths and reconstructing them into stories that call for action. Using imagery from the White House to Chernobyl, icebergs to abandoned ships, I work at the intersection of the current reality and the possibility of change to tell a story of hope in a landscape of despair—with armor-clad youth standing in the path of destruction. Previous Next

< Back Dean Larson AUG 16 - JAN 4 Urban Visions: Life in Motion Artist Dean Larson was raised in Palmer, Alaska where he first learned painting under the mentorship of Alaskan Artist Fred Machetanz. After graduating from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon Dean moved to Baltimore, Maryland for graduate studies at the Schuler's School of Fine Art and Towson University. In 1997 the artist moved to San Francisco, CA. He has long been associated with the resurgence of the American Contemporary Realist movement. Dean has written books, been featured in numerous art periodicals, has mounted over twenty-five solo exhibitions, and has been featured in over fifty group shows in museums and galleries across the U. S. He is a well-traveled artist who thrives on diversity and is constantly searching for new subjects. He is adept with cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, and interiors. Through the use of compelling compositions and harmonious colors he draws the viewer into his canvases. Dean's commissioned portraits and studio paintings can be found in museums and other public collections in the United States and Europe. Larson also has taught painting (mainly cityscape and landscape) at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco since 2006. He maintains a studio near Mission Dolores, the original Spanish Mission in San Francisco. Larson has painted the portraits of Senator Ted Stevens which hangs in the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. and Senator Mark Hatfield which hangs at Willamette University. Larson's work is also included in the collections of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), the Alaska State Capitol, Triton Museum of Art and Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. For more information visit www.deanmlarson.com , or www.instagram.com/deanlarson07 About the Artist: Dean Larson Urban Visions: Life in Motion Over the past several years two central themes have consistently attracted and inspired my artist’s eye. The first motif is life in the city. Having relocated from Alaska and Maryland to California in 1997, the Bay area and in particular, San Francisco, became an instant source of diverse and compelling subject matter. From Russian Hill to North Beach, from Market Street to Golden Gate Park, the city that changes constantly presents new perceptions and subjects. The focus on what it means to be a contemporary realist is constantly at the forefront when planning new work. It’s never enough to simply copy what’s in front of you. There is a desire to go deeper and search for what is most significant and essential. Intentional soft blurs contrast with hard edges to have objects and figures come forth and recede and fuse to backgrounds within pictorial spaces. With my second subject, figures, I search for accidental moments where people reveal the variety of the human experience and also show glimpses of what it means to be living and working in modern society. Sometimes it is a lone figure and other times there is a group of figures where the relationships between the figures are closely observed, highlighting the gestures of each figure and the group as a whole. The search for mass shapes and abstract patterns that, by working through my painting process, eventually becomes more realistic, unique designs challenge and inspire me to keep painting each and every day. Previous Next

< Back Priyanka Rana AUG 30 - JAN 11 Our Stories Live Underground Born in India in 1980 and now based in San Francisco's Bay Area, I established my full-time sculpture practice in 2018 after serving as Vice President in the exhibitions industry and working as a market research consultant. My practice centers on an intimate dialogue with wood—specifically naturally felled trunks that I transform into abstract sculptures exploring ecology, memory, and cross-cultural connection. Largely self-taught, I have developed a distinctive sculptural language through direct experimentation with materials, allowing me to create techniques that emerge organically from the wood itself rather than from prescribed methodologies. My technical approach lies in a unique process I have developed with fire. Drawing from my Indian heritage, where fire represents sacred transformation, I use controlled charring to "paint" wooden surfaces, revealing the hidden architecture of growth rings and grain. This technique—exemplified in my redwood sculptures—involves expanding the wood's surface area threefold through careful carving, then applying fire to create rich, textured finishes that speak to cycles of destruction and renewal. The resulting works transform solid mass into something ethereal, making visible the temporal layers embedded within the material. Beyond wood, I incorporate culturally significant textiles—saris and lungis from my multicultural community, as well as individual sari threads that I weave into carved surfaces—that bridge themes of migration and intimate history with larger environmental narratives. Recent explorations have expanded into aluminum, metal casting of wood forms, and 3D printing, maintaining my focus on the intersection of traditional craft and contemporary concerns. My work has been widely exhibited across California, featured in prominent arts festivals, and realized through public art commissions that engage directly with local communities. I hold degrees in Mathematics and Economics and an MBA. About the Artist: It took me a long time to own that I am an artist. Beginning my sculpture practice late in life, I discovered in wood a collaborative partner willing to tell stories—both mine and its own. The title of this exhibition, borrowed from Terry Tempest Williams' "When Women Were Birds," speaks to the hidden narratives that live beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to emerge. This exhibition spans several series from my practice, exploring themes of memory, nostalgia, and destiny while reflecting on healing, human behavior, and our relationships with the natural world. It bridges the cultural heritage of my Indian origins with the multicultural fabric of my Bay Area home. In our increasingly disconnected world, trees offer profound lessons about interdependence—their underground networks remind us that isolation is an illusion, that we are constantly in relationships through unseen connections. As you encounter these works, I invite you to pause and reflect: Which of your own stories live underground? What narratives are waiting to be revealed? These sculptures ask for slower looking, deeper listening, reminding us that the most profound stories—like the most resilient forests—grow their strongest connections underground, in the dark, patient spaces where transformation quietly takes root. Previous Next

< Back Nathan Oliveira JAN 11 - APR 19 Nathan Oliveira: Variations on Form Born in Oakland, California, Nathan Oliveira was a leading artist in the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Oliveira earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in fine art from the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in San Francisco. He was a professor of art at Stanford University for 32 years. About the Artist: Oliveira’s invented forms live just outside the realm of possibility. The artist Nathan Oliveira (1928-2010) liked to say that he thought of himself as an abstract artist whose work “had to be about something.” That “something,”—most often a human figure, but sometimes an animal, wing, head or mask—was the physical manifestation of Oliveira’s poetic imagination; an invented form that lives just outside the realm of possibility. Over the long span of his career Oliveira worked in a variety of media including painting, drawing, lithography monotype and sculpture, challenging himself to create forms with an air of mystery that allowed room for his viewers to find their own meanings. “I set it up to the degree that it gives you something recognizable to interact with,” he once offered, "and if you’re creative, you create your own metaphor.” The works on view at the Triton, selected from the artist’s estate by him son Joseph, will present examples of Oliveira’s evocations of form in both two and three dimensions. In the Cowell Room Gallery oil paintings ranging from small studies of faces to a monumental canvas from the "Windhover" series will demonstrate the artist’s engagement with the flexibility of the oil medium. A selection of bronzes—including masks and figures—will show how Oliveira’s painterly sensibility remained tangible in the sensitive surfaces of his three dimensional works. In the Triton’s Rotunda, where works on paper will be featured, examples of the artist’s "Imi" and "Santa Fe" watercolors of female figures will join a series of lithographs from the 1960s. Olivera’s fluid watercolors, in which he allowed the paint to form rivers and pools that soak into the paper then coalesce into figures, are among his most distinctive inventions. Committed to the idea that making art involved finding unique forms Nathan Oliveira: Variations of Form will offer a fresh opportunity for viewers to encounter the myriad forms of his personal universe and appreciate them on their own terms. Collaborations: In tandem with this exhibition, Pacific Art League of Palo Alto will also be showcasing another exhibition of Nathan Oliveira’s work - Origins of Flight: The Windhover Studies by Nathan Oliveira (February 7 - March 25, 2025). Previous Next