Art of California

Many of the artworks in this exhibition feature common objects: cardboard boxes scavenged from sidewalks, encyclopedias purchased online, and beloved keepsakes inherited from grandparents. Such humble, unexpected origins belie the alchemies that occur in the process of making — and result in artworks inestimably greater than the sum of their parts. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the works in this exhibition bring to the foreground the physicality of the things around us. Along the way, they reveal what is intangible but no less powerful, from private symbols and family lore to forgotten flash points calling for public remembrance.