Programs

"This Fall marks the 10th anniversary of OneBeat, the series of revolutionary international collaborations led by our Found Sound Nation team. This is some of the most noble work we know of - using music to build bridges across geographies and nationalities and cultures, redefining and expanding our artistic family, giving deep and meaningful opportunities to musicians coming from a wide spectrum of disciplines and traditions, underlining the recognition that our communities need to be central to how we all make music together. In honor of these 10 years, we are excited to showcase some of this groundbreaking work in…

NOW HEAR THIS! is an outdoor exhibition and sound festival featuring the work of thirty-one different local and national sound artists, composers, instrument-builders, performers, and visual artists for whom listening plays a vital role in their creative process. Visitors are invited to consider the following questions: How can listening disrupt or enhance our sense of place and space? Can the act of listening produce new forms of public engagement and awareness? How can we listen more deeply and differently? The exhibition includes five newly commissioned site-specific works of sound-based art by national and local artists Taraneh Hemami, Walter Kitundu, Hugh…

In March 2016, Montalvo launched an open call for proposals for our annual summer Art on the Grounds festival. We asked would-be applicants, “if you had five hours to present a work of sculpture in a public park, what would you create?” The eleven works on view at the festival opening, featuring more than 35 artists and their collaborators from the Bay Area, Greater US, and beyond―represented the final projects selected through this process. These mostly new works represented the expanded field of contemporary sculpture, ranging from temporary installations, interventions, gestures, actions, participatory engagements, spectacular intrusions, and performances. Many of…

In his expansive new installation, Particles: A Painting in Ten Chapters, James Gouldthorpe explores the passage of time and the aggregation of the self over a lifetime. The artist projects forward into the future and reaches back into the past, mixing humor with melancholy as he explores birth, childhood, adolescence, middle and old age, and death, and reflects on both the poignant and absurd nature of existence. Comprised of around two thousand individual mixed media paintings, Gouldthorpe developed Particles over a three-year period while an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artists Program. With this new body of work, he continues…

Co-commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center and the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, XLIII: A Contemporary Requiem was a site-specific performance work created by Mexico City-based composer and sound artist Andres Solis with choreographer and dancer Sandra Milena Gómez in association with the Santa Clara University Chamber Singers, and conductor Scot Hanna-Weir.The requiem is traditionally an act or token of remembrance for the dead and has inspired compositions by such musical luminaries as Mozart, Verdi, Brahms, and Dvořák. This immersive contemporary reworking of the genre by Solis and Gómez mixed traditional elements of organ and choir with…

Home to formal gardens, oak and redwood forests, and various exotic plantings, Montalvo's horticultural diversity serves as inspiration for a series of new works created by Lucas Artist Fellows Kija Lucas, Monica Lundy, Hector Dionicio Mendoza, and Fieldworks Collaborative (Trena Noval and Ann Wettrich). Identifying, collecting, and documenting various specimens of plant life discovered while exploring Montalvo's 175-acre public park, these artists have adopted creative processes that resemble the activities of the backyard naturalist. Through sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper, viewers are invited to reflect on the ill-defined boundary between the natural and unnatural, and the intimate entanglement…