October 7, 2023–April 7, 2024 Featuring arts of the book from South Asia and the Persianate world, produced from the 12th through the 19th centuries, Pearls from the Ocean of Contentment explores new ways of presenting the Museum’s world-renowned Edwin Binney 3rd Collection of paintings, drawings, calligraphies, and manuscripts from South Asia, Iran, and Central Asia by focusing on the…

  A one-of-a-kind exhibition, O’Keeffe and Moore compares the work of two iconic modernists: American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and British sculptor Henry Moore. While these artists worked on different continents, their careers and contributions to the artistic development of the 20th century reveal many parallels. While Georgia O’Keeffe was holding up a small pelvic bone of a gray fox against…

The San Diego Museum of Art’s Edwin Binney 3rd Collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of South Asian paintings outside of India. Numbering over 1,400 works, the collection was assembled by Edwin Binney 3rd (1925–1986), an heir to the Crayola fortune who was also interested in Persian painting, Ottoman and other Islamic art, ballet prints, and…

A Dialogue of Collections features approximately fifty renowned works from The San Diego Museum of Art permanent collection of Renaissance to early twentieth-century artwork and about forty complementary works from the permanent collection of Japan’s National Museum of Western Art. The unprecedented partnership between the two institutions is inspired in part by the parallel strengths of each collection, which will…

October 28, 2023–March 3, 2024     The special exhibition Korea in Color: A Legacy of Auspicious Images sheds light on the use of color in Korean painting—known as polychrome painting (chaesaekhwa)—and its role in Korean art and culture. Polychrome painting flourished during the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) and the colorful artworks created during this era, featuring symbolic images from sacred…

June 3–December 3, 2023     In 1980, American photographer Bruce Davidson (b. 1933) spent a year traveling the tracks of New York City’s subway system, photographing a full spectrum of people on their rumbling and sometimes gritty journeys through the city. Celebrating a recent gift from the collection of Wanda and Cam Garner, this exhibition presents a range of…

September 7, 2024–January 5, 2025   Wonderment is said to be a state of perplexity that comes over a human being when he fails to understand the reason for a thing or how it affects him. —Zakariyya al-Qazwini (d. 1283)   Wonders of Creation explores intersections of art and science in Islamic intellectual and visual culture from the 7th century…

March 25–May 15, 2023     Young Art 2023: Comfort and Calm presents thoughtful works of art that use visual storytelling to share students’ experiences with finding, receiving, or offering comfort and calm. Youth artists throughout the San Diego and Tijuana regions were encouraged to express interpretations of the theme, including contrasting ideas of discomfort and discord. Kindergarten through twelfth…

March 18–September 17, 2023     Drink wine in Kabul citadel, send round the cup again and again For there is both mountain and water, and both city and countryside —Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur)   Descriptions extoling the diverse geography forming present-day Afghanistan abound in the memoirs of Babur (r. 1526–30), a descendant of the Timurid rulers of Iran and…

February 18–November 19, 2023 Local artist Carlo Miranda (Filipino-American, b. 1988) showcases ten recent paintings in this intimate exhibition. Miranda’s works were first exhibited in this museum in 2020 as part of a display responding to the pandemic. Working as a registered nurse in San Diego during this time had a profound impact on his use of painting as a…