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…

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, 2023–January 15, 2024 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…

Modern Women celebrates the arrival of twenty works of art to the Museum on indefinite loan from a private collection. The art presented in this gallery is a testament to the imagination, experimentation, and fortitude of women artists who have enriched the world with their creations. The variety of work on view spans scale, media, and artistic approach—from gestural painting…

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed a schism in the arts as painters and sculptors in Europe and the Americas began to break with academic traditions. Rallying under the banner of expressive freedom and an independence from established institutions, these artists began to explore new social realities, and the even more radical concept of a purely abstract art….

October 29, 2022–February 12, 2023     A powerful new installation by Justin Sterling (b. 1992, Houston, Texas) immerses visitors in a beautiful space constructed of unconventional materials and provoking contemplation of the role of bad faith in society. Chapel of the Rocks is an approximately 1000-square-foot structure, suffused with light refracted through numerous stained-glass windows, which the artist has…

November 5, 2022–March 5, 2023   Artist Lisa Ross describes their relationship to Uyghur shrines and culture as a story of “fate and possibly faith.” An avid traveler drawn to desert landscapes, the photo and video artist first visited the Taklamakan Desert along the former Silk Route of the Uyghur Region, officially called Xinjiang (or “New Territory) by the People’s…

May 13, 2023–August 27, 2023   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…

November 12, 2022–February 12, 2023 Sergio Hernández (b. 1957, Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, México) is among the leading contemporary Mexican artists today and is currently based in Oaxaca in southern Mexico. After completing his studies at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Hernández gained international recognition after exhibiting his work in France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. His…