Emulation and Admiration: Two Stories of Collecting European Art European Master Paintings from San Diego Museum of Art and the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo   Now Touring Touring Schedule March 11–June 8, 2025 National Museum of Western Art (Tokyo, Japan) June 25–October 13, 2025 Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art (Kyoto, Japan)   Emulation and Admiration: Two Stories…

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 ibn Muhammad al-Qazwini (d. 1283)   Wonders of Creation explores intersections of art and science in Islamic intellectual and visual culture from…

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…