September 6, 2025–March 1, 2026     Alfredo Castañeda: Beyond Surrealism brings together thirty-five paintings from outstanding private collections in North America and Spain for the first museum retrospective of the artist’s work in the United States. The exhibition covers five decades of the artist’s wide-ranging international career and his unique exploration of Surrealist themes through deeply personal iconography and…

August 2, 2025–January 25, 2026 The collection of Ken and Jacki Widder, prominent researchers and business leaders in biotechnology who have donated significant holdings of photographs to The San Diego Museum of Art, resembles a microcosm of the major crosscurrents in mid-twentieth-century photography in the United States. Its breadth is vast, ranging from portraiture and photojournalism to architectural views, motion…

August 9, 2025–January 11, 2026     John Gutmann (1905–1998) and Max Yavno (1911–1985) were photographers who spent most of their careers in California’s two largest cities of the mid-twentieth century. Gutmann fled Nazi persecution in Germany and immigrated to San Francisco in 1933 while Yavno, a native New Yorker, moved to California in 1945, living in San Francisco and…

The early decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive break in the history of art, as painters and sculptors across Europe and the Americas challenged traditional approaches to realistic representation. Embracing expressive freedom and seeking independence from established institutions, these artists turned their focus to new social realities and the potential of purely abstract art. In the decades that…

July 11, 2025–January 4, 2026       Conversations in Art is an initiative that invites local artists to engage in meaningful dialogue with works from our permanent collection and on loan to the Museum. This first installment centers on the theme of Dignity—what it means, how we recognize it, and how art allows us to reflect on it in ourselves…

June 21, 2025–January 4, 2026     Berlin-based artist Mirae kh RHEE, born in Seoul and raised in the United States after her adoption, traces her personal journey through traditional Korean objects, ancient myths, and the glittering constellations once used to chart a course through the unknown. The immersive installation presented here explores the search for belonging within the vast…

May 10-August 10, 2025   Impressionism’s radical break with tradition in the 1870s and 1880s gave rise to the first Modernist movements in France. The artists represented in this gallery range from Post-Impressionism (a term coined in 1910) to the Pointillist, Fauve, and Nabis movements. Ultimately, each artist followed an independent path of Modernism, challenging established conventions in the first…

May 31, 2025–April 5, 2026   See approximately 40 Impressionist works from Europe and the United States alike, drawn from the Museum’s rich holdings in this area as well as significant loans. Few artistic movements have captivated the imagination more enduringly than Impressionism, originally a term of derision implying slap-dash facture. The now-beloved bold, bright colors thickly applied with a…

April 5–May 18, 2025   For nearly a century, Young Art, the longest-running program in The San Diego Museum of Art’s history, has celebrated the creative voices of youth artists. This forty-eighth biennial exhibition marks an exciting new chapter as it merges with the strong tradition of the Youth Exhibition from the Museum of Photographic Arts (now MOPA@SDMA), bringing together…

August 2, 2025–February 8, 2026     Experience the powerful sculptures of Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) in this exhibition marking the one-hundred-year anniversary of his birth. A visionary artist, Chillida’s body of work is closely linked to the landscape and traditions of his Basque Country homeland in northern Spain and frequently invokes the earth, sea, wind, and light, as well as…