Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape @ SJMA
Join artist Pao Houa Her as she discusses her work in Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape, currently on view at SJMA and at locations around downtown San José. Following the program, Her will be signing copies of the new exhibition catalog. This program is presented in partnership with SJSU King Library.
Creative Minds—SJMA’s premier Artist Talk series—allows audiences a chance to experience creatives in action by hearing directly from artists about their process and practice.
About the Exhibition
Pao Houa Her’s practice engages with the legacies, potentials, and aesthetics of landscape and portrait photography traditions, examining the complex intertwining of desire, homeland, and artifice. Rooted in the experience of her Hmong community and shaped by family experiences and lore passed down by her elders, Her’s work centers women as the knowledge bearers of both past and future. Using a formally rigorous photographic approach, Her explores constructions of homeland that resonate across diasporas.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is an unconventional survey of over 20 years. Seen through the expansive titular series, it traces conceptual ties between past series, new work, and work still under development, connecting California agricultural landscapes to the jungles of Laos, poppy fields in Minnesota, and beyond. Her’s images are also dispersed across downtown San José in unexpected place—outside and indoors, on walls and on screens—a reminder of the tenacity of diasporic communities flourishing throughout our city.
The exhibition is co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and will be presented at both organizations simultaneously.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at the San José Museum of Art, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Shebogyan, Wisconsin.
Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is made possible with lead support from the Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The San José Museum of Art presentation is also made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, Wanda Kownacki, and Mary Mocas and Marv Tseu.
Images in downtown spaces are presented in partnership with SJSU King Library, San José Downtown Association, Mezcal Restaurant, and Team San José.