ArtNow is an annual juried Santa Clara County high school art exhibition and educational program, presented by New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU). The ArtNow Exhibition and supporting programs offer opportunities for high school student artists, from Palo Alto to Gilroy, to gain real-world experience in participating in a juried museum exhibition.
Each year, a new theme is chosen for the exhibition and students are asked to submit works based on that theme. $10,000 in scholarships and awards are given to participating students. Students have the opportunity to win awards in 8 artistic categories as well as an overall Best in Show award and a People’s Choice award. The categories are Painting, Drawing, Mixed Media, Printmaking, Sculpture, Photography, Digital Art & Video/Animation. The awards in each category and the Best in Show award are determined by a panel of guest judges, who are local university faculty and established practicing artists. NUMU intentionally recruits a diverse array of jurors from different cultural and artistic backgrounds who can all speak to specific medium categories in ArtNow, depending on their own professional art practices. Our judges for the 12th annual ArtNow Exhibition Unarmed Truth are Kathy Aoki, Binh Danh, Mitra Fabian, James Morgan, and Rupy C. Tut. Learn more about the 2023 judges below!
Judges meeting at NUMU to decide awards on March 31, 2023
Kathy Aoki
Kathy Aoki is a multi-disciplinary visual artist who uses satire to critique the absurd value systems that dominate gender, pop culture, and politics. Her printmaking work can be found in major collections across the U.S. including the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. She has been an artist-in-residence at numerous venues including MacDowell (NH), the Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), and Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium). Aoki has completed commissions for the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Her studio is located in the San Francisco Bay Area where she is a Professor of Studio Art at Santa Clara University.
Kathy Aoki working on a lithograph
How long have you been making art and how did you get started as an artist?
My parents had a collection book from MOMA when I was growing up and, come to think of it, that might have had some influence at the start. We would also go to the Isabel Stuart Gardner Museum and other art museums on a regular basis - thanks to my mom. I finished high school in Sacramento and visited the Crocker Art Museum fairly often. At the university, I was a French major, but I think I took a grand total of five semesters of printmaking with Sylvia Lark, Don Farnsworth, and George Miyasaki.
What is your art about? What is the main message, question or goal that you are trying to communicate/represent with your art?
I express my bitter disappointment in beauty, pop culture, and political trends by subverting traditional museum formats with a twist of humor. Leveraging the exaggerated authority implied by museum settings, my installations use humor to comment on extreme beauty trends, consumer obsession with cute products, and gender-based privilege disparity. In addition to embedding commentary in fictitious artifacts, prints, and dioramas, my inventive narratives come through in the satirical, authoritative language in the labels, audio tour, and performance “lectures."
Why is art important to you and for society?
When I do not make art for a long time I start to get "itchy" and do not feel right. Through my art projects, I am free to observe and comment on many aspects of our daily lives as well as past histories. I want the viewer to rethink values and conditions that we take for granted. My work lures the viewer in with familiar formats and humor. When they suddenly realize something is not quite right with the scene, the wheels start to turn. In addition to questioning societal value systems, I also like to instill a sense of wonder in the viewer.
Do you have any words of advice for emerging artists?
Be as polite and professional as possible, all of the time; it makes a difference. Keep learning throughout your whole life; there are so many different kinds of art to make! Always make your work to your fullest capacity.
Binh Danh
Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. As a child who immigrated to the US from war-torn Vietnam in 1979, his family stories and diasporic experience are the foundation for his investigative practice. In his highly acclaimed series of chlorophyll prints, Danh uses photosynthesis to directly print portraits from the Vietnam War era onto the leaf's surfaces. Danh is also noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape.
He earned a BFA from San José State University and an MFA from Stanford University. His awards include a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, and a 2019 Creative Work Fund, collaborating with the Visual and Performing Art Department at the California State University, Monterey Bay. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He is an associate professor of art at San José State University.
www.binhdanh.com
www.scenicdags.com
Instagram: @binhtdanh
https://www.radiusbooks.org/all-books/p/binh-danh-the-enigma-of-belonging
What makes you passionate about making art?
"Photography allows me to examine the world in all of its complexities. Whenever I head out to photograph, I never know what I will get. That not-knowing keeps me coming back and wanting more. It's the mystery, and art-making takes me through that mystery."
Do you have any words of advice for emerging artists?
"Never stop, keep emerging; if it's not working out, change it, but let creativity come to you. You would never know what's next to come."
Mitra Fabian
Mitra Fabian was born in Iran and raised in Boston. She received a BA in Art with an Anthropology minor from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. She located to Los Angeles in 1996 and returned to school in 2002 to receive an MFA from California State University, Northridge. As of May 2005, she lives and works in the Bay Area. Fabian has been showing her work nationally since 1997, had a solo show at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in 2007, and was commissioned by Google for several pieces in 2021. She has also shown with galleries and museums in California and Oregon, and is represented by the Billis Williams Gallery in Los Angeles. She has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis in Omaha, NE, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Centre d’Art Marnay, in France. Her work has been reviewed by several media organizations including Spark, KQED Television, Ruby Mag (an online Argentinean art magazine), Create Magazine, Angeleno Magazine, and Artweek. She is a professor at West Valley College teaching sculpture and ceramics.
How long have you been making art and how did you get started as an artist?
I feel like I've been making art my whole life, but I didn't start taking it seriously until I got to college.
What is your art about? What is the main message, question or goal that you are trying to communicate/represent with your art?
My work is about intersections of natural and artificial, nature and humans, control and chaos. I subvert industrial/everyday materials to express these subjects with sculptures, installation, and drawings.
Why is art important to you and for society?
Art is culture. Art is how we express our most honest thoughts. It is a critical language when other forms of expression don't suffice. Without it we may as well be a bunch of robots.
Do you have any words of advice for emerging artists?
Be tenacious. Do honest work.
James Morgan
James Morgan is an instructor for Digital Media Art at San José State University and is the Director of Ars Virtua. His work involves social interaction, coded culture and democratic structures in game-spaces and simulations. James curates art and games in physical and simulated spaces. He has an MFA in Digital Media Art from the CADRE Laboratory for New Media. He has worked as a curator for nearly ten years, and shown work nationally and internationally at venues such as 01SJ, ISEA2006, EMAF, Laguna Art Museum.
James Morgan, Memories of San Jose I, 2020
“Playing around with images from the last 18 months and making some new vague memories of San Jose and the house I lived in for 8 years”
Rupy C. Tut
Rupy C. Tut creates paintings on paper using handmade pigments. Her work is rooted in personal history; Tut is a grandchild of refugees, an immigrant, a mother, and a preservationist of traditional Indian painting techniques in use since 18th century AD. Tut’s meticulous line work explores the relationship to homeland, and the criteria of belonging as an immigrant and a woman. Her work has recently been highlighted through exhibitions at the deYoung Museum and Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as solo shows at the Triton Museum of Art and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco. Tut’s work is a part of significant private and public collections, including the Asian Art Museum and the deYoung museum in San Francisco. She continues to inspire her practice from her studio in Oakland, CA.
rupyctut.com
Instagram: @rupyctut
What makes you passionate about making art?
“Through my practice I bridge personal/community histories, lived experiences and the future as an immigrant and mother. In a world where most of our focus is on how we use the world around us, art maintains our poetic connection to the world. To question, to inquire, to investigate, to comment, and to speak are some of the more important reasons for my art making.”
Do you have any words of advice for emerging artists?
“Be truthful to yourself and your narrative. Be confident and outspoken about the essence and complications of your own story. Prioritize excellence over being commercial.”
