This year, we received 600+ individual submissions, more high-quality pieces than our gallery can hold, making selecting the final pieces for the exhibition a difficult process. Our selection committee saw high merit in each of these honorable mentions and wanted to show appreciation for the thoughtfulness and skill of each artwork. Although these students aren’t exhibiting artists in this year’s exhibition, we wanted to feature their artwork and statements on our blog to honor their effort, talent, and perspective.

Chieko Shimizu Fujioka, a glass mosaic artist based in San Jose, California, specializes in public installations and private residential commissions. Born and raised in Japan, Chieko established her career after moving to the Bay Area and is now entering her pre-mid-career phase as a professional artist. Here, she shares her journey, along with the mindsets that have helped her maintain resilience and a healthy balance between her demanding career and personal life.

This year, we received 700+ individual submissions more high-quality pieces than our gallery can hold, making selecting the final pieces for the exhibition a difficult process. Our selection committee saw high merit in each of these honorable mentions and wanted to show appreciation for the thoughtfulness and skill of each artwork. Although these students aren’t exhibiting artists in this year’s exhibition, we wanted to feature their artwork and statements on our blog to honor their effort, talent, and perspective.

Hi everyone!

Thanks so much for coming to see my show and sending me some questions. Extra big thanks to curator Allison Railo and the installation crew. It was such a great experience to have Allison climb into my brain and see what she pulled out. Seeing how she chose to display my work has helped me make new connections about it. 

Shirin is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. She focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflects on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.

Artist Holly Lane has reimagined a new art form of her own invention, in which each component—painting and frame—is fundamental to the work as a whole. Holly has exhibited in two solo shows at NUMU, Not Enough Time to Love the World and Holly Lane–In the Artist’s Studio. Read on to hear her answer questions about her artistic practice, goals, and more!

This year, we had a record number of 810 individual submissions and many high-quality pieces. As we only have one gallery for ArtNow that holds a limited number of physical pieces, selecting the final pieces for the exhibition is a difficult process. Our selection committee saw high merit in each of these honorable mentions and wanted to show appreciation for the thoughtfulness and skill of each artwork. Although these students won’t be exhibiting artists in this year’s exhibition, we wanted to feature their artwork and statements on our blog to honor their effort, talent, and perspective. Scroll to see this year’s honorable mentions. 

What a year! We were blown away by the thoughtfulness of submissions across the board, and our team was faced with the difficult task of narrowing down the hundreds of submissions we received to the small percentage of pieces that can physically fit in our gallery. This year, we received 810+ submissions from 45 high schools across Santa Clara County and will be exhibiting the work of 82 student artists from 26 high schools…

Meet Ellie Lin, an emerging young artist who just won the Best in Show AND People’s Choice awards for NUMU’s ArtNow 2023 Annual High School Juried Exhibition Unarmed Truth. Ellie graduated from Los Altos High School this year, and will be attending Rhode Island School of Design this fall, to pursue fine art and illustration. In this post Ellie shares some reflections on her involvement in ArtNow and her own art practice. Follow Ellie on Instagram @dynojelatoe to stay up to date on what she creates next!

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.

During the second call for interns this Spring, we received over 70 applications from students across Santa Clara County, and onboarded 7 new interns to join 2 from our first cohort, for a total of 9 members of the Teen Council for the Spring of 2023. This group of interns will be working on some special social media projects, helping with big events like the ArtNow 2023 Award Ceremony and Celebration, and learning how to give exhibition tours! Scroll through this blog for some updates on what they’ve been up to in the last few months.

Inspired by NUMU’s exhibitions that explore land as a core concept, we invite you to reflect on your own relationship with the land.

In both its strength and fragility, land is a source of pleasure, beauty and bounty, inspiring artists from every era. We have built our lives on the land; it is our physical foundation, essential for the survival of all human life, wildlife, and Earth’s vegetation – it is literally the ground beneath our feet and the dust to which we return.

Visit NUMU’s lounge to participate in-person, or create at home!

Hello everyone, My name is Cesar Villanueva; I am a 24-year-old master's student born and raised in Woodland, California. A few things about me are that I am currently in the Applied Anthropology program at SJSU (San Jose State University). I am also an archaeologist/field tech and have experience working for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, Far Western Anthropological Research Group, and Kleinfelder. Lastly, I enjoy football, basketball, hiking, and exploring new foods and cities. As I worked for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, I was inspired to aid in their goal of receiving federal recognition. I wanted to pursue a graduate project that educates young learners about the tribe's past and present while bringing awareness to their presence and struggle.

Hello everyone! My name is Alexandra A. Garcia; I am a 23-year-old graduate student born and raised in San Jose, California. I am currently in the Applied Anthropology program at SJSU (San Jose State University). I wear many hats, both academically and professionally. I am a Research and Evaluation Assistant at the Exploratorium, a Research Assistant at both SJSU and its research foundation, an intern at NUMU, and I also have worked as a tribal monitor for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. In my free time, I enjoy watching tons of movies, taking long drives up the Santa Cruz mountains, spending time with my very hyper Border Collie, and traveling to new places. Because of my work for the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe and a previous project working on StoryMaps with Mosaic America, I was inspired to aid in any way I can to join the efforts of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe to reaffirm their federal recognition. I wanted to pursue a graduate project that educates the broader public on their rich history, culture, and places of significance in an educational and interactive way.

Weaving is a practice used by many cultures and artists all over the world! During our event Fall Family Art Day on Oct 1, NUMU presented a weaving activity, inviting participants to create a weaving inspired by diversity and what it means to you. Below are some instructions for you to get creative at home.

We encourage you to dive a little deeper and choose colors of yarn for your weaving that represents your own diversity such as your personality, your family’s heritage, your life story, a flag, or how diversity makes you feel. Our Artist in Residence Alexander Hernandez is a great example of how textiles can be used in a meaningful way to communicate ideas of identity, as seen in his work for the exhibition RETAZOS.

Hello all, my name is Toby Britton. I am almost 20 years old and I am currently pursuing my bachelors degree in Art at UCLA. Interning at NUMU this summer has served as a very informative introduction into the behind-the-scenes operations of a museum and an even greater step towards my aspirations of being a full-time artist. I am very grateful for this opportunity to become more involved with the museum that, through my past participation as an exhibiting artist, pushed me to pursue art more professionally.

For the first time ever, New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU) has launched an ArtNow Teen Council composed of 6 high school interns who are helping to elevate the ArtNow program to be more widely accessible and more relevant to teenagers living across Santa Clara County. Through establishing the ArtNow Teen Council, NUMU hopes to build a stronger partnership with student artists so that they aren’t just the recipients of the ArtNow program, but the architects. The dream is to establish this internship as a key feature of the ArtNow program. We received over 33 applications to the internship this summer, and we look forward to being able to offer more professional development opportunities to teens across the County in the months and years to come. This blog features our first ever 6 ArtNow Teen Council Members, representing different schools across the county, and gives a peek into what they’ve done so far, and what they are working on currently.