New Museum Los Gatos

New Museum Los Gatos (NUMU), formerly the Museums of Los Gatos, founded in 1965, is a public non-profit art and history museum located in the Civic Center Plaza in downtown Los Gatos. NUMU's mission is to engage community at the intersection of art, history and education through innovative, locally connected and globally relevant exhibitions, programs and experiences.

Exhibits

RETAZOS: New Works by Alexander Hernandez in Residence at New Museum Los Gatos
On view through Oct 9
Hernandez is a mixed-media artist who creates soft forms and layered quilted collages of textiles to represent stories of resilient individuals dealing with the experience of being othered, isolated, and excluded because of their identities. In Retazos, he begins to explore the use of writing on his quilts. The words painted onto the fabrics in Alexander’s work are lyrics from songs that Hernandez heard his mother listen to as a child. The words about loss and heartbreak ring true and earnest, reminding him of everything his mother was feeling.

Marie Cameron | Critical Masses, A Very Low Tide
On view through Oct 23
In her series Marie Cameron | Critical Masses, A Very Low Tide (June 17—Oct 23), Los Gatos artist Marie Cameron presents views of human impact on our delicate ecosystem, with a series of 9 pieces that explode with color, dense pattern, and familiar objects colliding with natural elements. For this exhibition Cameron adds 3 new pieces to the growing series that reminds the viewer of the fragile, causal relationships that affect the fate of our shared ecosystems.

Koons Ruins at the James Estate: In the Artist Studio featuring Kathy Aoki
On view through Nov 27
Kathy Aoki creates a faux-museum exhibit depicting a fictional character who collects and destroys artwork by Jeff Koons. The immersive satirical tableau, with a mesmeric diorama and new works on paper, brings the viewer in on the joke that reveals the hypocrisy and patriarchy of the art world, represented by Koon’s enormous financial success as a male artist who focuses on the banal.

Los Gatos History Project: Uncovering Untold Stories
Ongoing
The Los Gatos History Project is NUMU’s unprecedented effort to catalog and dive deeper into its permanent collection. This exhibition, the first to come out of the project, will present a selection of objects that have given the museum more questions than answers. By taking a critical look at these objects and the stories they tell, the exhibition will prompt visitors to ask: Who made these objects? Why did the museum collect them? What can we learn from them? And whose stories are missing? Through this exhibition, visitors will gain a greater understanding of museum collecting practices, and a greater appreciation for the hidden complexities of Los Gatos history.

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