Upcoming Exhibitions

This year the Palo Alto Art Center presents our Year of Legacy, highlighting our 55th anniversary and celebrating the Art Center's role of providing a community resource for creative expression for more than five decades.

Big Feelings

January 23-April 11, 2027

Nathan Oliveira, Profile, 2010, oil on canvas, 66 x 50 in., Courtesy of Oliveira Art LLC

Nathan Oliveira, one of the central figures of the Bay Area Figurative movement and an integral member of the Palo Alto artistic community, is best known for his singular abstracted and attenuated figures placed in ambiguous void-like spaces, isolated and solitary. Big Feelings explores the intentionality and impact of Oliveira’s use and treatment of figuration as an expression of his state of mind and mental health. In dark periods of his life, Oliveira embraced the expressionistic power of darkness, his figures emerging from shadow, while in times of joy, he utilized warm, rich color palettes and exultant poses that lift and embrace his subjects.

Placing works by Bay Area contemporaries and successors from the 1960s through today in dialogue with Oliveira’s deep bodies of work across media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, Big Feelings seeks to excavate Bay Area art’s expressionistic history, looking at artists’ emotional and psychological well-being as a driving motivator behind their artmaking. Through a close examination of Oliveira’s work from the 1960s through 2010, including his extensive work in lithography, monotype, and etching, variously paired and in conversation with works by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Koak, and Gregory Rick, the exhibition provides avenues of exploration into amplified emotion. While addressing complex feelings of solitude, aloneness, unhappiness, and existential contemplation, the exhibition also delves into moments of elation, joy, and the ecstatic, looking carefully at the artists’ formal and expressionistic decisions as sources of communication. This exhibition is guest curated by Morgann Trumbull.

From March 10-June 10, 2027 Further Triennial will celebrate Northern California’s creative and cultural life, bringing together more than 80 arts organizations across the Greater Bay Area. The Palo Alto Art Center is thrilled to participate in the first edition, Around Here. We look forward to celebrating Northern California’s vibrant art historical past and present with you! Find more information about the Further Triennial at this link.