The San Francisco Museum of Art is closed for the year while its downtown facility undergoes a major renovation and expansion. But that hasn’t meant the end to SFMOMA exhibitions. Pursuant to the slogan “We’ve temporarily moved… Everywhere,” the museum is staging exhibitions all around the Bay Area—with a special emphasis on the Silicone Valley town of Los Altos.

Situated close by Stanford University, Los Altos is the site of the garage where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the first Apple Computers. But technology happens behind closed doors; for most residents the town’s quiet avenues and leafy parks were ripe for an art invasion.

On display through the end of February, the multi-site Project Los Altos features new work by nine artists from around the country and from Europe, including San Jose native Chris Johanson, a sculptor now working out of a studio in Highland Park, a neighborhood of Los Angeles; Czech performance artist Katerina Seda; and art educator and theorist Charles Garoian, a California native who spent 17 years teaching art at Los Altos High School.

The curators asked that the artists “respond to the history and culture” of Los Altos, no easy task considering the town was only incorporated in 1952, and is as placid and Caucasian as any place in the Golden State. Each artist brought their own sensibility, and the result was more visual excitement than anyone could expect.

Garioan, now a professor of art education at the University of Pennsylvania, got a bit of a head start; his exhibit consists of documentation of the work he and his students produced at the high school in the sixties and seventies. At a time of general cultural ferment, Garioan had Los Altos at the cutting edge of innovation.

Chris Johanson’s work is more recent, and more muted. He placed half a dozen pieces around town, including several free-standing doors, complete with frame and sill—portals inviting thought or action. His largest piece is a 20-foot tall inflatable question mark, asking not an answer so much as posing a query.

Seda traveled the farthest to get to Los Altos, but her exhibition may be the most intimate. Building on a practice that centers on the daily lives of ‘ordinary people,’ Seda staged Everything is Perfect: Los Altos World Records. Town residents were invited to nominate themselves as Number One in any category they might choose; it might be Longest Beard; it might be Largest Variety of Back-Yard Fruit Trees. By focusing on unique attributes, Seda underscored her theme: that “each of us is exceptional in some way.”

The exhibition is scheduled to close March 2, but many of the works will remain. They won’t establish Los Altos as a cultural hotspot, but the denizens of Silicone Valley may never look at the sleepy little town the same way again.

Article sponsored by SFMOMA