Your Mind, This Moment: art and the practice of attention

http://sjmusart.org/exhibition/your-mind-moment-art-and-practice-attention

The average museum visitor spends fifteen seconds or less in front of a work of art—and spends a good portion of that time reading the wall label. A new exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art asks what might happen when viewers slow down. Your Mind, This Moment: art and the practice of attention, on view February 17, 2017 – August 27, 2017, exhibition is an experiment that presents contemporary artworks as objects of meditation. Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, it brings together the increasingly popular interest in mindfulness practices with the process of looking at art. It will feature works by Anne Appleby, Lesley Dill, Eric Fischl, Chris Fraser, Mineko Grimmer and Tam Van Tran, among others.

Your Mind, This Moment invites visitors to use the museum as a place to take time out from their hectic pace of life, for a moment of reflection or meditation. Bay Area mindfulness teachers Patrick Cook-Deegan, Max Erdstein, Anushka Fernandopulle, and Amari Romero-Thomas have created short audio meditations especially for the exhibition. The gallery will be designed with moveable seating and scrims, to create an atypically intimate museum space that also allows for solitude and focus. Introductory graphics include excerpts from mediation journals contributed by members of the American Leadership Forum—Silicon Valley (a diverse regional network of business and civic leaders) in response to a prototype, test version of the exhibition.