Are you heading down historic Route 66? Or maybe you'll be retracing the legend of Elvis at Graceland? Perhaps you'll pass through Valle, Arizona to visit Bedrock City (yes, as in The Flintstones). Wherever your travels take you this summer, send a postcard to the San Jose Museum of Art and your adventures will become part of the upcoming exhibition, Road Trip. Better yet, consider adding the San Jose Museum of Art to your next travel plans and experience art inspired by road trips.

Beginning September 19th, the San Jose Museum of Art showcases "Road Trip," an exhibition of photography, video, sculpture and works on paper about real and imagined journeys. Some of the artists creatively re-envision icons of the road, exploring metaphors of travel. For example, San Antonio-based artist Margarita Cabrera creates a life-size VW Bug made entirely out of soft, droopy vinyl fabric. Steven Deo molds hundreds of pairs of old leather shoes into the shape of luggage and a guitar case. Photographer Amy Stein captures the road trip gone wrong in her images of travelers waylaid by broken down cars and other unforeseen travel complications. Featuring over thirty artists, this exhibition examines the allure of the road trip - an excursion in which the journey is as compelling as the destination.

Journeys have been memorialized in postcards since their invention in 1861. Since then, the study of and collecting of postcards--or deltiology as it's officially called--has grown to become the world's third largest collectable hobby, surpassed only by coin and stamp collecting. These paper souvenirs and visual mementos document the quirky, hilarious, and monumental places we all visit. On view from September 19, 2008 - January 25, 2009, the Road Trip exhibition will feature an actual post office where visitors can stretch their artistic muscles by creating a postcard and mailing it directly from the Museum.

View our most recent road trip at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_rmqKVOI-U.

P.S. Wish you were here!

San Jose Museum of Art
110 S. Market Street
San Jose, CA 95113

Kristen Evangelista & Lucy Larsen
7/23/08

Kristen Evangelista is the Associate Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art and conceived of this exhibition after several cross-country road trips. She recently stayed in the "Go" room at the Madonna Inn and finally tasted Andersen's split pea soup in Buellton.

Lucy Larson is the Manager of Interpretation at the San Jose Museum of Art. She once locked her keys in the car at the Loneliest Sand Dune in America on Highway 50. Luckily she found the loneliest coat hanger in America and was able to continue her journey.