First Fridays ArtWalk SJ May 1st, 5–9pm
SoFA District (& beyond!) downtown San Jose
Free entry and all ages welcomed.
Galleries in the SoFA District, Historic District and Martha Gardens District are open late with new exhibitions, immersive installations, live music, and rich cultural programming. It’s a perfect way to support our local art scene, and discover new work and meet the arts community that make our downtown interesting and unique.
Enjoy free street parking or 90 minutes of free parking in the city garage at S. 2nd & San Carlos.
SoFA District
ANNO DOMINI // the second coming of Art & Design – 366 S. First St. map
AD SOMNIA (to the dreams): the wandering of a Dream-Passer
Céline Lyaudet (France) solo exhibition
AD SOMNIA (to the dreams) refers to the ancient rite of incubation—to lie down in Latin—which involved sleeping in a temple or sacred place to receive visions and answers from a divine entity during dreams. This practice, widespread in many cultures, is reminiscent of the shaman’s journey, as in the Dream-man figure of Ugrian culture in Northern Europe. Céline Lyaudet felt deeply related to these ancient rites in her own dream experiences and dived into those images and symbols as a great source of inspiration for her painting work.
She has taken notes of her initiated lucid dreams and visions for years, but only recently has she begun to glimpse topography, different types of places, wildlife, inhabitants, and spirits. From chaotic and fragmented episodes, a clearer path has begun to emerge—a world to explore, where Moon and Sun coexist, where she is sometimes a bird able to fly, or a wall-walker hiding in the House of the Abyss. Her body of work depicts these nocturnal journeys of visions, not as illustrations, but as partial memories pieced together from a single thread to reveal the pattern of a tapestry. The world of Dreams and painting are very similar: the desire to see further is accompanied by a surrender of control in order to be able to See and Listen.
From this need to assemble chaos were born her sculptural experimentations, Fetishes and Spirit Vessels, inspired by shamanic traditions of charged objects intended to embody spirits or ancestors that protect and heal. Created during a time of great anxiety, these vessels became receptacles to house protective spirits. Birds, dogs, or anthropomorphic figures were sculpted in clay like the small domestic idols of ancient houses, assembled with symbolic materials such as raffia, feathers, and shells. Inspired by ancient rites from different cultures, Céline seeks to articulate her personal rituals free from dogma—Rituals of Self that bring a sense of belonging to a greater Whole, hoping to See the Path beyond the Tall Grass.
KALEID Gallery – 320 S. First St. map
Opening Reception: @lt5+ a Photography Show of images created through Photograms, Pinhole, Plastic, Polaroid & alt Process.
@lt5+ process is a photography exhibition centered on experimental works created through historical alternative processes, highlighting camera-less and low fidelity techniques that embrace tactility, chance, and material exploration.
Featured Artists:
Shannon Amidon, Rosalie Anderson, Vanessa Atienza, Laura Barth, Jerry Berkstresser, Patrick Blas, Robert Chavez, Binh Danh, Amber Engfer, Arabela Espinoza, Dan Fenstermacher, Daniel Garcia, Jemal Diamond, Dylan Gutierrez, Terri Garland, Jackie Huynh, Louisa Krbashian, Jonathan Kermit, Steven Kimura, Diane Kreiter, Terry Kreiter, Pawel Kula, Debbie Lam, Quynh-Mai Nguyen, Donald Lawrence, Sarah Loyola, Abraham Menor, Marissa McPeak, Donald Miguel, Miguel Ozuna, Suzanne Pederson, Loc Phantung, Robertino Ragazza, Danny Sanchez, Cromwell Schubarth, Christine So, Jai Tanju, Thomas Taylor, Adrian Tsim, Kate Vinogradova, Jane Waggoner Deschner, Jan Watten, Rachel Wolf, rob + mari, Michelle Yau, and Ramona Zordini.
Curated by Robertino Ragazza.
MACLA Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana – 510 S. First St. map
2026 Latinx Art Now! Exhibition
MACLA’s annual curated exhibition surveys the very best of contemporary Latinx art from the Bay Area and beyond. Over 30 Artists with works ranging from sculpture and paintings to mixed media, that celebrate the diversity of Latinx arts and culture and reflect current issues and perspectives. The exhibition culminates in a live art auction, MACLA’s signature fundraising event, May 16th.
Phantom Galleries at The Pierce Apts. Lobby Gallery – 2 Pierce Ave. map
Opening Reception: Unspoken Impressions
Ashley Ogle Solo Exhibition
Life leaves marks that live in our body before they become clear stories. Monotypes bridge the connection between the kinesthetic and the intuitive by imprinting the emotion of felt experience.
Ashley Ogle is a monotype printmaker based in Los Gatos, California. Ashley learned printmaking from her father, David Ogle, a bronze sculptor and ceramics professor, who in turn studied with renowned printmaker Eileen Hill. What started out as a father-daughter project 15 years ago has evolved into a dedicated solo practice. Ashley has shown her work in Lake Tahoe and San Jose, California as well as Punta de Mita, Mexico.
Ashley’s work is abstract and contemporary with a sensitivity to light and atmosphere that echoes Impressionism. She is drawn to abstraction because it creates room for a unique narrative to emerge, inviting both maker and viewer to find their own meaning. Her monotype process translates the kinesthetic into visual rhythm and emotional expression through color, gesture, pressure, texture, and movement on the plate. She is interested in how this process mirrors intuitive, embodied cognition- how the hand often understands something before the mind finds words. Above all, Ashley wants people to encounter her prints and simply feel.
In a world that can feel fragmented and fast, Ashley sees art as a way to slow down, reconnect, and remember our shared inner worlds. As Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.”
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art– 560 S. First St. map
INFRAMUNDO by Miguel Novelo
In his first institutional solo exhibition, Miguel Novelo presents an interdisciplinary project that brings together Indigenous knowledge systems, ecological grief, and technological innovation.
In INFRAMUNDO, visitors move through immersive, responsive environments where perception, inherited ways of knowing, and emerging technologies converge. Virtual spaces become interactive with motion, sound and presence, inviting reflection on how humans, machines, and the living world exist as inseparable parts of the same systems.
Born in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, Novelo draws on a landscape shaped by cenotes—natural sinkholes formed by the Chicxulub meteorite impact, presumably responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs, and regarded as sacred portals to the Maya underworld. By situating his work in this geologically and culturally layered terrain, he connects memory, ancestral knowledge, and deep planetary time.
The exhibition is an invitation to the underworld, the INFRAMUNDO, where bodies are left behind and the human becomes geological. Contrary to the Anthropocene’s narrative of humans as a geological force, the exhibition invites the viewer to look inward—and become a rock. Guided by Maya cosmology and the avatars of the bat, jaguar, snake, dog, and crocodile, we enter a space for serious play and connection with the other. Immersive and generative installations invite us to defy fear of the dark and unknown, to embrace uncertainty. Augmented reality installations, machine learning apparatus, and rock sculptures invite us to create rituals, reconsider the inanimate as living, reflect on death, renewal, and coexistence with non-human intelligence.
My Body Was A River Once by Anoushka Mirchandani
“My Body Was A River Once” is the debut institutional exhibition by India-born, San Francisco–based artist Anoushka Mirchandani, curated by Zoë Latzer. Featuring an entirely new body of work, the exhibition engages the senses—sight, sound, and smell—to explore memory, matrilineage, and the ways migration and place shape identity and agency. For nearly a decade, Mirchandani has developed a distinctive visual language centered on translucent, introspective female figures often situated within domestic interiors. In “My Body Was A River Once”, these figures break free from built environments, merging with waterfalls, flora, stones, and tree bark in fluid metamorphoses that blur the boundaries between body and landscape. Drawing inspiration from the Apsaras—celestial beings in South Asian mythology whose name translates to “one who moves flowingly in the waters”—Mirchandani reimagines these mythic figures as vessels of intergenerational movement, carrying ancestral stories across terrains both real and imagined. Expanding her practice beyond painting, she incorporates diaphanous silks, sculpted wooden thorns, and subtle aromas to create a multisensory environment. Together, these works form a living archive that reflects on belonging, inheritance, and transformation through the lens of mythmaking and migration.
San Jose Jazz – 310 South First St. map
SJZ Break Room Jazz Jam featuring Martín Perna
San Jose Jazz presents free live music programming in conjunction with South First Friday. Following sets by our SJZ U19s and the Michael Webster Quartet, our all-ages jazz jam features special guest Martín Perna, founder of the Grammy Award-nominated Antibalas.
Schedule:
5pm – Doors
5:20–6pm – SJZ U19’s
6:15–7pm – Michael Webster Quartet
7–9pm – Jazz Jam
Martín Perna is a saxophonist and multidisciplinary artist who has been making music for over thirty years. Best known as founder of Grammy Award-nominated Afrobeat collective Antibalas and co-founder of Ocote Soul Sounds, he was also a founding member of The Dap Kings. His flutes, saxophones, percussion and production are featured on over 100 albums by artists including Ed Sheeran, The Roots, Mark Ronson and Angélique Kidjo.
Perna has served as musical director at Carnegie Hall for all-star tribute concerts to Paul Simon, David Byrne/Talking Heads and Aretha Franklin, plus Billie Holiday at the Apollo Theater. A 2020 Grammy nominee for Best Global Music Album for Antibalas’ Fu Chronicles, he composed and performed the soundtrack for the 2022 PBS American Masters documentary Roberta.
As a multidisciplinary artist, he authored the children’s book BLACKOUT!, practices superadobe architecture and has created performance art collaborations. He’s a lecturer at UC Berkeley when not touring internationally, playing exclusively baritone reeds on vintage saxophones including a 1961 Selmer Mark VI..
San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles – 520 South First St. map
The Woven Pixel
This exhibition explores the rise of digital weaving which emerged in the early 2000s. It brings together a variety of work by artists and designers who experiment with digital looms and jacquard software. It pays tribute to two artists in particular, Bhakti Ziek and Alice Schlein, who wrote “The Woven Pixel” (2006), which quickly became something of a bible for weavers in art, design and industry—-and referenced still today. Because every intersection of warp and weft represents a pixel, weaving seamlessly merged with the earliest computer technologies. Today digital weavers are altering the landscape of contemporary art and design using algorithmic painterliness, expressive structures and flexible parametric forms. Curated by Sarah Mills.
Historic District
Chopsticks Alley Gallery – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Bầu Cua Cá Cọp – Gourd Crab Fish Tiger
Chopsticks Alley Art proudly celebrates eight years of creativity, community, and cultural storytelling. The number eight symbolizes prosperity, harmony, and an unending flow of connection.
Under a theme inspired by the spirit of Bầu Cua Cá Cọp, the beloved Vietnamese game of chance is often played during Tết Lunar New Year. Played with three dice and six iconic symbols: a gourd, crab, fish, deer, rooster, and prawn, the game evokes luck, risk, anticipation, and joyful unpredictability.
Reflecting these qualities, the exhibition showcases artists and artworks that speak to who they are, how they see the world, and the vibrant diversity of creative expression within our community.
6 pm: Art Tongue – Artists Talk
Saraswathy Lakshmivaraham, Hadi Aghaee, Robin Lasser, Combsy, Nina Le, Tangying Shen, Brandon Luu, Angelina Melchor Nguyen
7 pm: Flow and Flourish: Growing Poetry, Growing Plants, Growing Community
Featuring Poets Laureate Emeritus Aileen Cassinetto and David Perez
plus Valley Verde planting and water conservation discussion.
Works/San Jose – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Refraction: sjsu animation & illustration bfa 2026
First Friday is opening night for this exhibition of more than seventy graduates in animation, character design, story, visual development, 3D modeling, gaming, and more. With hundreds of images, 3D printed characters, games, books, and more than 20 video screens running, come and explore work from the next generation of storytellers and visual entertainers.
Martha Gardens District
Art Ark Gallery – 1035 S. Sixth St. map
World’s Apart
Portrait & Street Photographer Daniel Garay
Fashion Photographer Todd Allen
Design & Perspective Photographer Christopher Denise
Landscape and Architectural Photographer Cosmo Rahn
An immersive experience of the world from beneath our fingertips to the world beyond our reach, at once above, beyond, and in between.
“A World Apart” brings the work of four local photographers together in an ecclectic experience spanning perspective, personality, and presence. From far and away to the closest closeup, from fantasy to forensics, and from digital detail to celluloid sacrament, this exhibit promises to take the viewer on a delightful and introspective romp through four unique lenses.
FUSE presents at the Citadel Art Gallery- 199 Martha St. map
Natural Forms
Featured Artists: Sandra Tingalay & Emmanuel Cervantes-Mejia
This exhibition looks at the complexities of the human form—a subject rich with multifaceted meaning, yet often reduced to a singular perception by the observer.
MACHU PICCHU Gallery of the Americas, Est. 1974 – 199 Martha St. map
Chullo: Traditional Peruvian hat by Quechua Knitters from Peru
The chullo is a traditional Peruvian hat finely knitted from alpaca, llama, or sheep wool. It is characterized by ear flaps designed to protect against the extreme cold of the Andes. As a symbol of cultural identity, its colorful designs and unique patterns reflect Inca heritage and the specific identity of each community.
They are made primarily from alpaca, llama, or sheep wool, making it both soft and warm. They are usually multicolored with geometric patterns, animals (llamas, condors), or symbols that tell stories and represent community identity. Old chullos are crafted by hand using traditional and intricate techniques sometimes adorned with tiny beads, making them fine works of ancient art.
SAVE THE DATE! JUNE 5th 5-10pm & 6th 2-8pm
FIRST FRIDAYS ArtWalk SJ is produced by CURATUS in partnership with the participating galleries, museums and independent creative businesses.
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South FIRST FRIDAYS
366 S 1st Street
San Jose, CA 95113
408-271-5155
info@southfirstfridays.com