Join us for the best night out in downtown San Jose at the May 2nd First Fridays ArtWalk!
Galleries and creative spaces will be open late (from 5pm–9pm and free admission!), showcasing everything from evocative paintings and immersive installations to innovative textiles, photography, and multimedia works. New exhibitions relate stories of identity, memory, transformation, and connection. Also on view will be bold experiments in abstraction, symbolism, and the interplay between nature and technology. Meet and chat with artists about the way they interpret the world around us, blending the ancient with the contemporary and the personal with the universal. There’s also live music, performances, and interactive activities that help bring us all together through creativity and culture.
If you’re looking for an inspiring night out, First Fridays ArtWalk is the perfect opportunity to meet local and global artists and connect with our amazing community in SoFA District (& beyond!).
SoFA District
ANNO DOMINI // the second coming of Art & Design – 366 S. First St. map
Artist’s Reception:
The Hunters and The Dreamers
Zero Cents solo exhibition
For hundreds of thousands of years, Homo sapiens have carried forward echoes of our vanished relatives-Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others-whose traces linger in our DNA and our stories. This exhibition is a meditation on those echoes and what it means to be human. Across millennia, our ancestors expressed themselves through rituals, art, and myth, leaving behind stories that repeat across cultures and generations: tales of survival, transformation, love, and loss.
Through these paintings, I reach for that ancient current-the pulse of storytelling that predates language, drifting between past and present, capturing moments of chase, embrace, sorrow, and hope. Boats float in the void, figures cross thresholds, and every journey is both a departure and a return, a melancholic dance through time that reflects who we’ve been, who we are, and who we might become. It’s about confronting what haunts us—not to destroy it, but to understand it. To tame it. To let it teach us something real. We are built from many pulses, stitched together by memory, rhythm, and myth.
Some of us walk in the light. Some live in the shadows. Often, we do both.
And that’s okay.
This is humanity.
KALEID Gallery – 320 S. First St. map
Artist’s recepton:
A Beautiful Fugate by Troublesome Creek
Jemal Diamond solo exhibition
“A Beautiful Fugate by Troublesome Creek” is the latest collection of paintings by Jemal Diamond, showcasing the interplay between his abstracted, segmented figures and landscapes that blend the organic with the technological. The figures exist in a state of tension – at once passive and reactive – amidst shifting natural and constructed environments. Drawing from the Spanish word “fugate,” meaning “to flee” or “escape,” the collection explores themes of movement, displacement, and the fragile balance between humanity and the worlds we navigate.
As always with Jemal’s work, there are layers of contrasting and complementary shapes and lines. They are both mechanical and organic, masculine and feminine, abstract and representational. There lies embedded intentional dichotomies to create a playground of visual cues and possible meaning. All titles for works in this collection are given by viewers like you, including “A Beautiful Fugate by Troublesome Creek” – title by Gail Rastorfer.
MACLA Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana – 510 S. First St. map
2025 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 17.
FREE performance at our Castellano Playhouse:
Join MACLA for a night of music, drag, and plenty of jotería as we celebrate queer Latinx culture through Jotería!, a Lotería-inspired game created by Antonio Castellanos.
Your hosts for the night, La Chucha and Sally Limón from Chillonas SF, will bring the drama, the glamour, and the vibes. Expect fierce performances, good company, and plenty of chances to win fun prizes. Come play Jotería! this May 2 at MACLA’s Castellano Playhouse.
Phantom Galleries at The Pierce – 2 Pierce Ave. map
Artist’s reception:
Breathe Easy Mario Dimas solo exhibition
“Breathe Easy” is about my creative connection with nature and plants. A series of works inspired by my time spent around plants, gardening, and hiking in nature. Plants are essential in our everyday lives, and we are very much dependent on them, from the air we breathe to the food and medicine they provide. We have them everywhere—in our homes, businesses, and hospitals—bringing us positive energy with their presence. They possess healing properties and create a stimulating visual effect in our surroundings.
In “Breathe Easy,” my pieces are abundantly green with welcoming vibes; the use of dark backgrounds conveys my mood and emotion during the painting process, further bringing my subjects forward with vibrant light. In this exhibition, I invite the viewer to explore their own imagination and visualize the air and auras emanating from plants.
Phantom Galleries Mural Project – San Carlos btwn S. Market & S. 2nd St.
Urban Abstractions
featuring artists: Apexer, Emoventur, Force129, Joey Reyes, Gwen Marcado-Reyes, Poesia and NoA–
Seven amazing artists have been painting “Urban Abstractions” murals on the sidewalk planters at the south gateway to SoFA District. These works are a signal to the passersby that we are an arts and culture district with galleries, music venues, residents and businesses that foster creativity and care about inspiring community well being. Stop by and check out this great project by Phantom Galleries in partnership with San Jose Downtown Association.
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art– 560 S. First St. map
Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa: Blood Be Water
In his first solo institutional exhibition, Blood Be Water, Esteban Raheem Abdul Raheem Samayoa presents an immersive installation featuring new airbrushed paintings, oil pastels, and ceramics. Drawing from muralism, street art, and Latin American folk traditions, Samayoa constructs a visually striking, deeply personal exploration of heritage, identity, and transformation..
San Jose Jazz – 310 South First St. map
SJZ Break Room
Bridges Rock Band (4:50pm)
U19s (5:40pm)
Michael Webster Quartet (6:20pm)
SJZ Break Room Jazz Jam (7-9pm)
San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles – 520 South First St. map
Just Quilts!
Featuring three innovative, award-winning, talented quilters from the Valley of Heart’s Delight (Santa Clara Valley), our museum is presenting between 80 and 100 quilts from our quilt artists: Charlotte Scholberg, Randa Mulford, and Joy Palmer. Their work represents many styles of quilting: hand and machine piecing, hand and machine quilting, applique, English paper piecing, realistic scenes and many other techniques. There will also be an additional display in the Porcella Gallery from other well known quilt artists of the area as well as quilts from the permanent collection.
Historic District
Chopsticks Alley Gallery – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Lành: A Healing Journey
Participating artists: Angelina Melchor Nguyen, Jayann Bella, Jonathan Perea, Hang Huynh , Hargun Mahal Mann, Lailani Africa
A vibrant tapestry of personal narratives, each piece reflecting a unique vision of healing. Through diverse methodologies—spanning traditional, experimental, and everything in between—our artists reveal the varied and winding paths they’ve traveled to mend, restore, and transform. May their works inspire you to explore, reflect, and uncover your journey toward healing.
Hammer2 Gallery – 101 Paseo de San Antonio map
Perspectives
Featuring: Carlo Ricafort, Tovah Cheng, Dani Torvik, Peter Moen, Josie Lepe, Ian Fabre
The Hammer2 Gallery features a rotating display of artwork by San José State University alumni. The current exhibition brings together the work of five alumni artists: Carlo Ricafort, Dani Torvik, Peter Moen, Josie Lepe, Tovah Cheng, and Ian Fabre. These artists explore work in a variety of media, including watercolor, oil paint and mixed media, and diverse subject matter, including personal identities, cultural symbols, family history and abstract forms.
Works/San Jose – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Interwoven: sjsu animation/illustration bfa 2025
Join us on South First Friday for the opening of “Interwoven” an exhibition of more than 70 animation and illustration graduates of San José State University. Experience dozens of videos and hundreds of images and models in areas of story, visual development, character design, 3D modeling, animation, and group thesis projects using all these skills and more.
Martha Gardens District
Art Ark Gallery – 1035 S. Sixth St. map
Artist’s reception:
Sacred Symbols
Simon Lanzoni solo exhibition
Language coalesces and encodes human experience: it is the very means through which we engage, feel, and express perceived realities. Alphabets— language transmogrified into sets of sacred, yet distinct visual symbols— form the keys to the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and narratives. Written text captures otherwise fleeting experiences of oral traditions to make them permanent. Similar to the act of writing, in artistic practice, resin applied to textile, an inherently pliable medium that can suspend, flow, and billow, translates shape-shifting moments and affixes them into states of permanence. Sacred Symbols takes inspiration from alphabetic letterforms, stretching them into the third dimension as a play on perspectival compositions that parallels the experience of shaping language.
FUSE presents at the Citadel Art Gallery- 199 Martha St. map
FUSE presents:
Spring 2025 Group Art Show
FUSE Presents proudly brings you our Spring 2025 show. As usual, we are bringing many talented painters, mixed media artists, and for a twist, we are exhibiting photography as well as showcases the wonderful photographers who captured the wonderful images.
Our planned musical guests are local musicians Moeka Ishizawa and LOLAH. They will bless us with acoustic guitar sets accompanied by lovely vocals during our opening night
MACHU PICCHU Gallery of the Americas, Est. 1974 – 199 Martha St. map
Paintings from a 1986 Journey to Perú
by Suzanne Peck
Silicon Valley artist Suzanne Peck joined a Folk Art Tour to Peru in 1986, led by Olga Enciso-Smith, founder of the Machu Picchu Gallery of the Americas (MPGA). During the journey, she was deeply moved by the Peruvian people’s warmth, the joy in their way of life, and the striking beauty of the countryside and traditional dress. Upon returning to California, Suzanne began painting the people and scenes that had touched her heart.
In Grandpa & Grandson / Abuelo y Nieto, she captures the quiet bond between generations. “I painted this old man and the boy because of the love and respect that I felt the boy had for his grandfather,” she explains. Another painting from the series, Man with Harp / Hombre con Harpa, was inspired by “the musical gift I felt as he played this ancient harp.”
These pieces reflect Suzanne’s emotional response to the people and culture of Perú—a heartfelt tribute to a vibrant and unforgettable experience made possible by Olga’s cultural tour that lasted 22 days in ancient and modern Perú.
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