First Fridays ArtWalk SJ + Street Mrkt indie urban art faire
AUGUST 7th 5pm–10pm
SoFA District (& beyond!) downtown San Jose
Bring your family and friends out for a creative night of art and connect with our amazing creative community!
Galleries and museums are open late & free entry with great art exhibitions on view & special programming to experience.
Street Mrkt is an indie urban art faire where you can find something you love while supporting talented artists & creatives out on So. 1st St. (in front of Anno Domini & KALEID Gallery).
All free entry(spend it with the Artists!).
Free street parking after 6pm. Free 90 minute parking in City garages (So. 3rd & San Carlos streets)
More info: www.southfirstfridays.com
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
Artist’s Reception: Blissful Rituals for a Mad World
Brandan Styles (Denver, CO.) Solo Exhibition
“Blissful Rituals for a Mad World” is a collection of mixed media works by Brandan Styles. The collection explores theatrical themes within the artists’ lexicon of weirdo spiritual characters and the mad world they inhabit, as a reflection of our own.
The world is mad and always has been. In that madness, one must find their bliss. An artist finds bliss through the ritual of art making, and while ritual doesn’t change the world, it changes the one who performs it.
About the Artist:
Brandan Styles (aka Bzurk) is a storyteller, tapping into the Universal Mythology that underlies all of our culture and humanity.
His work is about creating visual poetry through the language of mythology, symbols and characters. It invites us to explore our existence further, to question everything, seek Truths and to not be afraid to go into the dark night. He combines a mixed media technique of hand cut wood, graphic and rendered style of painting, flat and three-dimensional elements: roughed, beaten, withered, aged, yet contemporary. The past speaks to us in the present.
KALEID Gallery – 320 S. First St. map
Artist’s Reception: Conversations
Trieu Dao Solo Exhibiiton
Artist Trieu Dao is a refugee and has spent more time living and painting abroad than he ever spent in his homeland. It shows in the work.
Trieu uses simple shapes and quiet colors. The thick paint connects space and time. On the canvas, he paints people and objects alongside hanging hooks. They stand for pain, memory, joy, and happiness. Everything is born and everything dies.
Each painting holds space and time. Drops of water stretch across the canvas. They move like a river of impermanence, following the Buddhist cycle of rebirth.
These paintings are a conversation. They are about the journey to make something beautiful and to find oneself.
About the Artist:
Trieu Dao creates artwork built on the traditions from his native Vietnam and informed by his experiences as an immigrant refugee. He often fuses his experiences in his adopted country with the traditions of his native homeland. Trieu’s work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and cultural centers throughout California, including the VAALA Center, the Morgan Hill Culture Community Center, the Saigon Civil Center, La Gallaria, the Viet Bao Gallery, the Works Gallery, the San Jose Civic Center, Paradise Art Gallery, the Rose Garden Gallery, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Library Gallery. As an evolving artist, he continues to seek new and innovative ways of expressing and evoking the emotions which drive his artwork. Trieu currently lives in San Jose, California.
MACLA Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana – 510 S. First St. map
Queerennial: Identity Through Fashion
MACLA’s Queerennial: Identity through Fashion explores how individuals represent themselves through textile and design. The artists delve into how fashion serves as a means of visibility, resistance, and self-actualization within the queer community. From historical coded dressing to contemporary gender-fluid designs, the exhibition showcases the role of LGBTQ+ individuals in shaping fashion. Visitors are invited to reflect on the power of personal expression and its impact on identity and culture.
DJ sets by DJ Toonin throughout the night.
Phantom Galleries at The Pierce Apts. Lobby Gallery – 2 Pierce Ave. map
Artist’s Reception: Reimagined
Force129 Solo Exhibition
Inspired by getting paint on my favorite pants.
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.
Join us at the ICA San José on Friday, August 7th from 5-9pm to create collages with Sam Marks!
San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles – 520 South First St. map
A Mi Manera / My Own Way.
A Mi Manera / My Own Way explores the breadth and evolution of the Latino experience through textile art, highlighting the intimate and communal acts of making that carry deep cultural memory. From inherited traditions like embroidery, weaving, quilting, and garment-making to contemporary experiments with fabric, the exhibition will feature artists whose practices draw upon techniques and materials that fill our homes, closets, and altars. These tactile practices are often passed from one generation to the next—grandmothers teaching stitches, mothers repurposing garments, fathers repairing late into the night, as well as friends learning and sharing cultural knowledge online.
The phrase “a mi manera”—“my own way”—reflects a spirit of individuality shaped by cultural inheritance. This exhibition honors how artists reclaim, rework, and reimagine traditional forms of both Latine roots and American life, transforming them into new heirlooms for future generations. Together, the works in the exhibition will form a living archive that speaks to migration, memory, labor, celebration, family, and community.
While centered on the experiences of Mexican American and broader Latino communities in the Bay Area and beyond, the exhibition also invites visitors to consider how textiles act as vessels of identity—stitched with stories, symbols, and a sense of belonging.
Historic District
Chopsticks Alley Gallery – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Pearls Remember by Charlene Tan
Across the ocean, memory gathers slowly.
Pressed by time, shaped by care, they become pearls.
Charlene Tan works with ube powder, tapioca pearls, mung beans, and pigments rooted in home and ritual. She places each element one by one in quiet devotion. Her surfaces echo ancestral weavings and tribal markings, sacred geometries that move like water, scales, and skin: snake, crab, crocodile.
Interwoven across the Philippines and the United States, suspended between digital loss and return to handmade, Tan’s labor becomes a form of meditation.
Each pattern is an act of listening—to grandmothers, to oceans crossed, to histories that refuse to disappear.
7:00 pm – Hula Performance with Hālau Nā Wai Ola
Works/San Jose – 38 S. 2nd St. map
Hold Fast!:
Works presents its 2026 member art exhibition! The title “Hold Fast!” is a nautical term meaning to stay strong and hold on in a heavy storm. This exhibit asks broadly how local artists are standing firm for ideals and creativity in this time—from concrete to abstract statements: formal, societal, environmental, etc. Works member exhibition is a wide-ranging survey of South Bay and nearby artists. From the most experienced and collected regional artists to new voices, see the work of artist members who help support your community art and performance center. Don’t miss this impressive salon of talent in painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, digital art, and more. While Works has many members who support our community mission that are patrons rather than artists, this show celebrates creatives who volunteer and contribute to increase opportunities for everyone.
Martha Gardens District
Art Ark Gallery – 1035 S. Sixth St. map
Facsimile: The Afterlife of an Image by Allegra J. Bick-Maurischat
Facsimile presents a body of work built from a single archive of early photographs of the American West. Across drawing, collage, cyanotype, monoprint, and paper weaving, the exhibition investigates reproduction as both process and subject, inviting viewers to consider what constitutes an image, who owns it, and why making something by hand still matters today.
Artist’s Reception will include live music by Dave Maurischat, featuring original compositions inspired by the show’s focus on repetition and replication.
Fuse Presents at the Citadel – 199 Marth Street map
Fuse Presents: Connected
a Spotlight Exhibit by artists Jonathan Kermit and Natasha Kramskaya with supporting FUSE artists
From Frida Kahlo to Marina Abramović, artists have long sought to map the connections between us. This August, the FUSE Spotlight exhibit brings this dialogue into focus through the works of Natasha Kramskaya and Jonathan Kermit. With a striking contrast in medium, the two artists examine how we honor everything and everyone we’re connected to in our lives. Supported by FUSE artist members, exploring the theme in their own ways.
Live music performance by Esther Young
Machu Picchu Gallery of the Americas at The Citadel – 199 Marth Street map
Arpilleras
Women of Perú living in the shanty neighborhoods of Lima create handmade “arpilleras”.
The “arpilleras” are colorful, three-dimensional, cloth pictures or appliques often reminiscent of their former village life in the Andes.
These appliques provide social commentary, story telling or scenes of planting/harvesting. The high Andes Mountains are known to produce thousands varieties of potatoes. Other foods include quinoa and tuna, the cactus fruit, often surrounded by llamas.
Unfortunately, the apilleras are slowly disappearing as a folk art. Others were made with scenes of the rainforest. The testimony and message are that we need to conserve the Amazon Rainforest of South America. Considered the lungs of our sole planet earth. Our only home.
First Friday June 5th (5pm–10pm) & Saturday June 6th (2pm–8pm)
STREET MRKT indie urban art faire
Out on So. 1st St. (in front of Anno Domini & KALEID Gallery)
SoFA District downtown San Jose
Free admission (spend it with the Artists!) and family friendly.
We are proud to support hyper-local indie artists in our community by providing them with an event that connects them with ArtWalk patrons, collectors, curators and new fans. Meet these artists when perusing original paintings, sculpture, ceramics, jewelry and unique light projections and take home something you’ll love to live with!
Participating Artists:
Art Boutiki / Dan Vado
Bad Art by Nice
BAGI / Bay Area Glass Institute
Purl Bailey aka Marilyn Roaf
BX Edits
Bryan Corbin
Craft Haus
Crochetforloves
Crossroads
Curent Tattooing
Mario Dimas
Mahsa Emoventeur
FUSE Presents
Leysar Garcia
Katie Green
Ground Up Music Bus
Hand in Hand Henna
Harvest Empire
Higher Fire Ceramics
La Raiz Magazine
Lazy Daisy Designs
Yasushi Matsui
Elizabeth Jiménez Montelongo
Nuanez Artglass Studio 408
Petite Galleria
Phin & ernxde
Quỳnh Vy art & zine workshop
Steven Reece
Ruin to Ruin
Starbunny & Rue
TWC / Together We Create
VoidKnightArt
YMCA Camp Campbell
Food Trucks:
3 Brothers Kitchen
3 Hermanos Mexican Grill
Kabobi Persian Grill
Me Oi Vietnamese Kitchen
First Fridays ArtWalk SJ & STREET MRKT is produced by CURATUS in partnership with the participating galleries, museums and the indie arts community.
Join us on Facebook ArtWalkSJ | Instagram @ArtwalkSJ
South FIRST FRIDAYS
366 S 1st Street
San Jose, CA 95113
408-271-5155
info@southfirstfridays.com