SAN JOSE, CALIF.- ICA San José announces the opening of three exhibitions on Saturday, September 14th 5-8pm.

The group exhibition Allegedly the worst is behind us, features twelve contemporary artists who work to mend and amend the past in reckonings with memories, records, and archives, acting as both revisionists and storytellers.

Allegedly the worst is behind us highlights the practice of twelve contemporary artists who pursue personal and collective acts of rebuilding fractured memories and stolen histories. Posting the body as an archive with generations stored achingly inside, the exhibition prompts examination of the toll of historical trauma and how to recover fragments of disrupted pasts.

Accompany us, as past knowledge and future imagination meld in the hands of living artists who show us how re-examinations of history can offer insight towards the radical changes needed for today. The exhibition prompts the questions: What does it mean to inhabit a fraught or silenced history? How do we critically analyze and reconstruct historical narratives while caring and tending to our communities? How can reflecting on the past create spaces of liberation for the future?

The ICA San José also announced its’s newest Facade Project Without Them Is Not Us with emerging artist Oscar Lopez. This mural, Without Them Is Not Us, is part of the artist’s ongoing project, Your Food, My Work, Our Land. The new work will be completed concurrently with the other exhibitions opening on Saturday, September 14, 2024.

“The history of the farmland in what is now Silicon Valley could not have been possible without the knowledge and farm labor of Japanese, Filipino, and Mexican workers. This project's mission is to remember and honor the legacy of farmland and farm workers of San José and Santa Clara Valley. Farmers remaining in the Bay Area are in danger of being pushed out due to the transformation of Silicon Valley. The result is high costs, reduced quality of food, an increased carbon footprint, and the continued disfranchisement of our food and where it comes from. It is a recurring injustice to the people we rely on for our own quality food. The project urges us to consider that Without Them Is Not Us; without people working the land, we can not be a healthy society.” - Oscar Lopez

Opening concurrently, The Future Democracies Laboratory is a project by conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats in the Elain Cardinale Project Room, in partnership with the San José University's adjunct professor Steve Durie.

For Keats, in the United States and around the world, democracy is in peril. Caught up in partisan gridlock, and often indulging in corruption or bigotry, all too many politicians are unable or unfit to govern. The Future Democracies Laboratory project asks, “What if we automated governance, generating laws without legislators?This immersive project is the first public showcase of the lab’s provocative experiments, undertaken initially with San José State University’s student body as part of CADRE, the Digital Media Arts department at SJSU. From a digital legislature to various polling apparati, such as ripening bananas, the speculative systems prototyped in The Future Democracies Laboratory seamlessly combine science, technology, and art to address some of the greatest challenges of our time.