Institute of Contemporary Art San José

Museum

560 South First Street, San José, CA 95113
SoFA District

icasanjose.org

@icasanjose

Open Hours:

Special Events:

Tuesday, June 2 | 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Tech Afterlife - Live Demo + Healthy Paint Lab at SJ Energy Day
Miguel Novelo Workshop at San José City Hall

Join the San José Climate Art Program for an immersive monthly meet-up featuring artist Miguel Novelo. This event celebrates Novelo’s solo exhibition, INFRAMUNDO, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, and coincides with the city’s 2nd annual Energy Day at City Hall.

In this hands-on drop-in session, Novelo explores the intersections of materiality, design, and data. Participants will learn techniques for transforming discarded screens—including old monitors, tablets, and smartphones—into creative works. By investigating the journey from obsolescence to creative transformation, the session fosters care and curiosity about technological waste and the environmental impact of our everyday devices.

During this workshop session, you can also explore alternative paints from small paint producers committed to low emissions, low VOCs, and sustainability. This hands-on workshop will give you a chance to explore the sustainable paint market.

200 E Santa Clara St, San Jose, CA 95113

Learn more and RSVP here.

Tuesday, June 2 | 6:00 PM

Digital Ghosts, E-Waste, and Data Loss: Artist Workshop with Miguel Novelo

This workshop is accessible to participants of varying technological and artistic experience levels. To Bring: Old or discarded screens, monitors, tablets, and smartphones.

Structure:
For Recology site: 20-minute introduction: Guided conversation on e-waste from the Recology Environmental Manager, covering responsible disposal, data clearing, and ecological implications of digital consumption.

Device transformation: Functional devices become material for sculpture, drawing, or gestural experimentation. “Dead” devices serve as raw material for creative reanimation — exploring decay, residual data, and aesthetic potential.

Speculative design & making: Using accessible creative coding, free software, simple interventions, and sculptural practice, participants activate electronic devices to explore the poetic and technological afterlives of their devices.

Responsible closure: Components at true end-of-life are routed to certified e-waste streams.

401 Tunnel Ave, San Francisco, CA 94134

Learn more and RSVP here.

Thursday, June 4 | 6:00 PM

Digital Ghosts, E-Waste, and Data Loss: Artist Workshop with Miguel Novelo

Join the ICA San José and Recology AIR for a hands-on workshop exploring the afterlives of everyday devices—from technological aging and decay to creative transformation. Participants will bring old or discarded screens, monitors, tablets, and smartphones to investigate the intersections of materiality, design, and data. This workshop emphasizes design, data, and decay while fostering care and curiosity around technological aging. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of their devices’ material, ecological, and poetic afterlives, as well as small experimental sculptures or other creative digital explorations of their devices.

This workshop is accessible to participants of varying technological and artistic experience levels. To Bring: Old or discarded screens, monitors, tablets, and smartphones.

Structure:
For ICA Site: 20-minute introduction: Guided conversation on e-waste from San Jose’s Zero Waste team, covering responsible disposal, data clearing, and ecological implications of digital consumption.

Device transformation: Functional devices become material for sculpture, drawing, or gestural experimentation. “Dead” devices serve as raw material for creative reanimation — exploring decay, residual data, and aesthetic potential.

Speculative design & making: Using accessible creative coding, free software, simple interventions, and sculptural practice, participants activate electronic devices to explore the poetic and technological afterlives of their devices.

Responsible closure: Components at true end-of-life are routed to certified e-waste streams.

Learn more and RSVP here.

Friday, June 5 | 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Join the ICA San José for another College Night during the June South First Friday festivities! We will be hosting a found-objects workshop with Sam Marks, a San José-based teaching artist and the facilities and operations manager at the ICA.

This is a free, drop-in workshop from 5-9pm at the ICA. RSVPs are not required, but are encouraged. Stop by for a night of creativity and connection as we celebrate the teaching artists in our region.

560 1st Street, San José, CA 95112

Learn more and RSVP here.

INFRAMUNDO | April 18 - August 23, 2026

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.

Through these responsive environments, INFRAMUNDO attunes visitors to intertwined cycles of life, death, and matter, offering a space to encounter worlds beyond human time and perception (and possibly beyond human patience).

My Body Was A River Once | January 16 - August 23, 2026

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.

Image:

Miguel Novelo: INFRAMUNDO exhibition graphic, graphic by Arina Pozdnyak

Miguel Novelo: INFRAMUNDO installation image, photo by Shaun Roberts

Anoushka Mirchandani: My Body Was A River Once exhibition graphic, graphic by Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen

Anoushka Mirchandani: My Body Was A River Once installation image, photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno

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