Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape

Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is the first survey of the artist’s compelling body of work. On view from July 11, 2025 through February 22, 2026, the exhibition weaves connections between Her’s past series, recent projects, and ongoing explorations, linking California’s agricultural landscapes, the jungles of Laos, Minnesota’s poppy fields, and beyond. While rooted in Her’s Hmong American experience, the exhibition offers a meditation on the construction of homeland—a theme that resonates deeply across global diasporic communities.

Co-organized by the San José Museum of Art (SJMA) in California and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, the exhibition is presented at both venues, showing works from the same series. This collaboration reflects the diverse contexts in which Hmong communities have established new homelands. California hosts the largest Hmong population in the United States, while the Twin Cities region near Sheboygan is home to the nation’s most concentrated Hmong community.

“Her’s engagement with the histories of her medium is profound,” said Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator of SJMA. “Her work traverses portraiture, landscape, still life, and vernacular photography, in a complex exploration of diasporic longing. In her images, Minnesota and California transform into stand-ins for Laos, where plastic florals replace living tropics, and the line between reality and artifice blurs.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. It is co-curated by Lauren Schell Dickens, chief curator at SJMA, and Jodi Throckmorton, chief curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Pao Houa Her’s photographs are also dispersed across public spaces in downtown San José—outside and indoors, on walls and on screens.

Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape is made possible with lead support from Teiger Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The San José Museum of Art presentation is also made possible by the SJMA Exhibitions Fund, with generous support from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, and Wanda Kownacki.

Operations and programs at the San José Museum of Art are made possible by principal support from SJMA’s Board of Trustees, a Cultural Affairs Grant from the City of San José, and the Lipman Family Foundation; by lead support from the Adobe Foundation, the California Arts Council, Toby and Barry Fernald, Brook Hartzell and Tad Freese, the Richard A. Karp Charitable Foundation, Tammy and Tom Kiely, the Knight Foundation, Evelyn and Rick Neely, Yvonne and Mike Nevens, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Skyline Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the SJMA Director's Council and Council of 100; and with significant endowment support from the William Randolph Hearst Foundation and the San José Museum of Art Endowment Fund established by the Knight Foundation at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

The artwork in downtown spaces is presented in partnership with SJSU's King Library, San José Downtown Association, Mezcal Restaurant, and Team San José.