Jonathan Calm
To Wherever, Forever: Archives of Absence & Sites of Passage
Joint exhibition - de Saisset Museum and Department of Art and Art History
Exhibition Dates: Jan 5 - Feb 20, 2026
Closure dates: Jan 19 and Feb 16, 2026
Reception Date: Feb 5, 2026
4pm-5pm Edward M. Dowd Art and Art History Building
5pm-5:45pm Artist Talk de Saisset Museum
5:45-7pm Reception at de Saisset Museum
Travel is Fatal to Prejudice IV, 2017-2018, Silver Gelatin Prints, 20" X 16" each image, 9 images in each grid.
To Wherever, Forever: Archives of Absence & Sites of Passage unfolds across two venues at Santa Clara University: the de Saisset Museum and the Art Gallery of the Department of Art & Art History.
At the Museum Archives of Absence features Sunset Towns and Drowned Towns (2024–25), two recent bodies of work exploring sites where historically Black Americans were forcibly excluded—through racial terror, legal threats, or state-led displacement. These works emerge from Calm’s ongoing travels for The Green Book (2016-) series, where travelling the road itself reveals patterns of erasure far beyond the manifest meaning of guidebook’s listings. Across campus, the Art Gallery’s Sites of Passage include selections from The Green Book documenting hotels, gas stations, and businesses that offered safety and dignity to Black travelers during the Jim Crow era.
Incorporating video, installation, and photographic collage overlaid with embroidery, To Wherever, Forever marks Calm’s most expansive and ambitious exhibition to date. Drawing from documentary, vernacular, and evidentiary traditions, his work echoes the formal restraint of the New Topographics movement while quietly undermining the myth of photographic neutrality.
These landscapes—whether buildings, roads, or ruins—reveal how race and mobility have shaped, and continue to distort, who is seen, who is remembered, and who is allowed to move freely in America.
Jonathan Calm’s To Wherever, Forever: Archives of Absence & Sites of Passage is curated by Dr. Ciara Ennis, Director & Chief Curator, de Saisset Museum with Pancho Jimenez, Teaching Professor, Santa Clara University and Ryan Carrington, Teaching Professor and Gallery Director in the Department of Art & History, Santa Clara University.
This event is free and open to the public.
In compliance to ADA/504, please direct your accommodation request to mfgrieb@scu.edu at least 72 hours prior to the event.