First episode of the TV sitcom Cheers airs.

Steve Jobs introduces the first Macintosh computer.

Guest curator Michael S. Bell, assistant director of cultural affairs of the Arts Commission in San Francisco, offers a radical approach to art history with his exhibition Contemporary Art: 30,000 B.C. – Present. Doing away with traditional categories and trends in modern art, Bell proposes a collection of works that exhibit decorative, abstract, and surrealist qualities that transcend boundaries of time and place. A review from the San Jose Mercury News calls the exhibition “a provocative, ambitious show with real strengths.”

The 1986 exhibition The Artist and the Computer: New Portraiture, developed in conjunction with the 1986 Silicon Valley Festival of Electronic Arts, explores connections between technology and the self. The exhibition features the work of Alyce Kaprow, Ronald MacNeil, Joel Slayton, and Joan Truckenbrod, as well as film and media installations by Richard Lowenberg and Michael Naimark.

Guest curator Rebecca Solnit brings together works by seven California photographers, all of them women, in the group show Terra Incognita (The Known Earth). These artists subvert the traditions of twentieth-century landscape photography, with its emphasis on untouched, pristine views of the natural world, by highlighting those inhabited, intimate, and transformed landscapes of the present.

Culture and Context exhibits the works of 11 Southeast Asian artists working in the Bay Area. These artists use contemporary and traditional art forms to share their personal stories of immigration and cultural assimilation. The exhibition also includes Paul Kwan and Arnold Iger’s performance “Tale of Q.”

Border Axes: San Jose Connection connects artists with political and human rights activists to produce a series of works that explore poverty, oppression, immigration, and the occupational hazards of Mexican workers in California. This project grew from discussions about border issues that were initiated by the San Diego’s Border Art Workshop Taller De Arte Fronterizo. The exhibition also marks the ICA’s temporary expansion to a second building at 2 North Second Street in San Jose, the former site of the Johnson Wax Development Corporation.

The sixth annual Valentine Invitational Exhibition and Auction, and the first annual chocolate tasting extravaganza, is hosted at the ICA. Bay Area artists are invited to create works that give their interpretations of romance in ways that challenge conventional thinking.

The Oakland Hills firestorm kills 25 and destroys thousands of homes.

The San Jose Arena (now known as SAP Center) is completed and becomes home to the San Jose Sharks.

Amazon.com is launched

Our Lives: Negotiating Male Identity features the work of seven contemporary photographers who capture the challenges, complexities, and contradictions of masculinity with their photographic subjects.

Toy Story premieres to wide critical and popular acclaim due to its innovations in 3D animation, story line, score, and voice-acting.

The group exhibition Shadow Play opens. The 13 artists in this exhibition play with shadow, silhouette, and contre jour (against the light) to create tenebrous images of the daylight world. The show is guest curated by Marcia Tanner.

Tamagotchi, a digital pet housed in an egg-shaped handheld device, is released in Japan.

In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres came out through her sitcom character Ellen Morgan; becoming the first openly gay woman to have her own sitcom. Ellen had to play the role of a straight woman for four seasons before she, and her character, came out in a two-part, late-season episode. Although her career took a hit and her show was cancelled, she came back with her own television talk show called Ellen.

The Female Gaze: Women Looking at Men was produced in collaboration with the South Bay chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art. Challenging the long tradition of the male gaze in Western art, this juried exhibition invited women artists of the Bay Area to enter their own takes on the male figure. All depictions of men (the good, the bad, the ugly) were welcomed.

Sol LeWitt: Works on Paper brings together works by the acclaimed New York based conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. This major exhibition showcases the artist’s prints and works on paper, many of which begin with the formal elements (geometric cubes, stars, rectangles, etc.) that mark his three-dimensional works, before diverging into structural systems of line and color.

The Euro is introduced, creating an economic and monetary union between all EU countries.

Shut Up and Love Me: A 75-minute performance by Karen Finley performed on March 9th and 10th at the ICA. Finley’s performances often blend elements of theater, spoken word, and visual art. Shut Up and Love Me explores a woman’s journey through dysfunctional companionship and psychosexual lust “without apology.” Her book, A Different Kind of Intimacy was published in November of the previous year, a few months before the performance.

The first Night Moves event featuring Perpetual Labor by Chris Eckert, a San Jose State graduate student, premiers at the ICA. Night Moves is an after-dark program that presents installation works in the front window of the gallery’s façade. The City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs granted the ICA the funds to purchase necessary equipment.

Halle Berry becomes the first woman of color to win an Oscar for her performance in Monster’s Ball.

Bytes and Pieces: The Art of Contemporary Collage is an exploration of collage in the age of digital media, emphasizing the relationship between art and technology especially present in the Bay Area. The exhibition features 14 artists and was organized in conjunction with Cut, Copy, Paste at the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, an exhibition featuring earlier Bay Area collage artists like Bruce Connor and George Herms. Bytes and Pieces also marks the ICA’s first artist in residency program where artists hosted small public workshops.

Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook.

Hurricane Katrina strikes the Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama coastal areas.

Rio de Historias/River of Stories: Drawings, Prints and Artists’ Books by Gustavo Ramos Rivera, a solo exhibition featuring the San Francisco-based artist. The exhibition opens in May in conjunction with another solo exhibition of his work at the San Jose Museum of Art.

The ICA moves to its new location at 560 S. 1st St. Home Sweet Home opens as the inaugural exhibition for the new space.

Along with its new exhibition space, the ICA opens The Print Center. It accommodates up to six printers and is the first of its kind in the South Bay. The Print Center offered an ongoing schedule of workshops led by professional printers for artists of all levels, as well as open studio days for artists.

Open Shutters Iraq: A collaborative exhibition with the Montalvo Arts Center, curated by British photojournalist Eugenie Dolberg. The exhibition features a photographic series of diary entries written by 12 Iraqi women, revealing the deteriorating landscape of a country at war as well as the poignant portraits of some of its citizens.

Barack Obama, the first African-American President of the United States, is elected.

Manuel Neri: The Figure in Relief – A comprehensive exhibition of painted sculptures, maquettes and works on paper by preeminent Bay Area sculptor Manuel Neri. Neri is known internationally for his life-size sculptures in plaster, bronze, ceramic and marble, as well as for his association with the Bay Area figurative movement during the 1950s and 1960s. This exhibition marks the first time that this body of work has been shown together in California.

Captain “Sully” Sullenberger makes a successful crash landing in the Hudson River after his US Airways aircraft is struck by a flock of Canadian geese shortly after take off from LaGuardia Airport.

October 2nd is declared “Stan Lee Day”  by County of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach to honor the comic book artist and Marvel creative leader.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is signed into law by President Obama, changing the face of healthcare in the U.S.

Tony May: Old Technology marks a comprehensive 40-year retrospective exhibition of May’s paintings, sculptures, and installations as well as recreations of past temporal, interventionist and sitespecific projects that have been lost or destroyed over time. Tony May is a highly respected artist in the Bay Area, best known for a teaching career that spanned more than 40 years at San Jose State University from 1967 to 2005.

Actor, comedian and musician Steve Martin is invited to the annual auction through a Facebook campaign because the ICA’s Auctioneer’s name is also Steve Martin. Martin, the actor, does not attend but he does donate a “mixed media performance piece” entitled A Snowball’s Chance in Hell.

The artists in One Thing Leads To Another use repetition and serial procedures to systematically and sometimes playfully create a series of related works. By imposing constraints on their process, (which may dictate materials, dimensions, subject matter or involve organizational principles like alphabetical or numerical systems) they explore the endless variables within their framework, so that one work will inform the next one and so forth.

The eleven artists in The Office explore the absurdity of objects, ecosystems, culture and characters familiar to offices everywhere. In so doing, the work serves as a refreshing reminder that creative expression exists everywhere – especially in the office. Like its namesake television series, The Office playfully examines the everyday workspace that we all take for granted and provides ample opportunity to creatively reconsider the “daily grind.”

Charles Ginnever: Rashomon borrows its title from the Akira Kurasawa film of the same name, which presents widely differing accounts of four witnesses to the same crime. Reflective of the film’s plot, Ginnever’s installation consists of identical units, each of which is capable of assuming 15 distinct positions. Every angle of a Ginnever sculpture presents us with a different work of art; as one moves around the sculpture, the piece is transformed, evolving at a different pace and in a different way. According to Ginnever, “My work sits motionless and is only activated by the viewer moving around it – only then does it start to perform.”

Val Britton: Intimate Immensity premieres as the first Sandbox Project, a new exhibition program that provides opportunities for local and emerging artists to create and display experimental site-specific installations at the ICA.

Terry Berlier’s work is rooted in experimentation, risk taking, and problem solving. Many of the works incorporate kinetic features and sound elements and some require participation and collaboration from the audience. A combination of lowend tinkering and high-end technologies are utilized in the creation of the sculptures and her work is often composed of an amalgamation of parts that are found, repurposed, fabricated, crafted, and/or purchased. From the inception of ideas to the completed installation of her sculptures, Berlier is committed to providing a full sensory experience for the gallery visitor – much like the way we experience life.

On March 31, 2014, hit sitcom How I Meet Your Mother airs its much- anticipated final episode. The episode is part of season 9 and is numbered #208.

Relics is comprised of work by a wide range of artists from the Bay Area and beyond whose works document, examine, deconstruct, repurpose and critique recently obsolete technologies. Typewriters, pagers, 8- track tapes, walkmans, vinyl records, paper maps and more serve as inspiration for these artists’ creative practices.

U.S. Supreme court rules that same-sex marriage bans are unconstitutional, legalizing same-sex marriage across the country.

Jim Campbell’s custom electronic sculptures and installations have made him a worldwide leader in the use of computer technology as an art form. His pioneering research in HDTV and LED lighting, technologies that he uses to reduce visual information to the bare minimum, produce low-resolution works that explore what fellow artist Chris Salter describes as existing “in the limen between clarity and obscurity, the ephemeral and the concrete, the human and the technical.” His collaboration with Bay Area sculptor Jane Rosen further explores the territory between perception and cognition.

On July 6, Niantic, Nintendo, and the Pokémon Company release the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go. In the game, players use their mobile phones’s GPS to locate, capture, battle, train, and trade virtual creatures. In 2016, it was one of the most used apps, having been downloaded more than 500 million times worldwide by the end of the year.

San Jose affirms its status as a Sanctuary City.

The group exhibition Detritus examines the leftover scraps and byproducts of the art-making process from a multitude of Bay Area artists’ studios. By featuring no works of art, guest curators Kevin B. Chen, Lisa Ellsworth and Lordy Rodriguez invite both viewers and participating artists alike to consider their own valuation system when looking at and thinking about art. The display of materials gathered from more than 100 artists offers a glimpse into the time and labor spent in producing their work and shifts the focus from art as commodity to the core value of art making.