Location: San Jose, CA
Medium: Painting, sculpture, installation
Website: tonymay.net
Tony May was born in 1942 in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, and grew up on his family’s farm, where he learned carpentry and metalworking from his father. He earned his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1966, studying with Warrington Colescott, Steven French, and Don Reitz alongside classmate Bruce Nauman. In 1967 he moved to San Jose, California, to teach at San José State University, where he remained on the faculty for 38 years — teaching color theory, drawing, painting, sculpture, and graduate seminars in both the Pictorial and Spatial Arts areas — until his retirement in 2005 as Professor Emeritus. He has lived in San Jose since 1973 and continues to live and work there.
May’s public commissions include Remembering Agriculture, a 1998 memorial to Santa Clara Valley agriculture permanently sited in Guadalupe River Park, and two collaborative works produced through his “Art in Community” graduate seminar for the City of San Jose: South Fished Street (2004) in Bestor Art Park and El Paraguas de Padre Mateo (2008), a fifty-foot metal umbrella with a mosaic base, in Mateo Sheedy Park. In 2010–11, the San José Institute of Contemporary Art mounted Tony May: Old Technology, a forty-year retrospective spanning painting, sculpture, and interactive installation. He is represented by George Adams Gallery in New York, where he had his first New York solo exhibition, Tony May: Paintings, Objects, and Devices, in 2018, and by b. sakata garo in Sacramento. In 2026 his work is included in The Art and Architecture of Maybe at Montalvo Arts Center.
May describes himself as a conceptual craftsman who works “in both two and three dimensions,” moving between hand-built sculptural objects, site-responsive installations, and meticulous photo-realist paintings. His three-dimensional work — variable book constructions, collapsible and portable devices, illuminated objects made from books and tin cans, and rope-and-pulley constructions — favors humble, recycled, and functional materials assembled with exacting craftsmanship, and carries a strong lean toward the conceptual, the quasi-functional, and the whimsical. Since the early 1990s he has built the T. House, an ongoing, idiosyncratic backyard structure combining Japanese-influenced carpentry with functional design, and has painted it obsessively: acrylic-on-panel works in artist-made frames that document construction and home-repair details — cinder blocks, hinges, latches — in the visual language of instructional manuals, complete with hand-lettered, graphic-novel-style captions. May has said the paintings increasingly rely on “happy accidents,” things that strike him as odd or curious rather than deliberately composed. Running through both bodies of work is a belief that meaningful art can come from ordinary labor examined closely, and that an artist can accomplish a great deal “with very little means, just by employing their brains and their technical skills.”
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