At San José Museum of Art, Technology Is Women’s Work

In a 1969 Neiman Marcus catalog designed to shock, an elegantly attired woman leans against a $10,600 Honeywell “Kitchen Computer.” A basket of fresh produce balances on the machine’s smooth fiberglass top. It’s as if a spaceship’s control panel has beamed into a country kitchen.

Only 20 of the Honeywell 316 computers were ever produced, and even less were actually sold. (They cost about $94,000 in today’s money and required a two-week training course to operate.) But this photoshoot and the computer’s very premise — great at cooking but bad at logistics? — set up a binary that persists to this day: Women may benefit from technology, but they’re certainly not driving its development.

Motherboards, a group exhibition at the San José Museum of Art, tackles this falsity from two fronts. The show features 16 artists and collectives, working in a variety of mediums, who engage with the past and present of the technology industry. And alongside the art, objects from Mountain View’s Computer History Museum prove women were always part of the field — and drove some of its most remarkable innovations.

Maybe this sounds a bit like that dreaded and oft-rehashed intersection of art and technology. But Motherboards excels in referencing concrete facts and figures, and in pulling together surprising and truly beautiful artwork. While “technology” can be a vague and immaterial concept, curator Juan Omar Rodriguez has assembled a show that is satisfyingly tangible.

Take Hương Ngô’s sculptural and textile work. Her piece Assembling Power, a delicate framework of wire and electronics parts, resembles an airy model city. Across the orderly architecture, spiky orbs à la Buckminster Fuller lend the scene a utopian vibe. But who builds that utopia, and who gets to live in it? The sculpture is made from the same components her parents once assembled in electronics factories.

Across the gallery, her Core Memory series offers up more tiny parts, this time sewn into linen. The gridded designs reference magnetic-core memory, once used for data storage on the Apollo missions. (An example of a 1951 Whirlwind core plane is displayed in a vitrine nearby.) And here’s where visitors will get an added layer of appreciation if they read the show’s wall text: engineers sometimes called this medium LOL memory, for the “Little Old Ladies” who wove the software for the first moon landing.

References to weaving and embroidery abound in Motherboards. There’s no escaping how the Jacquard loom and its punch cards influenced the development of computing. Textiles also provide a handy material reference that pulls technology out of the digital realm and into physical space. Because behind every cloud, every wireless and invisible process is real labor, much of it repetitive and underpaid.

Amor Muñoz’s video and embroidered textiles present a project in which she offered women in Mexico sewing work for the U.S. minimum wage, then documented their output and timecards as proof of labor that would otherwise go unseen. Marilou Schultz’s remarkable weaving Replica of a Chip employs Navajo techniques to render a hugely blown-up version of an Intel microchip. The piece is the result of a long relationship between Navajo women and tech companies that have made use of that population’s “nimble fingers.”

As lovely as some of the works in Motherboards are — and there are many stunning pieces, including Sarah Rosalena’s luminous bead work, the textiles on Ahree Lee’s steel framework and Sonya Rapoport’s poetic use of computer paper — the show is mostly somber in tone.

“Computers” of course, weren’t always hunks of plastic and metal. (We learned this from Hidden Figures.) They were people, often women, who performed long and tedious calculations by hand. And yet there remains a general lack of knowledge about women’s central role in the industry. It’s an imbalance that has yet to be corrected. After reaching a high of 36% in the mid-’80s, women accounted for just 22% of computer science degrees in 2021.

It’s nice, then, when a work in Motherboards hits all the right notes, including delight. Unfolding across three channels, Tania Candiani’s video Four Industries features an all-women choir based in Cincinnati. Using just their voices, the performers “resurrect” the sounds of the city’s former industries: metal casting, meatpacking, printing and woodworking. (Yes, they mimic animal squeals.)

They sing rhythmic machine sounds, whistles and thumps, acting like foley artists to replace bygone soundscapes. It’s an absurd and wholly engaging performance, and a highlight of the show.

Even for those super well-versed in the history of Silicon Valley, Motherboards will contain discoveries. Here’s a potential one: So prevalent were female computers that “kilogirls,” 1,000 hours of a woman’s computational labor, was once a unit of measurement. The strength of the show is seeing how artists have taken their own experiences and discoveries and turned them, through kilogirls of careful labor, into impactful works of art.

‘Motherboards’ is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art (110 South Market St., San José) April 10, 2026–Jan. 10, 2027.