The Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose will be the site of the county's first Veterans Stand Down, a resource fair for veterans on July 8-9, 2023. (Sal Pizarro/Bay Area News Group)
We’ve never been shy about honoring our veterans around here, but there’s a new event this weekend at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds aimed at giving veterans more than just a salute and a round of applause.
The Veterans Stand Down, taking place Saturday and Sunday, will provide veterans with resources, including employment services, medical and dental screenings, mental health checks, groceries and even haircuts.
The effort is a huge collaboration among Santa Clara County departments, led by the Office of Veterans Services, community organizations and veterans groups. Reps from California’s Veterans Affairs office and the Veterans Benefits Administration will be there, too, to help resolve claims. Second Harvest of Silicon Valley will provide the food, and the VTA has arranged to provide free rides on buses and light-rail trains from anywhere in the county headed to the fairgrounds.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Otto Lee, himself a 28-year veteran with the U.S. Navy, said the county is committed to helping to ensure veterans receive their hard-earned benefits and thanked all the community groups that came together to make the event possible. “We should make this an annual event to make it easy and accessible for veterans to get services,” he said.
The Veterans Stand Down will take place in the Fiesta Hall at the fairgrounds from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday. It is free, but registration is suggested. You can do that and get more information by searching for “Santa Clara County Veteran Stand Down” on Eventbrite.com.
ART AND ABOUT: It’s shaping up to be another creative summer at the San Jose Museum of Art, which is opening “Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist” with a reception Friday night. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 78, burst into the art world in the late 1970s with her modern — and controversial — depictions of the Virgin de Guadalupe and cemented herself as a major Chicana artist for the next several decades.
The exhibition, which runs through Oct. 29, showcases 50 of the painter’s most iconic works, as well as featuring other works and materials about her role as an activist in the Bay Area. Friday’s reception starts at 5 p.m. and will include live music by Pau D’Arco. The Museum of Art is also making sure that wider audiences can experience the exhibit, too, by providing a Spanish-language family tour led by Studio Art Educator Ruby Morales on July 8 and Aug. 5 that includes interpretation activities and a take-home art activity inspired by the exhibition. Get more details at www.sjmusart.org.
SJMA Executive Director S. Sayre Batton also recently emailed me with the news that Let’s Look at Art, the museum’s volunteer school outreach program, had hit a milestone of serving 1 million students on the heels of its 50th anniversary last year. A team of about 50 volunteer docents provides art education to thousands of students in Santa Clara County each year, and Batton said their work helps make SJMA a “borderless” museum.
RETURN ‘VOYAGE’: The Children’s Discovery Museum is bringing back “Voyage to Vietnam: Celebrating the Tet Festival,” an exhibit that delves into what’s different and what’s the same about the lives of kids and families in Vietnam and the United States. You can try on a giant lion dance mask, select flowers and food items for Tet festivities and see traditional áo dài gowns.
The exhibit, which opens July 8 and runs through Dec. 31, first opened in 2015 before heading off on a three-year national tour to nine children’s museums. It was last shown in San Jose in 2018. Go to www.cdm.org for more details.
Originally published at Sal Pizarro