On the Road: San Jose, CA

San Jose, the largest city in Northern California with just over a million people, is located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Home to the San Jose Sharks and a sprawl of tech companies, including Cisco and Google, it has been primed for a place at the table of the global arts scene. It seems that time may have come.

During the last week of October, it held its first Pow!Wow! Mural Festival, which is geared at engaging the local community in the process and creation of art and music with world-renowned artists. For me, this put San Jose on my radar and I was quick to plan a visit to check it out. (For more stories about the Pow!Wow! festivals we have covered on SOLD, see Worcester, Long Beach, Washington, DC .)

Here are some of the walls (along with locations) from the Pow!Wow! San Jose event. For a full list of the work from their inaugural festival, you can check out the map on their website:

In addition to the latest splash of paint on the walls of the "Capitol of Silicon Valley", San Jose has a lot of other art to be discovered on its streets, sprinkled around the city in such areas as the SOFA District and Japantown.

I was pleasantly surprised to find a Sainer (Etam Cru) wall and an electric box by Hueman! There was even a huge canine creature by Nosego lounging around Japantown.

Slowly but surely, more and more color is being added to San Jose's bustling streets. Here are some of the other current works you may see while cruising around. Personally, I found it easiest to have a car, since some of the distances between walls are pretty far, but then again, you never know what you may come across just by hitting the pavement:

If you are headed to Northern California and feel like making a pitstop between the charm of San Francisco and the beaches of Santa Cruz, you may may want to spend some time in San Jose to see a few of the gems I recently discovered.

With Winter coming, California never looked better. So, what are you waiting for?