Lecture, Scenery, Story, Spirit: American Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Curator’s Choice: Scenery, Story, Spirit
Some highlights inlcude:
Frederick Edwin Church’s Moonrise in Greece (1889):
Frederick Edwin Church, "Moonrise in Greece," 1889. Oil on canvas. SBMA, Gift of Mrs. Lockwood de Forest.
Church studied with Thomas Cole between 1844 and 1846 and adopted his teacher’s method of synthesizing natural elements in meticulously painted landscapes. Inspired by the writings of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Church traveled throughout South America and along the coast of northeastern Canada in the 1850s, making sketches for the monumental paintings that cemented his reputation as the greatest landscape painter of his generation. In 1867, Church embarked on a tour of the Holy Land, sailing to Athens in 1869 to sketch the Parthenon. This 1889 scene of an undetermined locale derives from sketches or photographs Church made on site on this earlier trip. Painted in Mexico, where the artist convalesced in the late 1880s, the painting’s elegant composition and elegiac mood are characteristic of Church’s late works, which often reused earlier material.
My Studio Door (1895) by John Frederick Peto:
John Frederick Peto, "My Studio Door," 1895. Oil on canvas. SBMA, Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton to the Preston Morton Collection.
In the late 19th century, painters sought to elevate their professional status through calculated depictions of the artist’s studio, an increasingly specialized domain that combined laboratory, atelier, and gallery space. As Peto’s work demonstrates, such images were occasionally delineated in the mode of illusionistic painting known as trompe l’oeil, which sought to fool the eye and invite the touch. In an ironic twist, Peto’s closed studio door only alludes to the space within. Likewise, the painting presents objects typical of the rural huntsman—a pistol, a Bowie knife, a lantern, and powder horn—but none associated with the painter’s art.
Frederic Remington’s Fight Over a Waterhole (1897):
Frederic Remington, "Fight Over a Waterhole," 1897. Oil on canvas. SBMA, Gift of Barbara D. Dupee.
Remington painted hundreds of scenes of the rustic west from his studio in New Rochelle, New York. During a trip to the West at age nineteen, Remington decided to devote himself to the preservation of the vanishing frontier and its colorful inhabitants, publishing his images in popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Collier’s. Made around the time Remington traveled to Cuba as a war correspondent during the Spanish-American War, this monochromatic painting, called a grisaille, was intended to better accommodate the image’s transference to the print medium. It depicts two frontiersmen making a last stand to protect a much-coveted source of water in the desert. The square formation of the logs surrounding the small waterhole they seek to protect suggests the indefensibility of their position and the futility of their resistance as attackers circulate easily along the high horizon.
Scenery, Story, Spirit is the third in the quarterly series of Curator’s Choice lectures. Hand-picked by the Museum’s curators, the lecturers provide fresh perspective on the visual arts and provide stimulating opportunities for discovery to adults in the Santa Barbara community.
Thursday, May 17, 5:30 PM
Mary Craig Auditorium
Free for Members/Regular admission for Non-Members
The Curator’s Choice lecture series is made possible through the sponsorship of the Museum’s curatorial support groups: Friends of Asian Art (FOAA), Dead Artists Society (D.A.S.), PhotoFutures, and The Museum Contemporaries (TMC). To receive information about one or more of these support groups, please contact Alexandra Mosher at amosher@sbma.net or call 805-884-6425.
Going Up, Publicly Private: Enrico Natali and Doug Rickard, School Programs
SBMA’s Partnership with La Cuesta Continuation High School
Inspired by Publicly Private: Enrico Natali and Doug Rickard
On view in the Museum’s elevator through May 20, as part of the series Going Up:
The students of La Cuesta Continuation High School responded passionately to the photographs of Enrico Natali and Doug Rickard in the recent SBMA exhibition Publicly Private, which captured people in public during private moments―that is, people unaware that their photo was being taken.
Armed with black and white disposable cameras, the students were given the assignment to shoot 24 exposures in 24 hours. The resulting photographs, while taken in the spirit of Natali and Rickard, also frankly express the students’ own unique viewpoint of the world around them. As Natali states, [they] “…make visible the beauty of that which we take for granted, that which is so common that it all but disappears.”
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and La Cuesta Continuation High School have been collaborating since 2007, providing opportunities for La Cuesta students to explore forms of self-expression through art and language, inspired by the Museum’s permanent collection and special exhibitions.
Going Up is a series of unorthodox installations of student artwork displayed in the non-traditional space of the Museum elevator. The title both refers to the enhanced experience of the passengers as well as the student artists who are onthe rise. Going Up installations connect to special exhibitions or the Museum’s permanent collection and vary in size, subject and medium.
Tags: Doug Rickard, Enrico Natali, Going Up, La Cuesta Continuation High School, Publicly Private
Behind the Wheel, Scenery, Story, Spirit: American Painting and Sculpture from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Studio Sundays, This Weekend at SBMA
This weekend at SBMA
Happy Mother’s Day Weekend!
Albert Bierstadt, "Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley", 1864. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton for the Preston Morton Collection.
Give your Mom something beautiful– eye candy for the soul. Take her to SBMA, and treat her to beautiful art, a lovely setting, and lunch in the Museum Café. Take in the re-installed French works in the Ridley-Tree Gallery, and American collection in Scenery, Story, Spirit, and see the recently opened photography exhibition, Behind the Wheel.
Saturday, May 12
Noon – Join our knowledgeable and entertaining docents for a tour through our newly reinstalled Asian galleries
Ma Quan, Spring Flower in Cloisonne and Bronze Vessels, "Presenting the New Year", 1731. Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk. SBMA, Museum purchase with John and Peggy Maximus Fund.
Sunday, May 13
Noon, 1 pm: Join one of our two tours to marvel at the great craftsmanship of the artists on display: tour Scenery, Story, Spirit, SBMA’s American Collection at noon, or learn more about photography touring Behind the Wheel at 1 pm.
1:30 – 4:30 pm Studio Sundays on the Front Steps: Visitors of all ages are welcome to participate in this free, hands- on workshop with SBMA Teaching Artists on the Museum’s front steps. Using Ma Quan’s Spring Flowers in Cloisonne and Bronze Vessels, “Presenting the New Year” as inspiration, sketch a selection of spring flowers from life onto a paper scroll then add color with opaque inks.
5:30 pm Go see Mama of Dada with your Mama! This documentary, written and directed by Thomas L. Neff, tells the story of Beatrice Wood, a renowned ceramist and leading figure in the Dada art movement in New York in the 1910s.
Beatrice Wood, Colin Gardner, Film Screening
OF CHOCOLATE, CLAY, AND YOUNG MEN: THE MAMA OF DADA
Beatrice Wood, photo by Tony Cunha, Courtesy of the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts
Mid-way through Tom Neff’s charming and informative documentary film biography, Beatrice Wood: Mama of Dada (which screens this Sunday at 5:30 pm at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art) he asks, in rapid succession, a number of art experts the exact same question: “What is Dada?” Each starts to proffer the same reply: “Dada? Ha!…” but is cut off before continuing their train of thought. Truth be told, it’s obvious that none of them really knows the answer, including Wood herself, although she does make an attempt at historical contextualization: Dada was “An expression of revolt against the first time that masses of people were killed by airplanes in war.”
Whether this comment is original to Wood or something she picked up from her Dada cohorts is never made clear. However, far from being a weakness, this seeming lack of contextualized clarity is one of the film’s great strengths. Any attempt to “define” Wood historically―either in terms of her idiosyncratic art practice or her unique place in the Modernist pantheon―is doomed to failure simply because she was such a “seat of the pants” practitioner. Even her famed ability to produce brilliant, lustrous glazes was a hit-and-miss affair, a case of “mixing up the chemicals” and seeing what happens rather than a scientific application of tried and trusted techniques and methods. Let’s face it: her autobiography isn’t called I Shock Myself for nothing.
Sumptuously shot on 16mm, Neff’s film originally premiered on March 3, 1993 at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles to mark Wood’s 100th birthday (she eventually died five years later). As one might expect, the documentary is dominated by the centenarian’s pixie-ish good humor and school-girlish delight in flirting with all and sundry. It’s no accident that, when asked the secret to her incredible longevity, she responds, “I owe it all to chocolate and young men.” Well yes, but keeping company with some of the greatest artistic minds of the 20th century certainly didn’t hurt.
Interspersed with contemporary footage of Wood explaining her artistic process, the film follows a rough chronology, tracing her early years as the daughter of wealthy San Francisco socialites and her initial attraction to both painting and acting. Because of her fluency in French, she was allowed to move to Paris where she studied at both the Comédie-Française and the Académie Julian. This sojourn was unfortunately cut short by the onset of World War I and Wood was forced to return to the US, continuing her stage career by joining a French Repertory Company in New York City. It was here that she met Marcel Duchamp, who had moved the Dada seat of operations to Manhattan following the cause celèbre of his own Nude Descending a Staircase at the infamous 1913 Armory Show. In addition she made the acquaintance of author Henri-Pierre Roché, who along with Duchamp became Wood’s lover (the ménage is believed to have been the initial inspiration for Roché’s subsequent 1953 novel Jules et Jim, successfully filmed by François Truffaut in 1962). It was at this time that Wood, Duchamp, and Roché produced The Blind Man, a magazine that helped to formulate and spread Dada ideas within the New York art scene and whose second issue provided a critical vehicle for denouncing the rejection of Duchamp’s Fountain readymade at a 1917 exhibit.
Perhaps even more important in Wood’s aesthetic and intellectual development was her introduction to the famed art patrons, Walter and Louise Arensberg, whose regular salons became a meeting ground for a wide range of artists, writers and poets, including Man Ray and Francis Picabia. It was during this period that Wood became known as the “Mama of Dada,” although her ideological affiliation was never that strong or committed. Neff’s film brings this period magically to life with a combination of period films and photographs (set to John Rosasco’s jaunty ragtime-styled score) and, more importantly Wood’s own paintings and drawings, which represent a kind of imagistic diary of her life ―both intellectual and erotic―at that time. Wood documented both her immediate surroundings―the Arensberg’s soirées, Duchamp’s apartment―but also her own intimate sexual relations with her lovers. The works are particularly remarkable for their suggestive use of contour and line and their deliberate eschewal of internal figurative detail. In other words, the bulk of the forms are delineated by negative space which is allowed to “bleed” into the white surround, as if Wood were presenting a purely felt and haptic experience, literally representing ephemeral affect itself.
This is of course analogous to her later ceramic techniques, where the shimmering luster of her glazes (which start out looking like a thickly-applied vanilla milk shake but emerge from the kiln like iridescent mother-of-pearl) both enhances the decorative surface of the bowls and figurines but at the same time dematerializes them into the incommensurability of pure light. Unfortunately, this has led to a certain fetishization of her work (not to mention commodification) which has transformed what are supposed to be utilitarian objects into precious collectibles. Instead of being arrayed on the dinner table as drinking and eating vessels, they sit in vitrines and display cases, reified examples of the very thing Dada as a movement detested. How wonderful then to see Wood hosting a dinner party at film’s end where her guests drink wine from her goblets and pass around food in her bowls. Yes, it’s a definite cut above Melmac in terms of craft and labor intensity, but it’s still supposed to be used. Happy Mother’s Day!
Reflections of a Docent
Ralph Wilson, SBMA Docent
For visitors to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, docents are the institution’s welcoming face and informed voice. A volunteer corps comprised of approximately 65 men and women from all backgrounds, docents support the arts by giving gallery tours to both adults and students.
Read more about the experience of one of the Museum’s docents, Ralph Wilson:
“As I complete my first year as an active docent at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, I think back to the beginning of the 9-month provisional training period. Having recently retired, but with a life-long interest in art—though no formal art history training—I felt somewhat uncomfortable to be taking an entirely new direction toward unknown territory but somehow at ease to be doing something entirely for myself, or so I thought.
My fellow provisionals and the docents teaching the class were encouraging and supportive. If you loved art, the work was not difficult, although it took hours of concentrated reading and research. With each assignment my confidence grew along with my knowledge of art in general and of the astounding objects in the museum. Wherever I went I was looking at things differently. My perceptions were more focused, perhaps more critical.
Upon graduation and commencing to lead tours of the Museum, I was having fun telling others about the art and encouraging them to expand their vision. That initial selfish feeling of doing something entirely for myself disappeared. I was sharing my enthusiasm for art with other people who were as excited to learn about our paintings and sculpture as I had been.
No longer in the business world, I had been reinvented as a teacher, as a guide to the wonders of art. And this experience of sharing knowledge and giving to others the joy of art is some of the greatest pleasure I have had in my life.”
The Museum is currently looking for volunteers to participate in a training program that begins in September.
Those interested in becoming a docent are encouraged to attend a Recruitment Reception and Tea on Friday, May 11 at 3:30 pm at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
To RSVP, contact Rachael Krieps, Manager of School and Docent Programs at 884.6441 or rkrieps@sbma.net.
Tags: Docents
Happy National Tourism Day
In recognition of National Tourism Day, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art celebrates its Travel Program, which has provided a variety of travel opportunities for more than 30 years! Tours focus on art, architecture, and gardens, often including private museum visits, behind-the-scenes access, and visits to private residences and art collections. Land tours are often led by experts and art scholars, while cruises include onboard lectures. Read about two recent trips, and those coming up!
Left to right: Sheryl Lawrence, Willard Huyck, Robin Chasteen, Paul Guido, Susan and Claude Case, Susan Keller and Myron Shapero, Gloria Huyck, Glenna Berry-Horton, Diane Sugahara, Jim and Connie Binns, Judith Taylor (front), Barbara Marré (front), Pat Hseu, Arnie Kassoy Venice and the Veneto from Palladian Masterpieces to the Venice Biennale, 2011.
Havana Revealed
In August 2011, SBMA was granted a license to bring its members to Cuba under a “people-to-people” license, valid for one year. In February 2012, two groups of SBMA members spent eight days in Havana meeting with artists, curators, authors, and musicians and participating in meaningful cultural exchanges with the Cuban people.A Cuban art scholar joined each tour to provide context for what the travelers were seeing in the exciting and complicated world of Cuban art. Using a conceptual framework, artists on the island have navigated the space between creative reality and the everyday, while developing the role of art and culture in Cuban society. Highlights included visiting the U.S. Interest Section, the Ludwig Foundation, which promotes Cuban experimental artists, and ISA, the island’s most prestigious art school where the travelers met and conversed with several of the school’s most talented students. Discussions with an economist and an expert on U.S. / Cuban relations provided valuable insight into the country’s history and what lies ahead.Through meaningful interactions with Cubans from all walks of life, the travelers came away with a deeper understanding of this fascinating country and an appreciation for Cuba’s people and art, as well as a thirst to learn more. SBMA hopes to offer two more trips to Cuba in early 2013, pending the re-approval of its license. More information will be available in fall 2012.
“If you think that guided trips are for the unadventurous, think again. The SBMA Cuba trip gave us access to the studios of some of the most outstanding artists in Havana . We could not have had anything like this experience without their assistance.” – Susan and Claude Case
Venice and the Veneto: From Palladian Masterpieces to the Venice Biennale
Venice and the Veneto, 2011.
October 2011 In October 2011, a group of SBMA travelers traveled to Italy’s Veneto region to explore Palladian villas and the Venice Biennale. The tour began in Asolo, where days were spent visiting many of the finest villas and palaces designed by Andrea Palladio including some that are still in private hands and nights were spent at the former home of poet Robert Browning, where he wrote his last volume of poems, Asolando.The group enjoyed several lunches with counts and countesses inside their family villas with interiors covered in frescoes dating back to the 16th century. On the way to Venice, a stop was made in Padua to see Giotto’s frescoes inside the Scrovegni Chapel. Highlights in Venice included a private after-hours visit to St. Mark’s Cathedral, guided tours of Peggy Guggenheim’s and François Pinault’s collections, a meeting with an architect in a contemporary loft he designed, and a visit with an artist in his studio, where he shared pictures of his pavilion that was part of the Biennale and that the group was able to see the following day. The prestigious Venice Biennale featured national pavilions by 89 countries at two different sites and included art installations inside countless churches and other buildings throughout the city. The tour, led by Susie Orso, presented a wonderful overview of ancient and modern art, as well as several private visits, providing a glimpse into the Venetian world, art, culture, and lifestyle.
Venice and the Veneto from Palladian Masterpieces to the Venice Biennale, 2011.
“My husband and I have been on many different tours with different organizations. The SBMA Venice tour was the best we’ve ever had. Top notch guides with perfectly-timed itineraries. Any concerns or needs we had were responded to without delay. This was my dream tour of Venice. Thank you!” – Sharon Felder
“The Palladian villas and the Teatro Olimpico were a revelation. And of course the ancient and contemporary city of Venice was spectacular as always. We thank SBMA for making all the special arrangements.” – Carol and John Green
Upcoming SBMA Travel Opportunities:
Click here to view the 2012 travel brochure.
Click here to read what travelers are saying about SBMA tours and about what makes SBMA tours unique.
Click here for recaps and more photos of past SBMA tours.
Tags: Cuba, Italy, National Tourism Day
Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, This Weekend at SBMA
This Weekend at SBMA
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Retrato del México de hoy (Portrait of Mexico Today), 1932. Casein oil pigment on cement applied to plaster. Anonymous gift.
Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, the annual commemoration of the Mexican army’s victory over French forces at the 1862 Battle of Puebla. What better way to celebrate than to see David Alfaro Siqueiros’ mural Portrait of Mexico Today, 1932? Located in front of the Museum, this is one of three murals painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros while he was a political refugee in Los Angeles. It is the only surviving intact mural in the United States by the world-renowned Mexican muralist, who was one of a group of muralists known as Los Tres Grandes (The Big Three), which also included José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Retrato del México de hoy (Portrait of Mexico Today), 1932. Casein oil pigment on cement applied to plaster. Anonymous gift.
At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, we’re proud to be a part of our community and we love to celebrate the places and faces that make our hometown special.
This weekend, enjoy gallery tours, installations, exhibitions, and demonstrations that reveal how artists investigate and celebrate their own sense of place.
Saturday, May 5:
Opening this weekend!
Jane Gottlieb, Dusty Ford, 1999. Courtesy of the Artist.
Behind the Wheel
On View through August 12
Get Behind the Wheel with SBMA’s ode to California’s car culture―an exhibition that explores the psychological place of the car in Southern California life. Whether in celebration, investigation, or incrimination, all of the photographs depict those unique mental states that can only be produced behind the wheel.
Final weekend!! Don’t miss SBMA’s Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California 1951-1969!
12 – 5 pm:
Watch Santa Barbara-based artist, Suemae Willhite, as she gives a presentation of calligraphy and brush painting in the Museum Store and stay to browse the works for purchase.
, Suemae Willhite.
SUNDAY, May 6:
Noon and 1 pm: Join our knowledgable and entertaining docents for tours throughout the day. At noon, join a tour of the Museum’s European collection, At 1pm, learn more about the art and artists that made Santa Barbara special in a tour of Pasadena to Santa Barbara.
Tags: Behind the Wheel, Exhibitions, Pacific Standard Time, Suemae Willhite
Exhibitions, Featured Artists, Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California
New York Dada out West
Beatrice Wood with Marcel Duchamp (left) and Francis Picabia (center) at Coney Island, 1917.
Long before Beatrice Wood produced organically shaped ceramic works in her Ojai studio, she was better known as the “Mama of Dada.” She had spent the early 1910s in Paris, studying art at the Académie Julian and acting at Comédie-Française. With the onset of World War I, Wood, along with many European artists, moved to New York City. It was here that she befriended Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, two French artists fascinated by the machine aesthetic ubiquitous in New York. Together they formed the core of New York Dada—taking a more playful approach than its war-torn, European counterparts—and published their own avant-garde magazine The Blind Man. Although short-lived, the publication featured, among other things, sketches by Wood and the editorial “The Richard Mutt Case,” which detailed the controversy surrounding Duchamp’s most incendiary readymade, The Fountain (1917).
Beatrice Wood, Works from the Collection of Forrest L. Merrill, n.d. Ceramic with glaze, dimensions variable.
Both Wood and Duchamp were drawn out West. In 1923, Wood followed her lover, British actor and director Reginald Pole, to Los Angeles. She continued to draw and paint, but her daring female figures never found an audience on the West Coast. In 1933, she enrolled in a pottery class at Hollywood High School with the practical objective of making lusterware teapot to match a set of dessert plates that she had purchased in Holland. It was in this chance encounter with the physically engaging medium of clay that she reoriented her career as an artist. She studied with Glenn Lukens at the University of Southern California and, in 1939, with the renowned ceramic artists Gertrud and Otto Natzler. Shortly after moving to Ojai in 1947, Wood began exhibiting regularly at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She continued to produce and teach out of her Ojai studio for over fifty years until her death at the age of 105, becoming a figure of both local and international resonance.
Marcel Duchamp, Couple of Laundress's Aprons, 1959. Fabric and fur suspended in glass and wood frame, Edition of 20, Male: 9 x 7 1/8 in; Female: 9 1/2 x 7 3/8 in., Norton Simon Museum, Museum Purchase.
Duchamp had intermittently traveled to California to visit old friends Walter and Louise Arensberg, New York collectors who had moved to Los Angeles in 1921. However, his major West Coast debut would come in 1963 with his first retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. Working closely with Duchamp, newly appointed director Walter Hopps gathered either original works or artist-sanctioned copies of 114 objects spanning more than fifty years of the artist’s career. Several works were borrowed from the Arensbergs. Duchamp even became a living work of art in his retrospective—playing chess in the center of one of the exhibition’s galleries with a nude Eve Babitz. This seminal exhibition had a profound influence on the trajectory of Southern California postwar art.
Wood’s ceramics along with several works from Duchamp’s 1963 retrospective are currently on view in the exhibition Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951–1969 until May 6th.
Related Programming
Sunday, May 13, 5:30 pm
Film Screening: Mama of Dada
This documentary, written and directed by Thomas L. Neff, tells the story of Beatrice Wood, a renowned ceramist and leading figure in the Dada art movement in New York in the 1910s. (1994, 53 min.)
Introduced by UCSB, Critical Theory and Integrative Studies Professor, Colin Gardner
Mary Craig Auditorium
Free for Members/Regular admission for Non-Members
Tags: Beatrice Wood, Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, New York Dada, Pasadena Art Museum, Walter Hopps
1st Thursday, After-School Programs, Education, Events, School Programs
Did you know?
In addition to an exceptional variety of exhibitions, did you know that the Santa Barbara Museum of Art offers dynamic education programs for families, students, and the community?
Family programs such as Free Family Days (Museum-wide celebrations that focus on an exhibition or a cultural celebration, such as Día de los Muertos), family gallery tours, Family 1st Thursdays, Studio Sundays on the Front Steps, interactive family guides, and activities in the Family Resource Center reach over 3,000 families each year, and are interactive, multi-generational, and help participants understand language, cultural history, and art.
In addition, the English Language Learners (ELL) program provides students an opportunity to transfer their language to a different context and to reinforce existing skills while building new vocabulary. When parents, children, students, and teachers visit the Museum together and engage in meaningful conversation under the influence of great works of art, they experience the Museum as an accessible place where interpretations and opinions are welcome.
The Museum also touches nearly every school in the community, offering free docent-taught classes in the galleries to over over 14,000 students each year, providing free transportation to 80% of those students. In addition, more than 1,000 of our most valued partners and teachers participate in Museum workshops and use our online resources, to incorporate art across the curriculum and link to the Common Core State Standards.
In addition to local schools, the Museum partners with about 40 community organizations, including UCSB, PAL (Police Activities League), Alzheimer’s Association, Santa Barbara Public Library, Santa Barbara Symphony, and Storytellers.
Have you wondered how to help?
As SBMA outreach has grown over the years, so has the commitment to new levels of excellence. We strive to present exhibitions of even greater international significance to the community and provide exceptional education programs to people of all ages – creative, innovative programs aimed both at and beyond the art itself, and that make a real difference in people’s lives.
A gift to the Museum Fund for Excellence makes all of this possible. If you are interested in making a contribution or finding out about other ways of supporting the Museum, click here.
Thank you!
Tags: Alzheimer's Association, ELL, English Language Learners, Family 1st Thursdays, Free Family Days, Gallery Tours, Museum Fund for Excellence, PAL, Santa Barbara Public Library, Santa Barbara Symphony, Storytellers, Studio Sundays, UCSB
Events, Exhibitions, Lecture, Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California
Conversation with the Curators
Thursday, April 12, 5:30 pm
Mary Craig Auditorium
Free for SBMA Members/Regular admission for Non-Members
Ever wonder how the idea for an exhibition is born? Join SBMA’s Curator of Contemporary Art Julie Joyce and the Norton Simon Museum’s Associate Curator Leah Lehmbeck this Thursday for a lively discussion on the creative connections undergirding the exhibition Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951–1969.
The exhibition explores the Pasadena Art Museum (known since 1975 as the Norton Simon Museum) and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, two of Southern California’s leading venues for contemporary art since the 1940s. From John Altoon’s first solo museum exhibition at SBMA in 1951
to Marcel Duchamp’s first U.S. retrospective at PAM in 1963, both institutions were home to many notable firsts.
Tying these two cities and institutions together was the very literal thread established by Thomas W. Leavitt, who served as Director at PAM (1957–62) and SBMA (1963–68). Leavitt’s contributions to postwar art in Southern California have been largely under-recognized and serve as the locus of this exhibition.
Top Left: Mark Tobey, Pacific Rhythms, 1948. Tempera on paper mounted on board. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, First Pacific Coast Biennial Fund, 1955.19
Right: Thomas W. Leavitt, 1967, Courtesy of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
Tags: Contemporary Exhibitions, Julie Joyce, Leah Lehmbeck, Norton Simon Museum, Pacific Standard Time, Pasadena Art Museum, Thomas W. Leavitt
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