SBMA Online

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: FREE
Adult: FREE
Senior (age 65+): FREE
Child (ages 6-17): FREE
Under 6: FREE

Writers of all levels are invited to participate in this informal exploration of the Museum's galleries as an impetus to writing. Each session is led by a visiting writer/facilitator who begins with a conversation and prompts, partially inspired by works on view. Participants are free to write on their own and then reconvene as a group to share and comment on each other's work. Please bring a journal or notebook, laptop, or tablet on which to write.

Instructor: Nora Gallagher

Join Mara Papatheodorou, a former travel editor at Bon Appétit and culinary expert, on a virtual journey to French Polynesia, in celebration of SBMA’s upcoming tour there. Learn all about Tahitian culture and cuisine, tastes and traditions, fact and folklore. A popular guest lecturer, commentator, panelist/judge, and presenter about food, travel, and entertaining, Papatheodorou promises to transport guests across the Pacific Ocean to the islands of French Polynesia to explore its rich culinary history and culture.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00

All skill levels are invited to experience the tradition of sketching from original works of art in current exhibitions. Museum Teaching Artists provide general guidance and all materials.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

“A novelist has two lives—a reading and writing life, and a lived life. He or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.”

Parallel Stories takes a close look at the life-long passions, prodigious productivity, and well-honed writing practice of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley in a far-ranging conversation with longtime friend, fellow author, and colleague in the Creative Writing program at UC Riverside, Andrew Winer. Often epic in scale and yet intimate in telling detail, Smiley’s multigenerational tales tell the story of middle America written, says Winer, “with a classic sense of humanity and compassion that have made her name part of any serious conversation about fiction in our time.” Hailed as one of America’s greatest living writers, Smiley was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001, and in 2006 she received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. Her intimate evocations of American life have been compared to John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy; Updike himself praised Smiley for working on what he called “the edge of acceptable novel writing,” where she had replaced “plot and suspense with something freer and more lifelike.“

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00
Senior (age 65+): $6.00

Hear from author Daniel Stone about the true story of an American food spy who traveled the world and transformed what America eats.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00

James Glisson, Chief Curator, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Beginning in the late 1940s, Frederick Hammersley experimented with artworks that had a limited range of shapes and color choices often created through elaborate procedures and scripted processes. As this lecture will explore, Hammersley used control as way to free himself, to open his mind to new ideas, to play. It will begin by focusing on the SBMA’s Hammersley painting, Four awhile (1974), and will share insights drawn from scientific analysis and archival research.  The discussion will conclude by expanding the discussion to other artists from the mid-20th century who applied rules to structure their art making.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Curators' Patron & above): FREE
SBMA Member (Collector's Patron and below): $10.00
General Admission: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

“I’m a political poet—let us say a human poet, a poet that’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use.”

Parallel Stories flings open the door to the exuberant experimental poetry of former California and U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera in a conversation between Herrera and his longtime friend, fellow author, and colleague in the Creative Writing program at UC Riverside, Andrew Winer.

Writing to create, as he says, “incredible bridges,” Herrera confounds all borders including that between the written and the spoken. The son of migrant farmers, which he says strongly shaped his work, he finds his stories in the landscape and language of California. This multiple award-winning author of over 30 books including poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, reminds us that we are the poetry makers and invites us to join him.

Book signing to follow

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00
Senior (age 65+): $6.00

All skill levels are invited to experience the tradition of sketching from original works of art in current exhibitions. Museum Teaching Artists provide general guidance and all materials.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Established in 2013, the Arod Quartet, based in Paris, has already captivated chamber music lovers, performing more than eighty concerts this season at such prestigious venues as the Auditorium of the Louvre in Paris and the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. The Arod first came to international attention when they won the First Prize at the 2016 ARD International Music Competition and went on to join the BBC New Generation Artists’ roster. The quartet made its Carnegie Hall debut in April 2019.

Their program includes Haydn’s Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5, Bartók’s Quartet No. 4, and Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky,” by Beethoven.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
General Admission: $25.00

Join SBMA for a Members-only day trip to the Getty Center! Once there, enjoy a docent-led tour of Michelangelo: Mind of the Master. This exhibition explores the full range of Michelangelo's work as a painter, sculptor, and architect through more than two dozen of his extraordinary drawings, including designs for celebrated projects such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Medici Chapel tombs, and The Last Judgment. Afterward, enjoy free time on your own for lunch and view the art, architecture, and gardens the Getty Center has to offer.

The Getty Center offers two locations for lunch. To make a reservation at The Restaurant, please call 310.440.6810 to reserve a spot from 12:30 pm on. The Café does not require reservations.

Your reservation for the Getty Center day trip includes a complimentary ticket to the upcoming Art Matters lecture on February 6 at SBMA, Michelangelo: Burning Inspiration by Julian Brooks, Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Center. Please RSVP for this lecture by calling 805.884.6423.

credit: Michelangelo Buonarroti, Study of a Mourning Woman (detail), ca. 1500-1505. Pen and brown ink. J. Paul Getty Museum.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $70.00

Writers of all levels are invited to participate in this informal exploration of the Museum's galleries as an impetus to writing. Each session is led by a visiting writer/facilitator who begins with a conversation and prompts, partially inspired by works on view. Participants are free to write on their own and then reconvene as a group to share and comment on each other's work. Please bring a journal or notebook, laptop, or tablet on which to write.

Instructor: Ellen Whittet, Essayist & Lecturer, UCSB Writing Program

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Join SBMA in saying farewell to Kehinde Wiley: Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan. To celebrate the closing of the artist’s Park Projects installation, the Museum is screening the 2014 PBS documentary Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace, followed by a 30-minute Q&A with Rachel Heidenry, SBMA Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art.

credit: Kehinde Wiley, Equestrian Portrait of Prince Tommaso of Savoy-Carignan (detail), 2015. Oil on canvas. Collection of Dennis and Jeanne Masel. Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Mary Hunter, Associate Professor, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

When Berthe Morisot asked Edouard Manet to have a look at her recently completed portrait of her mother and pregnant sister in the days before the 1870 Salon, she did not expect him to completely repaint the depiction of her mother. “[I]t isn’t possible to stop him,” she wrote in distress to her sister. “He moves from the petticoat to the bodice, from the bodice to the head, from the head to the background.” While Morisot sought Manet’s expertise, she feared that the painting’s public display would ruin her reputation as an independent artist as his heavy hand left too obvious a mark on her canvas.

This paper explores the gender politics of occupational expertise – artistic and medical – through an analysis of Morisot’s The Mother and Sister of the Artist. Firstly, it considers the significance of hands and touch in Manet’s and Morisot’s work. Secondly, it examines how the hands of male experts ‘infected’ female spaces, including paintings and pregnant bodies.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Curators' Patron & above): FREE
SBMA Member (Collector's Patron and below): $10.00
General Admission: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

Grab your morning coffee with SBMA! Kick off your day with us for Member Morning in the galleries before the Museum opens to the public.

Enjoy docent-led tours of current exhibitions, catch a final look at the mesmerizing works of Tatsuo Miyajima.

Enjoy coffee and refreshments at 10 am, then enjoy a docent tour at 10:30 am. Stick around afterward and peruse the SBMA Store for a double-discount of 20% off unique exhibition-related gifts!

This event is open to all Members free of charge.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: FREE

Called by critics "one of the smartest writers alive," Rachel Cusk returns to SBMA and Parallel Stories to read from her latest collection of nonfiction writing, Coventry. In essays that are at once freewheeling and controlled, Cusk covers topics ranging from good manners, to rat eating, to traffic, to leashes on lions, and who controls the story. This fierce and elegant collection is a fearless exercise in truth telling; subtle, serious, and singular.

Book signing to follow.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00
Senior (age 65+): $6.00

Tiffany Bell, Independent Scholar, NY

The research for the catalogue raisonné, by bringing together information about Agnes Martin’s complete body of work, has made it possible to better understand the development of her early work as well as some of the stylistic shifts and thematic changes throughout her career. This presentation will describe the research for the catalogue raisonné, presenting anecdotes about newly found works and interesting discoveries, as well as giving examples of observations that have influenced a new understanding of Agnes Martin’s art.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Curators' Patron & above): FREE
SBMA Member (Collector's Patron and below): $10.00
General Admission: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE