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Welcome to SBMA! Advance ticketing reservations are highly recommended and guarantee your entry time.

Joyce Tsai, Ph.D.
Director, Clyfford Still Museum

The American Abstract Expressionist artist, Clyfford Still, held on to 93% of everything he ever made and willed this extraordinary corpus, not to an existing art museum or gallery, to an unnamed American city. In so doing, he invests his art with civic potential. Joyce Tsai, director of the Clyfford Still Museum will illuminate the ways her institution seeks to fulfill that ambition.

Generous support for Art Matters is provided by the SBMA Women’s Board.

credit: Children responding to a painting by Clyfford Still, PH-1049, 1977, oil on canvas, 114 x 172 inches, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. Photo credit: Joyce Tsai.  

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Museum Circles): FREE
SBMA Member (Enthusiast and below): $10.00
Non-Member: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

Celebrated author, Guggenheim Fellow and UCSB professor Yunte Huang reads from his latest book, Daughter of the Dragon, an in-depth exploration of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star who both encouraged and defied the Hollywood industry’s efforts to categorize her. Huang is interviewed by Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar, filmmaker, and Dean of the Division of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media at UC Santa Cruz. She is formerly Professor and Director of the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University and Professor of Asian American, Feminist and Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Inside Stories/Outside Tales

Local award-winning authors share new work and invite conversation about identity and voice, what we share, what we conceal, and what might be lost or gained in translation. Offered in conjunction with the exhibition Inside/Outside, on view through February 18, 2024.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

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

Join us for a special Members-only morning preview of the exhibition Shape, Ground, Shadow: The Photographs of Ellsworth Kelly and Flowers by a River: The Art of Chinese Flower and Bird Painting, 1368-1911. Masterworks from the Tianjin Museum and Changzhou Museum.

Reservations are requested by September 29.

This event is for Members Only. If you would like to attend, you may Join today.

credit: Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923 – 2015), Roof, St. Martin, 1977. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: FREE

Join us for a special Members-only evening preview of the exhibition Shape, Ground, Shadow: The Photographs of Ellsworth Kelly and Flowers by a River: The Art of Chinese Flower and Bird Painting, 1368-1911. Masterworks from the Tianjin Museum and Changzhou Museum.

This Member-only evening preview includes wine, appetizers and an opportunity to view the exhibitions before they open to the public.

Reservations are requested by September 29.

This event is for Members Only. If you would like to attend, you may Join today.

credit: Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923 – 2015), Roof, St. Martin, 1977. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy Ellsworth Kelly Studio. © Ellsworth Kelly Foundation

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $15.00

“A kick-ass counter-cultural icon.” —The New Yorker

The Museum welcomes acclaimed poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist Eileen Myles. A trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work, in the words of The New York Review of Books, “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.” Myles is the author of more than 20 books, including A Working Life, For Now, Evolution, Afterglow (a dog memoir), Chelsea Girls, and I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems 1974-2014. They bring to our consideration the ideas of identity, vocation, language, and place, which are also present in the current SBMA contemporary exhibition Inside/Outside. Myles’s many honors include 4 Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Creative Capital’s Literature Award and their Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.

Book signing to follow.

Parallel Stories is a literary and performing arts series that pairs art and artists with award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. This series functions as a multidisciplinary lens through which to view the Museum's collection and special exhibitions.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
Non-Member: $10.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

Suzanne Weaver
Independent Curator

Suzanne Weaver, a former museum curator of modern and contemporary art for over three decades and now, an independent curator living in Maine, will give a refreshing, thought-provoking and at times, irreverent talk about how to look at modern and contemporary art. Many of the insights she has developed over the years were inspired ironically, from trying to answer oft-heard disparaging remarks about contemporary art like “my five-year-old could do that,” “is it is art?” or “I don’t get it”.

Generous support for Art Matters is provided by the SBMA Women’s Board.

credit: Suzanne Weaver. Photo: © Kevin Todora. Courtesy San Antonio Museum of Art.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Museum Circles): FREE
SBMA Member (Enthusiast and below): $10.00
Non-Member: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

Three writers read and discuss their works. Distinguished scholars and creative writers discuss how their work has involved them in intensive explorations of cultures and arts apart from their immediate backgrounds.

Inside Stories/Outside Tales

Local award-winning authors share new work and invite conversation about identity and voice, what we share, what we conceal, and what might be lost or gained in translation. Offered in conjunction with the exhibition Inside/Outside, on view through February 18, 2024.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

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

Matthew Welch, Ph.D.
Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Minneapolis Institute of Art

With their crisp outlines, unmodulated colors, and surprising vantage points, Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) from the 18th and 19th centuries seem as fresh and captivating today as when they were produced. Sensuality, fashion, decadent entertainments and urban pastimes all reflect the popular tastes of young sophisticates in the premodern era. Matthew Welch, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts will provide an overview of the social milieu of Japan's "floating world," and the artists who immortalized it through their prints. He will also discuss several contemporary artists whose works reference the ukiyo-e tradition.

Generous support for Art Matters is provided by the SBMA Women’s Board.

credit: Kabukidō Enkyō, 1749-1803. Actor Ichikawa Yaozō III as Umeōmaru, 1796. Color woodblock print. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Bequest of Richard P. Gale, 74.1.192.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Museum Circles): FREE
SBMA Member (Enthusiast and below): $10.00
Non-Member: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): FREE

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 magician of perspective and scale.” – The New Yorker

In this conversation, resonating with both the past and tradition exemplified in the exhibition Flowers on a River and with the distillation and duality explored in Inside/Outside, Jenny Xie opens up, as US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera described, “multiple terrains of seeing.” With longing and memory, nuance and subtlety, the “anxiety of bilingualism,” and the unknowability of the self, Xie takes us deep into what is irreducible with pure piercing beauty.

Born in China and raised in New Jersey, Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University; and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022), long listed for the National Book Award in Poetry. Lauded for its precision, beauty and humanity, her work has appeared in Poetry, New York Times Magazine, and Tin House, among other publications.

Book signing to follow.

Parallel Stories is a literary and performing arts series that pairs art and artists with award-winning authors and performers of regional, national, and international acclaim. This series functions as a multidisciplinary lens through which to view the Museum's collection and special exhibitions.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
Non-Member: $10.00