SBMA Online

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

Exhibition curator and ArtCenter College of Design Senior Curator Julie Joyce will focus on the multiplicity of histories and stories to be captured in works by Nigel Cooke, Noah Davis, Vernon Fisher, Charles Garabedian, Tom Knechtel, Jeni Spota, and others.

Free with paid Museum admission.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Writers of all levels are invited to participate in this informal exploration of the Museum’s newly reopened galleries as an​ impetus to writing. Each session is led by a visiting writer 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.

The September session is led by novelist and UCR Professor of Creative Writing Andrew Winer, who writes and speaks about literary, philosophical, and artistic matters and is the author of the novels The Marriage Artist and​ The Color Midnight Made. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, he is presently completing a novel and a book on the contemporary relevance of Friedrich Nietzsche’s central philosophical idea, the Affirmation of Life.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

During this intimate book signing, author Mary Tonetti Dorra shares her personal experience and gives a reading from her upcoming book Two Lives on Four Continents: A Double Memoir.

This double memoir tells the story of how Mary and her husband Henri Dorra, two people from different worlds, found each other and created a unified life. Against the sweeping history of the 20th century, readers will travel from Alexandria, Egypt to Washington DC, and from Fort Worth Texas to Central and South America and Italy as they follow the exciting lives of Mary and Henri Dorra.

This event is in person at Santa Barbara Museum of Art's Mary Craig Auditorium.

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

Lowery Stokes Sims
Independent curator and cultural analyst

This lecture demonstrates how Keith Haring evolved from engaging the wall as a renegade “tagger” in the context of 1980’s street art to expanding his artistic ambitions to include sculpture and objects. In this process he brought his 2-dimensional work out into space through his free-standing routed and painted figures and recruited a variety of objects—both found and pre-existing—as surfaces for his impulsive and compulsive embellishments. Haring’s interest in African and Oceanic Art was particularly evident in his collaborations with chanteuse/provocateur Grace Jones and dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones that encompassed the performative aspects of body painting and masking.

This ecumenical approach indicates that Haring participated in the blurring of the lines among design and art that can also be seen in the ambient impulses of his contemporaries such as Kim McConnell, Rhonda Zwillinger, and Kenny Scharf.

This event is virtual via Zoom.

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

While the story of bronze sculpture is often told through the evolution of casting technologies and stylistic development, investigating human relationships with figurative sculpture is equally revealing. In this presentation, Dr. Wharton will discuss his three-year collaboration with residents in a semi-rural Hawaiian community to research the material and social history of the Kamehameha I sculpture on the Big Island, leading to a community decision about whether to gold leaf or paint it. The Kamehameha I sculpture was commissioned in 1878 to commemorate Captain Cook’s “discovery” of the Hawaiian Islands and promote a western style monarchy. Modeled in the image of a Roman emperor while wearing highly symbolic feathered garments, the figure has come to function as a spiritual, economic, educational, cultural, and political object. The participatory project aimed not only to conserve the painted sculpture but also to enable a process of local control over narratives of the Native Hawaiian past.  Wharton's ethnographic research reveals tensions that exist within the multicultural, post-plantation community, as local residents voice notions of what it means to be Hawaiian.

Glenn Wharton is a Professor of Art History at UCLA and Chair of the UCLA/Getty Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. His diverse experiences in conservation include serving as Conservation Director for the Japanese Institute for Anatolian Archaeology at Kaman-Kalehöyük, Turkey. In a different vein, he initiated and managed MoMA’s program in video, performance, and software-based art conservation. He also co-directs the NYU-based Artist Archives Initiative that develops digital information systems for the display and conservation of contemporary art. Early in his career, he owned a private practice in sculpture conservation in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, serving many local museums including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He received his Ph.D. in Conservation from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and his MA in Conservation from the Cooperstown Graduate Program in New York.

This event is in person at Santa Barbara Museum of Art's Mary Craig Auditorium.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Esteemed sculptor Alison Saar will discuss the ancient and transformative powers of metal and its casting. Referencing Western mythologies as well as Fon and Yoruba deities, the artist will cite her monumental commissions and smaller cast pieces. One such cast piece is her bronze sculpture Inheritance (2009), currently on view in the exhibition Fire Metal Monument: Bronze at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Alison Saar’s work can be found in over sixty public collections, including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, National Gallery of Australia, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. In addition to numerous awards and residences, she has had over thirty solo exhibitions, including the glowingly reviewed Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, on view at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and the Benton Museum at Pomona College through December 19. The Los Angeles Times recently described Saar as “among the finest American sculptors working today.”

This event is in person at Santa Barbara Museum of Art's Mary Craig Auditorium.

credit: Alison Saar, Inheritance (detail), 2009. Bronze, cotton, wood. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Sarah Jane Lind in honor of Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College, 2010.2. © Alison Saar. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Writers of all levels are invited to participate in this informal exploration of the Museum’s galleries as an impetus to writing. Monthly sessions are led by a visiting writer who begins with a conversation and prompts, partially inspired by works on view. Participants write on their own, then reconvene to share and comment on each other’s work. Please bring something on which to write.

In November, novelist and UCR Professor of Creative Writing Andrew Winer leads the final of his three Fall sessions in the Museum’s new Contemporary Art Gallery.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Alicia Boswell
Assistant Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

In the ancient Andes, metallurgical technology was driven by an ideological system that imbued metals with sacred properties. Unlike Old World societies, where metallurgical technology developed in response to the demand for utilitarian goods, in the ancient Andes, gold, silver, and copper alloys were used to create regalia worn by elites. These objects lended authority and power to those that wore them—in life and death. This lecture discusses the role of regalia in the Moche world, a society that thrived on what today is the north coast of Peru in the first millennium. 

This event is in person at Santa Barbara Museum of Art's Mary Craig Auditorium.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Curators' Circle & above): FREE
SBMA Member (Enthusiast and below): $10.00
General Admission: $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.

Join us for a close examination of artworks from across the ages and cultures and a series of unexpected discoveries about the almost alchemical processes of transformation inherent to bronze. This talk will reflect the interdisciplinary, collaborative work involved in the technical study of bronzes and their preservation.

Francesca G. Bewer is the Research Curator for Conservation and Technical Studies Programs at the Harvard Art Museums with expertise in bronze sculpture and on the history of conservation.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE