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

Suzanne Hudson discusses mid-century abstraction in relation to psychology and projective testing and examines the ways that the use of images in clinical settings conditioned audience encounters with art.

Suzanne Hudson is an art historian and critic based in Los Angeles, where she is Associate Professor of Art History and Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. Hudson’s work has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), Creative Capital | The Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Dedalus Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Parkett, Art Journal, and October. A long-term contributor to Artforum, she also has written numerous essays for international exhibition catalogs and artist monographs. She is the author of books including Robert Ryman: Used Paint (MIT, 2009), Agnes Martin: Night Sea (Afterall/MIT, 2017), and Contemporary Painting (Thames & Hudson, 2021). She is currently at work on Better for the Making: Art, Therapy, Process, a study of the therapeutic origins of art-making within American modernism.

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

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

Art historian Alexander Alberro explores the development of a research-based artistic practice that fused abstract art with mathematics, science, and technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The stated goal of the artists involved was to demystify the creative process in favor of an objective investigation of visual phenomena. Alberro will address how and why these experiments evolved into a greater concern with the participation of art spectators.

Alexander Alberro is a professor of art history at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City. His writings have been published in a broad range of journals and exhibition catalogues, and he is the author of Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (MIT, 2004) and Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-twentieth Century Latin American Art (Chicago, 2017). He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Currently, Professor Alberro is completing a book-length study of the newly-formed transnational web of individuals and institutions that has in the past three decades fundamentally changed the nature of contemporary art, exploring not only what has led to this complex transformation but also the impact it has had on the current conditions of artistic practice.

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

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

Chris Hallett, Ph.D.
Professor of Roman Art with the Department of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley

Julius Caesar spent a vast amount of money on building projects in the late 50s and early 40s BC, constructing an extension to the Roman Forum, a great Basilica in the Forum itself, and a temple to Venus. Because Caesar was assassinated with most of his building projects left unfinished—and with some of them not even started—his impact on the city of Rome, and the nature of the interventions he made, is today disputed. The new joint Danish-Italian excavations of Caesar’s Forum, now already underway, offers a quite exceptional opportunity for scholars to re-open this and other important questions about Caesar’s original intentions, and to offer a comprehensive re-evaluation of his legacy as a builder.

credit: Colossal head of Julius Caesar from Trajan’s Forum in Rome, early 2nd century AD, Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples.

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

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

Polyglot poet, translator and literary editor Patricio Ferrari, is joined by Pulitzer prize winning poet, novelist and essayist, Forrest Gander in a conversation about poetry, translation, the loss of linguistic diversity, and the lyric passion of pure sound.

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.

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

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

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 prompt, 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.

The September session is led by multi-lingual poet, editor, and translator Patricio Ferrari in Going Global: Abstract Art at Mid-Century.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Ages: 5 – 12

Construct, collage, and mix materials to create new narratives from the everyday, inspired by architecture and imagined worlds.

Instructors: Nicola Gherson and Jason Summers

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $150.00
Non-Member: $200.00

Layering, fragments, appropriation, cutting, higher cribbing, collage, and what artist Marshall Brown has called “creative miscegenation,” are all part of the crucible in which familiar themes are recast in art and literature. Is the resulting cross-disciplinary mashup an homage to what is left, what is kept, and what is removed? Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Lethem joins artist, Urbanist, Princeton University professor of Architecture and critical-thinking futurist Marshall Brown in a conversation about what Lethem termed the “Ecstasy of Influence.” This event is part of the opening celebration and catalogue release for the exhibition The Architecture of Collage: Marshall Brown (October 2, 2022 – January 7, 2023) on view in the Contemporary and Ala Story New Media Galleries.

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.

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

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

Jan Tichy
Assistant Professor at the Department of Photography, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

The artist and educator, Associate Professor at SAIC, Jan Tichy shares his work and research on the writer and photographer Lucia Moholy and discusses the place of contemporary art within historical research and preservation.

credit: Jan Tichy, Installation no. 30 (Lucia), 2016. Photo credit: the artist.

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

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member (Museum Circles): FREE
SBMA Member (Enthusiast and below): $10.00
Non-Member: $15.00
Student (Valid student ID required): 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 prompt, 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 October, award-winning author and UCR Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Andrew Winer, leads a session inspired by Édouard Vuillard's Fuchsias and French Marigolds (ca. 1903), on view in Ridley-Tree Gallery.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

In a reading and discussion of his electric, darkly humorous collection of 13 new short stories, the inimitable T.C. Boyle, Santa Barbara resident and bestselling writer of Talk to Me and Outside Looking In, ”messes with us” as the book inscription from Willie Dixon’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” promises.

In the title story of I Walk Between the Raindrops, a woman sits down next to a man at a bar and claims she has ESP. In “Thirteen Days,” passengers on a cruise line are quarantined, to horrifying and hilarious effect. And “Hyena” begins simply: “That was the day the hyena came for him, and never mind that there were no hyenas in the South of France, and especially not in Pont-Saint-Esprit—it was there, and it came for him.” A virtuoso of the short form, T.C. Boyle returns to share with us these inventive and masterfully told short stories characterized by his always biting satire, resonant wit, and a boundless, irrepressible imagination.

Book signing to follow.

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

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

Frank Kelly, Ph.D.
Curator of American Paintings, National Gallery of Art

American landscape painter Thomas Cole was at the height of his artistic powers when he died at the age of 47 in 1848. We will never know for certain what Cole might have done, but there are clues in the works he left behind, both finished and unfinished, in his studio when he died. Large canvases—including the one in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art known as The Meeting of the Waters—suggest that he had many subjects in mind to paint, so fertile was his imagination. This lecture outlines what Cole was doing artistically in his last years and the works he actually created then. It further considers what he might have accomplished had he lived to paint longer.

credit: Thomas Cole, The Meeting of the Waters, 1847. Oil on canvas. SBMA.

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

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

The New York Times award-winning author Susan Straight returns to read from her latest and much lauded novel, Mecca. Set in Southern California’s inland and high desert area, this is a story of freeways, wildfires, secrets, and struggles that is, at its heart, a love song for a place and its people. Told from different points of view in interwoven narratives, Mecca speaks of loneliness and grief, family, and home, and the ways in which language, with its power and peculiarities carries a culture’s hopes and fears. With courage and grace, Straight, noted as “an essential voice in American writing and in writing of the West,” looks closely at the California few see, pushes deep into the difficult territories of the past few years, and shifts how we see the land and each other.

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.

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

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

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 prompt, 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, award-winning author and UCR Associate Professor of Creative Writing, Andrew Winer, leads a session inspired by Eugène Delacroix's Winter: Juno and Aeolus (1856), on view in Ridley-Tree Gallery.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Harmon Siegel, Ph.D.
Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows

Impressionism has, from the beginning, been seen as an art of nature. Today, however, in the moment we call the Anthropocene, when human projects have transformed every corner of the planet and threaten to make it uninhabitable, this commitment may seem hopelessly naive. In fact, however, impressionist paintings illuminate our condition, revealing the entanglement of nature and society. In so doing, they help us overcome nostalgia for a lost nature and recognize our responsibility for shaping the world we inhabit

credit: Camille Pissarro, La Machine de Marly à Bougival, c. 1869. Image courtesy of Sotheby's, Inc.

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

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