SBMA Online

In a wide ranging and informal conversation with the audience, artist Edgar Arceneaux shares his thoughts about his art, current and past projects, and how we construct history and memory in a racially divided country.

Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux constructs drawings, installations, video, and film works as complex arrangements between implausible relationships. Constantly working in new modes, Arceneaux directed his first play at the Performa Biannual in NYC in November 2015 and was awarded the Malcolm McLaren, Best of Show Award. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, MA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

How-to books and photo blogs often represent the rules of photography as timeless or inherent to the medium. In fact, though, what we define as a “good picture” is constantly changing. In her new book,? Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography, Kim Beil traces 50 stylistic trends through 175 years of photographic practice. In this informal hour-long conversation via Zoom, she discusses elements of contemporary pictures that seem unassailably good (the “best” angle for selfies, the “best” light for portraits), and shows that these judgments are actually recent developments, which overturn decades of previous advice on how to make good pictures.?

In the second half of the hour, Beil comments on pictures submitted in advance by you, the audience, placing your own family photos (1880 – 1980) in the context of photo history.

Send pictures of your favorite vintage photos to communityprograms@sbma.net by 9/21 to have your photos included in the conversation.

Kim Beil teaches art history at Stanford University.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Elena Fitzpatrick Sifford
Assistant Professor of Art History, Baker Center for the Arts

In the 18th century in Mexico, artists began painting images of couples of different ethnic backgrounds along with their racially-mixed children. Typically, created in sets of 16, each picture showed a different type that was loosely codified in the sistema de castas, a hierarchy that categorized people based on racial mixture. This talk introduces casta paintings and discusses their formal and contextual characteristics, including the impetus for their creation and the significance of the works for those who commissioned and displayed them on both sides of the Atlantic.

credit: Miguel Cabrera, 5. From Spaniard and Mulatto Woman, Morisca (5. De español y mulata, morisca) (detail), 1763. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Be inspired by Joseph Stella's charcoal on paper, The Crusher and Mixer Building (1918–20), and create drawings that evoke mood through geometry, simplicity, light, and shadow. SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Tina Villadolid explores the value scale, thumbnail sketches, line and shape, positive and negative space, how to measure spatial distances and angles with your pencil and eye, and mark making and texture.

View the inspiration image for this class on the Museum’s online collection.

Required supplies:

• paper
• pencil (ebony drawing pencil recommended)
• eraser

Meet your Instructor
Tina Villadolid has been a Teaching Artist for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 22 years. Connecting with the people in her community through art has brought her so much joy! Tina loves to paint with oils, sculpt with clay, create installation art, draw portraits with charcoal, and write songs. She is conversational in Spanish, has two grandchildren, is originally from New York City, and lives with her cat, Chappie James, Jr.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: FREE

After looking closely at Aaron Siskind’s gelatin silver print photograph, New York 329 (1978), create your own abstract landscape using a small selection of common household items. Play with pattern, texture, and the inspiring constraints of working in a limited palette to evoke a sense of place in a setting you remember or imagine.

View the inspiration image for this class on the Museum’s online collection.

Visitors of all ages are welcome to participate in this virtual workshop, led by SBMA Teaching Artists via Zoom. On the second Sunday of each month participants explore a different medium, including clay, metal, ink, wood, photography, and paper. All projects are inspired by works of art in the Museum’s permanent collection or special exhibitions.

Materials needed for each activity are posted in advance here.

Registration is limited to 24 participants.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Working through the intertwined histories of art, architecture, and photography, Marshall Brown’s collages create new connections, associations, and meanings among disparate architectural and photographic sources. This talk focuses on collage making as a transgressive medium that embraces multiple histories, formal impurities, and uncertain visions for the future.

Marshall Brown is an architect, artist, and director of the Princeton Urban Imagination Center.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Terrance Hayes is an elegant and adventurous writer with disarming humor, grace, tenderness, and brilliant turns of phrase, and very much interested in what it means to be an artist and a black man. He has called poetry both "music box and meat grinder" and in his playful, almost improvisational approach to language, his writing takes on the energy and teasing rhythms of jazz. An athlete and artist as well as an award-winning poet, Hayes defies categorization or containment, just as his poetry uses and subverts canonical forms such as the sonnet to create both formal and rhetorical puzzles. Like many in these past months, he knows how to inhabit and make his own the space between flight and confinement. He moves fluidly, brilliantly, and unblinkingly in the space between word and image, between music and breath.

Terrance Hayes’s most recent publications include American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin (Penguin 2018) and To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight (Wave, 2018). To Float In The Space Between was winner of the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin won the Hurston/Wright 2019 Award for Poetry and was a finalist the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry, the 2018 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry, and the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Hayes is a Professor of English at New York University.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Associate Professor of Art, La Salle University

Costumbrismo, a genre that took hold in Spain and Latin America, manifested itself through the visual and literary arts and sought to capture the customs, costumes, and traditions of everyday people and everyday life. In Mexico, it garnered particular momentum and prominence as the nation’s leaders tried to stabilize the country both politically and economically. Costumbrista artists desired to capture the corporeal physicality and presence of the Mexican people through their emphasis on naturalistic depiction and attention to detail. They created personal, constructed portrayals of Mexican life that were often romanticized and politicized. Ultimately, costumbrismo created a propagandistic, subjective language of representation that evaluated, critiqued, and celebrated 19th-century Mexican culture and traditions.

credit: José Agustín Arrieta, La Sorpreza (detail), 1850. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Historia, INAH, Mexico City.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Explore a contemporary approach to creating the illusion of space, gravity, and movement. Draw inspiration from Robin Vaccarino's Freeze Frame series, which combines an atmospheric background with detailed graphic elements. SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Tina Villadolid explores the value scale, thumbnail sketches, how to measure distance and angles with your pencil and eye, and going from sketch to collage and back again.

Required supplies:

• paper
• pencil (ebony drawing pencil recommended)
• eraser
• scissors
• glue stick
• magazine pages with elements of sky, architecture, and nature (or whatever catches your eye)
• charcoal or chalk pastels (optional)

Meet your instructor:
Tina Villadolid has been a Teaching Artist for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 22 years. Connecting with the people in her community through art has brought her so much joy! Tina loves to paint with oils, sculpt with clay, create installation art, draw portraits with charcoal, and write songs. She is conversational in Spanish, has two grandchildren, is originally from New York City, and lives with her cat, Chappie James, Jr.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: FREE

Mark Castro
Jorge Baldor Curator of Latin American Art, Dallas Museum of Art

In the aftermath of Mexico’s violent civil war from 1910 to 1920, artists played a vital role in the construction of a new national identity. The works of the famous mural painters José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros epitomized this transformation, capturing scenes from Mexico’s past, present, and an imagined future. Although of critical importance, these monumental works represent one facet of the rich history of Mexican modern art. This talk offers a glimpse of the complex history of innovation and debate that shaped Mexican art and in turn influenced modern art across the globe.

credit: David Alfaro Siqueiros, La colina de los muertos (detail), 1944. Duco on board. SBMA, Gift of Mrs. MacKinley Hel, 1969.35.51. © David Alfaro Siqueiros / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SOMAAP, Mexico City.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE