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

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. This lecture will include glass plates once thought lost, now recreated through modern technology, as well as parts of the artist’s personal history that were only recently recovered by researchers working with Tichy.

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

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

With performances acclaimed for both “high-octane” excitement (The Strad) and “dusky lyricism” (New York Times), the Aeolus Quartet has been awarded prizes at nearly every major competition in the United States and performed across the globe. Formed in 2008, the Aeolus Quartet has performed in venues ranging from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series to Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, to Dupont Underground, a subterranean streetcar station in DC's Dupont Circle. They were the 2013-2015 Graduate Resident String Quartet at the Juilliard School and are currently Quartet-in-Residence at Musica Viva, NY. In addition to extensive touring throughout the United States, the 2021-22 season includes a Morgan Library performance as well as a feature on the Violin Channel.

Returning to SBMA after a lauded performance in 2019, the Quartet will perform Beethoven’s Quartet in Bb Major, Op. 18 No. 6, Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint*, and Schubert’s Quartet in G Major, D. 887.

* Caroline Shaw’s work will be performed three times this season. This New York City-based contemporary musician and composer became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013. She is often cited as proof that classical music has an exciting future.

Chamber Music Concerts at SBMA are supported by the Katharine Putnam and Reginald M. Faletti Concert Fund with additional support from the Curletti Fund.

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

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
Non-Member: $25.00

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 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

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

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

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

Inspiring performances, luminous sound, and exceptional musicianship are the hallmarks of the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet. Renowned for its dynamic interpretations and polished, expansive colors, the group has rapidly distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation, dedicated purely to the sound and depth of their music. The Quartet has appeared at the world’s most important venues since its founding in 2002. The Parker Quartet is now in its seventh year as faculty members of Harvard University’s Department of Music in the group’s role as Blodgett Artists-in-Residence.

For their fourth performance at SBMA, this favorite group will play Caroline Shaw’s Valencia*, Ligeti’s Quartet No. 2, and Beethoven’s Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127.

* Caroline Shaw’s work will be performed three times this season. This New York City-based contemporary musician and composer became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013. She is often cited as proof that classical music has an exciting future.

Chamber Music Concerts at SBMA are supported by the Katharine Putnam and Reginald M. Faletti Concert Fund with additional support from the Curletti Fund.

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

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
Non-Member: $25.00

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

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 this special December session, SBCC Creative Writing Professor Joshua Escobar explores the idea of transformation as a prompt for writing. Participants may submit their work for consideration of inclusion in a related public reading and performance at SBMA on February 12 or to the upcoming issue of Open Fruit, SBCC's Creative Writing Magazine. For further information, contact jmescobar2@pipeline.sbcc.edu.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

SBMA is excited to welcome the Catalyst Quartet back for their 7th performance. Hailed by The New York Times at its Carnegie Hall debut as “invariably energetic and finely burnished… playing with earthy vigor,” the Grammy Award-winning Catalyst Quartet was founded by the internationally acclaimed Sphinx Organization in 2010. The ensemblehas toured widely throughout the United States and abroad, including sold-out performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Chicago’s Harris Theater, Miami’s New World Center, and Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall in New York.

Their program of all female composers includes Jessie Montgomery’s Strum, Teresa Careño’s Quartett, Germaine Tailleferre’s String Quartet, and Fanny Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in E-flat.

Chamber Music Concerts at SBMA are supported by the Katharine Putnam and Reginald M. Faletti Concert Fund with additional support from the Curletti Fund.

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

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
Non-Member: $25.00

Formed in 1995, the Austin, Texas-based Miró Quartet, is one of America’s most celebrated string quartets, having performed throughout the world on the most prestigious concert stages. They won first prizes at the Banff International String Quartet Competition and Naumburg Chamber Music Competition, and in 2005, became the first ensemble ever to be awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. The Miró is quartet-in-residence at Chamber Music Northwest in Portland, OR and Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival in Washington State.

They will perform Haydn’s Quartet in B-flat major, Op. 64, No. 3, Caroline Shaw’s Microfictions*, and Antonin Dvořák’s Quartet in G major, Op. 106.

* Caroline Shaw’s work will be performed three times this season. This New York City-based contemporary musician and composer became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2013. She is often cited as proof that classical music has an exciting future.

Chamber Music Concerts at SBMA are supported by the Katharine Putnam and Reginald M. Faletti Concert Fund with additional support from the Curletti Fund.

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

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
Non-Member: $25.00