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

Inspired by the artistic collaboration of Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and the SBMA exhibition Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz, Parallel Stories examines what happens in fiction and life when artist couples work together. Celebrated author and recent winner of the Femina Prize for a foreign novel, Rachel Cusk returns to read from her Mann Booker Prize-nominated novel, Second Place. In this enigmatic and compelling tale, Cusk explores the complicated geometry of relationships—freedom and gender, art and suffering, ego and self-sacrifice, illusion and will. Her husband and artist, Siemon Scamell-Katz, joins her on the stage, along with their longtime friend award-winning author Andrew Winer, whose novel, The Marriage Artist, provides a provocative snapshot of contemporary marriage.

Together, they examine a certain anti-domestic stance, the closeness of comfort and control of our constructed selves, the way we enlist love in our perpetual search for meaning, and what we give up to create art.

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

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 preview of the exhibition Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz and Out of Joint: Joan Tanner. Reservations are required by February 6.

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

credit: Joan Tanner, End of Water #2, 2020. Oil stick, oil pastel, chalk, Conté crayon on folded Strathmore paper. Courtesy of Joan Tanner, copyright 2022

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: 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 February writer, SBCC professor, and current poet Laureate of Santa Barbara Emma Trelles leads the session.

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

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Ph.D.
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities, UC Berkeley

In 1836 Ingres ordered an artistic encounter between two Creoles who had both been born in Saint-Domingue, renamed Haiti. From Rome, the fifty-six-year-old painter exerted his power over an “homme de couleur” and a black man by orchestrating a confrontation that left both men in ignorance of its ultimate purpose. Ingres’s sixteen-year-old student Théodore Chassériau, was being told secretly to paint the celebrated black model Joseph, famously placed at the apex of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa: “See to it that [Chassériau] keeps this absolutely the greatest secret. He should bar the idle from his studio at this time.” While refusing to share his intentions with either man, Ingres confided to a friend that the subject was “Christ Chasing the Devil from the Mountain. As for the pupil, he does not need to know this.” Locked behind closed doors and left in the dark as to Ingres’s plans, two Creoles – painter and model - confronted one another; this lecture considers their meeting in light of France’s history of slavery.

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

credit: Théodore Chassréiau, Étude de nègre, 1838. Oil on canvas. 59 x 73 cm. Musée Ingres Bourdelle, Montauban, France. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource.  

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

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

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

Inspired by the artistic collaboration of Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz and the SBMA exhibition Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz, this series explores what happens in fiction and life when artist couples work together or in parallel, and sometimes within competitive creative spaces. 

Contemporary artist Cassandra C. Jones, whose work has shown in venues throughout the US and Europe, including Mass MoCA, Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, and the MFA Houston, is joined by her husband, Mikael Jorgensen, the Grammy award-winning keyboardist for Wilco. The two reflect on marriage and being a creative couple in an audio-visual presentation and guided conversation with James Glisson, SBMA Curator of Contemporary Art.

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 March session is led by essayist and lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, Ellen O’Connell Whittet.  

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Karen Wilkin

In 1959, the collector and critic B.H. Friedman published School of New York: Some Younger Artists, a selection of eleven artists of the period with varied approaches: Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough, Grace Hartigan, Jasper Johns, Alfred Leslie, Joan Mitchell, Ray Parker, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Jon Schueler, Richard Stankiewicz. Though admirably wide-ranging, this list is hardly definitive. School of New York Revisited proposes a broader, more diverse overview, adding twelve other artists, all of whom worked and exhibited in New York in the late 1950s, often in the same shows and institutions as the artists on Friedman’s list, but frequently investigated alternative ideas. They are: Peter Agostini, Ed Clark, Lois Dodd, Jean Follett, Judith Godwin, Stephen Greene, Alex Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Jan Müller, Alfonso Ossorio, Pat Passlof, Thomas Sills. Considering both groups together offers a capsule overview of taste in mid-20th century America and insight into how perceptions and evaluations of works of art evolve and change over time.    

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

credit: Judith Godwin, Series 7 No. 9, 1958. Oil on canvas. 72 ¾ x 49 ½ in. (184.8 x 125.7 cm). Berry Campbell Gallery, GOD-00108. 

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

Melissa Hyde

Though never as ubiquitous in the eighteenth century as the color blue, pink became the color par excellence of the French Rococo. The color was intimately associated with the so-called “Godmother of the Rococo,” Madame de Pompadour, the famous mistress of Louis XV. But even before Pompadour, pink was a hue much favored amongst elites in France, where it attained an unprecedented level of visibility in the visual and decorative arts and in the fashions worn by women, children and men. This talk will demonstrate why, in the eighteenth-century, to wear pink was to make a statement—a statement made all the more emphatic and enduring when memorialized in portraiture; and one in which gender, class and/or race played a fundamental role. These matters concerning portraiture “in the pink” will be addressed by way of some very basic, but actually quite complicated, questions:  what did pink mean in the eighteenth century? What colors were comprehended by “pink”? Who did or didn’t embrace this color and why?  In light of the complexities and nuances of pink, what might it have meant for a racially “white” Frenchman to wear this notionally feminine color (or to have himself depicted wearing it)? 

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

credit: Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Olivier Journu (1724–1783), 1756. Pastel on blue-gray laid paper, laid down on canvas. 22 7/8 x 18 1/2 in. (58.1 x 47 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003.26. 

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