SBMA Online

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: FREE
Adult: $5.00
Senior (age 65+): $3.00
Child (ages 6-17): $3.00
Under 6: FREE

From Iran to North Korea, from Cuba to Tibet, Pico Iyer has spent more than 40 years traveling to the places we hear about more than know about. In a world ever more mediated, he longs to see places first-hand, and catch a human reality often lost in images or on screens. Sharing long, detailed stories about his journeys across Iran, to Pyongyang, and to other places in the news more than in our heads, he catches some of the beauty and surprise of travel and reminds us why travel is more urgent than ever in a world where we're so often lost in our own bubbles. Iyer is the author of 15 books, including, this year, Autumn Light, This Could be Home, and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. Two of his recent works The Art of Stillness and The Open Road were national bestsellers.

Chris Hallett, Professor of Roman Art, UC Berkeley

In the Roman period the tendency to individualize or “personalize” the Egyptian mummy (or its case), which had to some extent always existed in Pharaonic culture, became much more pronounced. The process culminated in the creation of the “portrait mummy”, or “portrait shroud” which carried a vividly painted representation of the deceased, and showed him or her in contemporary clothing. What were the aims or goals of this “personalization” of the mummy? In this lecture a number of different interpretations of the Roman portrait mummy will be considered, with the aim of arriving at a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the evidence.

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

A foremost expert on the history of photography’s first decades, Hope Kingsley, Curator, Education and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography, presents a fascinating in-depth overview of Salt & Silver: Early Photography, 1840-1860. This major traveling exhibition provides a rare and extraordinary chance to experience some of the earliest photographs ever made, by many of the most important and groundbreaking figures in the history of the photographic medium. Organized by the Wilson Centre for Photography, London, with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, Salt & Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art September 8 – December 8.

This event is sponsored by the Lorna Hedges Lecture Fund.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Since its inception, the Aeolus Quartet has been awarded prizes at nearly every major competition in the United States, and is dedicated to bringing music into the community through highly innovative and engaging outreach programs. In celebration of Beethoven’s 250th birthday next year, they will perform the composer's Op. 18 No. 5, Op. 95, and Op. 131.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $20.00
General Admission: $25.00

This talk takes as its launching point the September 1939 issues of National Geographic magazine, which features a 20-page article by the Baroness Ravensdale and 13 color photographs by Stephen Nyman. For many Americans, this was their first exposure to seeing Persia and its cultural heritage. What was the goal of this issue? Who were these adventures and photographers, and why did they go to “Persia?” What was travel like at the time? How do the tourist itineraries of the past compare to those today?

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00

Ken Lapatin, Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum

Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and others carved semi-precious gemstones millennia before the craft was taken up by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but the art reached new heights in classical antiquity. This talk explores the development of gem-engraving in Archaic and Classical Greece and the rise of a culture of collecting in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, a tradition revived in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. While several stunning gems recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum will be introduced, the scope of this introductory lecture will be considerably wider.

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

Matthew Robb, Chief Curator, Fowler Museum at UCLA

In the summer of 1966, the May Company’s store on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax held a sale of approximately 4,000 items of pre-Columbian art. The sale, sponsored by Morton D. May, president of the company and a well-known art collector himself, was part of a larger trend when pre-Columbian art experienced a moment in the collecting spotlight across the country, particularly in urban centers like Los Angeles. Dealers like Earl Stendahl had established the viability of collecting such objects as art in the 1930s. They had also developed a roster of clients that included Hollywood luminaries like Vincent Price, whose cultural cachet extended to the objects they owned, promoted, and sold. Price – like May, a native of Saint Louis – shared May’s conviction that art of all kinds should be accessible to and even buyable by a broad swath of the public. These personalities moved along a spectrum of mass media that included print advertisements, television appearances, and movies where pre-Columbian art objects featured as primitivist MacGuffins that completed the backdrops of modernist homes.

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

Julian Brooks, Senior Curator of Drawing, J. Paul Getty Museum

Michelangelo is regarded as one of the most creative artists in western art history, using countless drawings to explore the dynamics of the human form and to solve compositional problems. Yet he is recorded as burning hundreds – perhaps thousands – of his sketches and cartoons. Julian Brooks, Senior Curator of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, looks into the extraordinary phenomenon of Michelangelo and his draftsmanship.

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

James Glisson, Chief Curator, The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Beginning in the late 1940s, Frederick Hammersley experimented with artworks that had a limited range of shapes and color choices often created through elaborate procedures and scripted processes. As this lecture will explore, Hammersley used control as way to free himself, to open his mind to new ideas, to play. It will begin by focusing on the SBMA’s Hammersley painting, Four awhile (1974), and will share insights drawn from scientific analysis and archival research.  The discussion will conclude by expanding the discussion to other artists from the mid-20th century who applied rules to structure their art making.

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

Mary Hunter, Associate Professor, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

When Berthe Morisot asked Edouard Manet to have a look at her recently completed portrait of her mother and pregnant sister in the days before the 1870 Salon, she did not expect him to completely repaint the depiction of her mother. “[I]t isn’t possible to stop him,” she wrote in distress to her sister. “He moves from the petticoat to the bodice, from the bodice to the head, from the head to the background.” While Morisot sought Manet’s expertise, she feared that the painting’s public display would ruin her reputation as an independent artist as his heavy hand left too obvious a mark on her canvas.

This paper explores the gender politics of occupational expertise – artistic and medical – through an analysis of Morisot’s The Mother and Sister of the Artist. Firstly, it considers the significance of hands and touch in Manet’s and Morisot’s work. Secondly, it examines how the hands of male experts ‘infected’ female spaces, including paintings and pregnant bodies.

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

Tiffany Bell, Independent Scholar, NY

The research for the catalogue raisonné, by bringing together information about Agnes Martin’s complete body of work, has made it possible to better understand the development of her early work as well as some of the stylistic shifts and thematic changes throughout her career. This presentation will describe the research for the catalogue raisonné, presenting anecdotes about newly found works and interesting discoveries, as well as giving examples of observations that have influenced a new understanding of Agnes Martin’s art.

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