SBMA Online

Matthew Robb
Chief Curator, Fowler Museum

From 100 BCE to 600 CE, the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan dominated Mesoamerica though a complex mixture of religious, economic, and military power. As a city, it presented a unique and unprecedented environment for its inhabitants, drawn from all over Mesoamerica, to become citizens of a unique urban experiment. It did this through the deployment of specific kinds of objects and images in specific kinds of architectural and spatial contexts. This talk explores one of Teotihuacan’s most famous object types—enigmatic stone faces that seem to represent the city’s physical and material ideals. It is a tale of two canons: the modern canon of these objects, from their earliest discoveries in the 18th century to their presence in museum displays and private collections around the world, and the ancient canon of these objects as their makers might have understood it. In the modern canon, it is precisely the lack of contextual knowledge about these objects that allows them to serve as almost stereotypical representatives of Teotihuacan as a culture. In the ancient canon, it may be that the masks represent an ideal that in other Mesoamerican cultures was closely tied to the Maize God. Understanding these objects in this way gives us a sense of how Teotihuacan understood its place in a broader Mesoamerican history, and how these objects gave its citizens a vision of themselves as parts of a larger whole.

credit: Teotihuacan masks in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City, ca. 1940s.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Escape for an evening to Paris with SBMA and the marvelous and multi-talented, Jane Smiley—talking animals, French cheeses, and plenty of bonhomie. Allons-y, Let's go!

SBMA Members are invited to an intimate, informal, and virtual conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Jane Smiley, from her Carmel Valley ranch. Smiley will read from her latest genre-defying and captivating story, Perestroika in Paris, a tale of three extraordinary animals and a young boy who find friendship and freedom in the City of Light.

• Invite a friend to this virtual event. Reserve them a ticket using your Member information and their email address.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom (SBMA Member): FREE
Virtual Experience via Zoom (Friend of SBMA Member): FREE

In honor of Black History Month, this session examines Jacob Lawrence’s screenprint The 1920’s…The Migrants Cast Their Ballots (1974). Draw details from his unique, modernist depiction of African-American migrant workers in the 1920s voting for the first time. Lawrence created this print as part of the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio, with artists contributing to the portfolio responding to the question “what does independence mean to you?”.

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

Required supplies:

• Prismacolor ebony pencil
• Eraser
• Pencil sharpener

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.

Join Justin Cammy for an engaging discussion on the building and concealing of memory, and its implications for the present. Dr. Cammy will be the study leader on the SBMA Tour Monuments & Memory in Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic from June 12 to 24, 2022.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

In honor of Black History Month, this session examines Jacob Lawrence’s screenprint The 1920’s…The Migrants Cast Their Ballots (1974). Draw details from his unique, modernist depiction of African-American migrant workers in the 1920s voting for the first time. Lawrence created this print as part of the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio, with artists contributing to the portfolio responding to the question “what does independence mean to you?”.

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

Required supplies:

• Prismacolor ebony pencil
• Eraser
• Pencil sharpener

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

Local writers, working in a variety of genres and forms, meet with participants for two, 90-minute sessions during consecutive weeks. Each writer, inspired by a work(s) of art in the Museum’s collection, chooses the theme, format, and form for the workshop; allowing both the writers and participants maximum choice. Participants have an opportunity to also share their writing. Sign up for both sessions with one writer or sample across disciplines.

Theme
Seeing in the Dark

What do we strain to see in the darkness? What procession of thoughts interrupts us mid sleep? What is moving into illumination and understanding? What remains obscure and unexplored? In this workshop we will explore the edges of unformed thoughts and fears.

Inspiration Image
Morris Graves, Procession of Sounds in the Night (1943)

Meet your Instructor
Rick Benjamin currently works at UCSB, where he teaches courses in poetry and community, environmental studies, translation, and juvenile justice. The former poet laureate of Rhode Island, he has published three books of poetry and is currently doing the final edit of a fourth, and also a book about the work that poetry helps us to do in our lives.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Learn the basics of watercolor painting from SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Itoko Maeno. Focusing on still life, this one-hour class is inspired by Marsden Hartley’s Still Life (1929-1930). Study the artwork or set-up your own still life to use as inspiration while you paint.

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

Required supplies:

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint + brush
• Two cups of water
• Pencil
• Paper towel or cloth

Meet your Instructor: Itoko Maeno
Itoko has been a Teaching Artist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 20 years. With specialties in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, she provides art lessons to all ages ranging from kindergarten students to adults. Celebrated for her watercolors, she also enjoys painting in oil and acrylic. Besides teaching art, Itoko has illustrated more than 20 picture book titles, including My Way Sally, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Picture Book, and Minou, nominated for the Caldecott Honor.

Learn the basics of watercolor painting from SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Itoko Maeno. Focusing on still life, this one-hour class is inspired by Marsden Hartley’s Still Life (1929-1930). Study the artwork or set-up your own still life to use as inspiration while you paint.

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

Required supplies:

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint + brush
• Two cups of water
• Pencil
• Paper towel or cloth

Meet your Instructor: Itoko Maeno
Itoko has been a Teaching Artist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 20 years. With specialties in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, she provides art lessons to all ages ranging from kindergarten students to adults. Celebrated for her watercolors, she also enjoys painting in oil and acrylic. Besides teaching art, Itoko has illustrated more than 20 picture book titles, including My Way Sally, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Picture Book, and Minou, nominated for the Caldecott Honor.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: FREE

Local writers, working in a variety of genres and forms, meet with participants for two, 90-minute sessions during consecutive weeks. Each writer, inspired by a work(s) of art in the Museum's collection, chooses the theme, format, and form for the workshop; allowing both the writers and participants maximum choice. Participants have an opportunity to also share their writing. Sign up for both sessions with one writer or sample across disciplines.

Theme
Writing the Frozen Moments

The stories we tell about our lives play in a series of memories, similar to the images in Robin Vaccarino's "California Freeze Frame" prints. In this workshop, tell a story from your life through a frozen moment in your memory. By piecing together these disparate memories into a sequence, you will tell stories that are larger than the sum of their parts.

Inspiration Images
Robin Vaccarino's California Freeze Frame series (1979)

Meet your instructor
Kara Mae Brown is an essayist, short story writer, and poet. Her work has appeared in PopMatters, Plainsongs, Hawaii Review, and Green Briar Review, among others. She is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: 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 lecture 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, and secondly examines how the hands of male experts "infected" female spaces, including paintings and pregnant bodies.

credit: Berthe Morisot, The Mother and Sister of the Artist (detail), 1869/170. Oil on canvas. Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, 1963.10.186.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

"Rankine’s voice is one of unrelenting candor: teaching, chastening, changing, astounding, and humanizing the reader." —Macalester University

Acclaimed author Claudia Rankine joins SBMA for a conversation "on the path to understanding.” The talk begins with a screening of selections from Situations, a series of ten short videos collaboratively produced by documentary filmmaker John Lucas and Rankine. In the words of their creators: “These are multi-genre responses to contemporary America. The videos exist around public experiences in individual lives. These experiences turn into situations that resonate with us not only as people, but as citizens.” The videos both emerge from and are in dialogue with Rankine’s 2014 hybrid prose-poetry book Citizen: An American Lyric, which likewise amplifies the micro and macro racist aggressions that occur throughout the social and political fabric of the United States. Rankine and Lucas admit us into the liminal "in between" spaces where we might travel toward trust, and offer us a look at the disturbing ordinariness of what we have come to a accept. Their work is an invitation to participate in an "experimentation in directness."

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine will join the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New Haven, CT.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

During this session, extend the spirit of International Women’s Day and find inspiration from the artist Barbara Kasten, who at 84 years old, continues to challenge spatial relationships in her work. Drawing from her photograph, Construct NYC 11 (1982), explore her depiction of a 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional plane. 

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

Required Supplies

• Prismacolor ebony pencil
• Eraser
• Pencil sharpener

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

In this searingly raw and graceful first book, author Ellen O'Connell Whittet explores both the joy of learning to jump and the safety of landing. Sorrow, violence, love, fear, hunger, and pain run through this memoir that critics have called "enthralling, "poignant," and "exquisite." Join the author for a conversation that opens out the personal to the universal questions of self-worth, the desire to disappear, the loss and reclamation of our own voice, and what it feels like to look at a body and see a story.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Join Dr. Ruggiero on an exploration of Michelangelo, who saw the world through the myopic lens of the male nude set in abstract space and surrounded by an extraordinarily expressive range of colors, and ushered in a new interpretive style. Dr. Ruggiero will be the study leader on an SBMA Tour in Italy in 2022.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

During this session, extend the spirit of International Women’s Day and find inspiration from the artist Barbara Kasten, who at 84 years old, continues to challenge spatial relationships in her work. Drawing from her photograph, Construct NYC 11 (1982), explore her depiction of a 3-dimensional space on a 2-dimensional plane. 

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

Required Supplies

• Prismacolor ebony pencil
• Eraser
• Pencil sharpener

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

Learn the basics of watercolor painting from SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Itoko Maeno. Focusing on the depiction of folds of cloth or clothing, this one-hour class is inspired by George Rickey’s Study of Drapery (1978). Study the artwork or set up your own drapery to use as inspiration while you paint.

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

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint + brush
• Two cups of water
• Pencil
• Paper towel or cloth

Meet your Instructor: Itoko Maeno
Itoko has been a Teaching Artist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 20 years. With specialties in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, she provides art lessons to all ages ranging from kindergarten students to adults. Celebrated for her watercolors, she also enjoys painting in oil and acrylic. Besides teaching art, Itoko has illustrated more than 20 picture book titles, including My Way Sally, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Picture Book, and Minou, nominated for the Caldecott Honor.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: FREE

Learn the basics of watercolor painting from SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Itoko Maeno. Focusing on the depiction of folds of cloth or clothing, this one-hour class is inspired by George Rickey’s Study of Drapery (1978). Study the artwork or set up your own drapery to use as inspiration while you paint.

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

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint + brush
• Two cups of water
• Pencil
• Paper towel or cloth

Meet your Instructor: Itoko Maeno
Itoko has been a Teaching Artist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 20 years. With specialties in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, she provides art lessons to all ages ranging from kindergarten students to adults. Celebrated for her watercolors, she also enjoys painting in oil and acrylic. Besides teaching art, Itoko has illustrated more than 20 picture book titles, including My Way Sally, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Picture Book, and Minou, nominated for the Caldecott Honor.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: FREE

Learn the basics of watercolor painting from SBMA Senior Teaching Artist Itoko Maeno. Focusing on the depiction of folds of cloth or clothing, this one-hour class is inspired by George Rickey’s Study of Drapery (1978). Study the artwork or set up your own drapery to use as inspiration while you paint.

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

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint + brush
• Two cups of water
• Pencil
• Paper towel or cloth

Meet your Instructor: Itoko Maeno
Itoko has been a Teaching Artist with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for over 20 years. With specialties in painting, printmaking, and ceramics, she provides art lessons to all ages ranging from kindergarten students to adults. Celebrated for her watercolors, she also enjoys painting in oil and acrylic. Besides teaching art, Itoko has illustrated more than 20 picture book titles, including My Way Sally, awarded the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Picture Book, and Minou, nominated for the Caldecott Honor.

Ticket Cost:
Workshop via Zoom: 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 describes the research for the catalogue raisonné, presenting anecdotes about newly found works and interesting discoveries, and provides examples of observations that have influenced a new understanding of Agnes Martin's art.

credit: Charles R. Rushton, Agnes Martin (detail), 1992. Silver gelatin print. © Charles Rushton.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE

Join Dr. Overton for a historical overview of Armenia and Georgia through the lens of art and architecture. With beautiful images as a backdrop, she will share on the fascinating sites she visited in 2019 when she was there for a month doing research and planning the SBMA tour Armenia and Georgia: Monasteries, Manuscripts, Mountains, and Modernism for which she will be the study leader in 2022. She will also be the study leader for SBMA’s Morocco tour in 2022.

Ticket Cost:
Virtual Experience via Zoom: FREE