SBMA Online

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

Join us on an SBMA Members-only day trip to the Getty Center! Enjoy a private, curator-led tour of Manet and Modern Beauty led by curators Scott Allen and Emily Beeny. Afterwards, enjoy free time on your own for lunch at The Restaurant (reservations requested, please call 310.440.6810 to reserve a spot starting from 12pm on) or the Café, and view the art, architecture, and gardens the Getty Center has to offer.

credit: Édouard Manet (French, 1832 - 1883), Jeanne (Spring) (detail), 1881, Oil on canvas. Courtesy The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $65.00

Artist and amateur astronomer Russell Crotty, whose work is featured in The Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos in Art, talks about his interest in and artistic interpretation of the art and science of the universe.

image credit:
Russell Crotty, Nightfall Matilija Wilderness, 2007-2019. Ink and watercolor on paper on fiberglass sphere. Russell Crotty Studio.

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

Join SBMA for an out-of-this-world evening in the galleries! Enjoy after-hours access to the Museum with delicious wine and bites provided by Satellite SB, and experience current exhibitions, including newly-opened The Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos in Art.

Includes two drink tickets.

Space is limited. Get your tickets today!

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $10.00
General Admission: $15.00

Parallel Stories looks at the power of memory and the family stories that are woven together in the "Homeric" epic and memoir of In the Country of Women: A Memoir in a reading and conversation with award-winning author Susan Straight. In this ode to what The New York Times called "the entire multiracial, transnational tribe she claims as her own,” Straight reminds us in powerful, fiercely lyrical language of the grit, hope, courage, resilience, hope, and sorrow inextricably connected to our stories—stories of women, stories of coming to, and leaving, and returning, and in the author’s case, stories written within blocks of where she was born and still lives in Riverside County. This book, addressed in large part to her daughters, is finally and most tellingly about love—transcendent, inconvenient, persistent, imperfect generations of love. Straight has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, and Between Heaven and Here. Her short stories have appeared in Zoetrope, the Ontario Review, the Oxford American, the Sun, Black Clock, and many others. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Family Circle, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, Harpers, the Nation, and elsewhere.

Book signing to follow.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: $5.00
General Admission: $10.00
Senior (age 65+): $6.00

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

Winner of the prestigious CMA Cleveland Quartet Award, Philadelphia’s Jasper String Quartet is the Professional Quartet in Residence at Temple University’s Center for Gifted Young Musicians. The Jaspers have been hailed as “sonically delightful and expressively compelling” (The Strad) and The New York Times named their latest album, Unbound, as one of the 25 Best Classical Recordings of 2017. “They match their sounds perfectly, as if each swelling chord were coming out of a single, impossibly well-tuned organ, instead of four distinct instruments.” (New Haven Advocate)

Their program includes Beethoven’s Op. 18, No. 4, Vivian Fung’s Quartet No. 3, and Quartet in D minor, D. 810 “Death and the Maiden” by Schubert.

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

The Thalea String Quartet brings together artists of Nigerian, Venezuelan, Japanese, and Canadian heritage. With repertoire as diverse as its members, and every bit as exuberant, Thalea connects with audiences on a musical, emotional, and personal level, from first-time listeners to string quartet aficionados. Top prizewinners at both the 2018 Fischoff and Chamber Music Yellow Springs Competitions, Thalea was founded in 2014 and made its U.S. début at the Kennedy Center in 2016. They have performed across North America and in Italy, France, and Belgium. “Thalea never failed to deliver a stirring performance.” - Calgary Herald

They will perform Aaron Copland’s Movement for String Quartet, a new work being written for the Thalea Quartet, Beethoven’s Op. 59 No. 2, and Three Folksongs in Counterpoint by African-American composer Florence Price.

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

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

Established in 2013, the Arod Quartet, based in Paris, has already captivated chamber music lovers, performing more than eighty concerts this season at such prestigious venues as the Auditorium of the Louvre in Paris and the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. The Arod first came to international attention when they won the First Prize at the 2016 ARD International Music Competition and went on to join the BBC New Generation Artists’ roster. The quartet made its Carnegie Hall debut in April 2019.

Their program includes Haydn’s Quartet in D Major, Op. 76, No. 5, Bartók’s Quartet No. 4, and Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1, “Razumovsky,” by Beethoven.

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

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