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

A lecture given by James Glisson, Curator of Contemporary Art, held in conjunction with the exhibition Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz (Jan. 29 – May 21, 2023)

We live in a world of disposable and mostly forgettable manufactured objects. Behind every gleaming big box retail store is a dumpster waiting to welcome what is on the shelves inside. From cast offs and supposed junk, Ed Kienholz (1927-1994) and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1943-2019) made sculptures full of incendiary commentary about American life during the 20th century.  They liked swap meets, flea markets, and had Ed lived longer he would have surely trawled Ebay (founded 1995).  These artists often show us the isolation, loneliness, and cruelty that humans inflict on each other, but they also force a recognition of the mountains of stuff springing up around us and the emptiness at the core of a one-and-done consumer society.

credit: Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1943-2019), Home Sweet Home, 2006. Mixed media assemblage. Image © 2023 Estate of Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA. Photograph by Jeff McLane.

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

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

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.

The April session is led by essayist, short story writer, and Program Coordinator of the College of Creative Studies' Writing and Literature major, UC Santa Barbara, Kara Mae Brown.

Ticket Cost:
General Admission: FREE

Artist Joan Tanner joins acclaimed poet and art critic, John Yau, Professor of Critical Studies at Rutgers University, for a conversation. Tanner is currently the subject of a solo SBMA exhibition, Out of Joint: Joan Tanner (through May 14). Yau has edited the Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic Weekend, and has authored some 50 books of poetry. Having been a voice in the art world since 1975 when he began writing art criticism, he is among the most well-known critics of contemporary art writing today. Yau and Tanner reflect on how to stay out of joint, that is how to avoid cliché and stilted ways of writing and artmaking.

Ticket Cost:
SBMA Member: FREE
Non-Member: $5.00
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

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