October 8, 2011 - January 15, 2012

Anish Kapoor was born in India and educated in London, where, in the 1980s, he became part of a group of young artists who reinvigorated British sculpture.  In the mid-1990s, Kapoor began working with cast metal, the result being works like Turning the World Inside Out. An organic sphere cast in stainless steel and then highly polished, this work is a synthesis of Kapoor’s Western European education.

Selected Abstraction, 1940s–90s presents a diverse range of paintings from local and the Museum’s collections that stem from, but are not necessarily the most common, names found in the orthodox history of Abstract Expressionism. Beginning with offshoots of Lyrical Abstraction (Tachisme) in Europe, moving through various New York styles, and ending up in Southern California, this exhibition treads an eclectic course through the legacy of Abstraction.  Artists include Helen Frankenthaler, Clinton Hill, Hans Hofmann, John Millei, Ed Moses, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Kenzo Okada, Richards Ruben, John Seery, Mark Tobey, Jack Tworkov, and Ulfert Wilke.

To view the full Press Release, click here.

September 17, 2011 – January 8, 2012

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth are co-organizers of this intimately scaled exhibition, featuring approximately 15 paintings and 25 prints conceived by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso during one of the most prolific and intensely experimental exchanges in the history of art.

Curated by SBMA Chief Curator, Eik Kahng, this presentation is the first to dwell on a selection of the paintings, as well as nearly all of the prints produced during these two critical years, to demonstrate the visual point and counterpoint that fed into the invention of the revolutionary art form now known as Analytic Cubism. A central theme of the show is the role of format and its representational consequences in the Cubist experiment.

The exhibition is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue that features essays by prominent specialists, and includes breathtaking illustrations, generated through the new technology of spectral imaging to produce reproductions of extraordinary fidelity in terms of both texture and color.

This exhibition is organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. It is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, as well as the generous support of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Women's Board, Mildred and Charles Bloom Fund, Willfong Family Trust, Michael Armand Hammer, Dody Waugh, SBMA Dead Artists Society, Jane and Ken Anderson, Ceil Pulitzer, Marianne and Norman F. Sprague III, M.D., and Charlene and Tom Marsh.

For extended exhibition informaiton, including footage from the Picasso and Braque Symposium, click here.
To view the full Press Release, click here.
For more information on the spectral imaging used for this exhibition, click here.

October 1, 2011 – January 1, 2012

Admiration for Japanese art was a defining characteristic of the Parisian artistic avant-garde in the late 19th century. Henri Rivière took his appreciation further than most, teaching himself the labor-intensive woodblock technique used by Japanese printmakers and using it (and later lithography) to produce print albums that deliberately emulated theirs – most famously, Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower, a modern, urban take on Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. This exhibition, the first to showcase SBMA’s extensive holdings of Rivière’s work, traces his career from his early days as a designer of shadow plays for the Cabaret du Chat Noir to the albums of Parisian cityscapes and Breton landscapes with which he made his name.

This exhibition will feature 27 photographs, including Grant Mudford's unique series of gelatin silver prints. Mudford's larger-than-life prints, made in the late 1980s, offer an unvarnished look at the Southern California artists who were his friends. Like passport photographs, with the subject placed against a white background and in harsh light, they seem to reveal both everything and nothing.

To view the full Press Release, click here.

October 1, 2011 – January 1, 2012

While Santa Barbara is known for its extraordinary landscape, climate, history, and culture, the dynamic pulse of our community comes from the artists who call it home. The creative range of these individuals is as wide as it is deep, and their work enlivens the city. View from Here provides a selection of works in the permanent collection by artists currently living and working in Santa Barbara, and represents works acquired from 1955 through the present. While the exhibition presents only a fraction of the local talent in the region, it speaks to the ongoing artistic vitality of an extraordinary place. Artists include Hilary Brace, Irma Cavat, Anne Diener, Michael Dvortcsak, Dane Goodman, Mary Heebner, Hank Pitcher, Keith Puccinelli, Harry Reese, William Rohrbach, Marie Schoeff, Ilene Segalove, Joan Tanner, and more.

October 1, 2011 – January 1, 2012

One of the well-known photographers in the Monterey Bay area, Al Weber conducted workshops in Yosemite with his close friend, Ansel Adams, for decades. Al Weber's passion for aerial photography had its unlikely beginning during the Korean Conflict when, as an aerial observer for the Marine Corps, the photographer witnessed the breathtaking Korean landscape from a low-flying plane. It altered his perspective and influenced the course of his 50-year photographic career. Weber eloquently summarizes his goal: "To make a successful photograph of a common subject is my co-pilot. To bring forward features of the common, and make then uncommon with grace and simplicity with the best craft available."

To view the full Press Release, click here.

May 28 - September 18, 2011

American Essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes hailed photography as "the mirror with a memory." Certainly, portrait photography presents us with a mirrored likeness. Yet, portraits reveal more than the physiognomy of the sitter; like a mirror, they invite us to reflect on ourselves. New Faces celebrates the range of themes, styles and approaches to the contemporary photographic portrait while exploring the introspective nature of portraiture. Rather than presenting the viewer with the facts about a person, these portraits provoke inquiry and engage the viewer in a dialogue. What can we know from a portrait? What do we read into a portrait?

This exhibition will feature 27 photographs, including Grant Mudford's unique series of gelatin silver prints. Mudford's larger-than-life prints, made in the late 1980s, offer an unvarnished look at the Southern California artists who were his friends. Like passport photographs, with the subject placed against a white background and in harsh light, they seem to reveal both everything and nothing.

The diverse works of portraiture chosen for this exhibition are some of the newest additions to the Museum's photographic collection – a collection that spans centuries, styles, and continents. In our anniversary year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art is proud to reflect on its collection and its accomplishments. Made possible by legendary founders, community leaders, gifted connoisseurs, and artists, the SBMA has demonstrated a seventy year commitment to igniting the imagination, stimulating thought, and generating rewarding experiences through art.

May 28 – September 18, 2011

This exhibition of 20th-century still life paintings and photographs, beginning with Pierre Bonnard’s Flowers in a Pitcher, produced in the early years of the 20th century and ending with Guillermo Srodek-Hart’s Gauchito Gil Sanctuary in 2006, hints at the range and scope of the genre that has existed since the classical age of Greece.

Within a seemingly benign bowl of flowers or a succulent arrangement of fruit, a still life secretes social and cultural messages. Still Lifes can be a mirror of society or of the soul, a rediscovery of quotidian objects, or an expression of artistic harmony that coalesces light, color, and form into synchronous relationship. Eluding precise definitions, still lifes are simply a group of objects that are arranged into a coherent picture.

Still Lifes have their origin in antiquity. The messages they impart have changed over the centuries, but the genre offers the artist nearly limitless possibilities for expression – political message, spiritual exploration, societal and cultural reflection – with the only limit being the artist’s imagination.

May 20 - September 4, 2011

Ori Gersht depicts scenes of natural beauty that perceptively disguise and reveal a history of violence. Featuring selections from a trilogy of works based on 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century European still-life painting, and two new series based on Japanese history and scenery, this exhibition represents five years of recent work by the artist. This is the first solo museum exhibition of work by the artist in the Western United States.

Gersht’s work fuses the past with what he has called the “ultimate present” by creating sublime scenes that become precipitously unsettling through both sudden and gradual obliteration. Each work renders a prolonged moment of suspense through the use of stop-motion photography and slowmotion film. Although achieved through the medium of photography and film, the visceral level on which these works operate most closely mimics that of their inspiration: painting. Referencing historic paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Fantin Latour, and Chardin, among others, these photographs and films provide a meditation on life, loss, destiny, and chance.

Allusions to the catastrophic violence of the French Revolution and the Spanish Civil War are found in these works and in later such events, including the bombing of Hiroshima and the suicide bombs that Gersht feared during his frequent visits to Israel, and that continue to threaten there and elsewhere in the Middle East.

This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of The Luria Foundation.

To view the full Press Release, click here.

April 16 - July 24, 2011

In honor of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art's 70th anniversary, this exhibition celebrates the legacy of Wright S. Ludington (1901-1992), one of the Museum's founders and a collector whose wide-ranging interests and keen eye played a central role in shaping the permanent collection.

Curated by SBMA Curatorial Research Fellow Rachel Sloan, this exhibition focuses on an area of Ludington's collection that, due to its fragile nature, has historically received less exposure: European modernist drawings and prints. A selection of approximately 45 works on paper, complemented by a small number of sculptures, showcases the breadth and independent spirit of Ludington's impeccable taste, from classical modernists like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and André Derain to British artists whose work was seldom collected in the United States: Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Percy Wyndham Lewis. Rather than display the prints and drawings in chronological order or by national school, the installation will evoke the elegant, harmonious way that Ludington displayed his collections in his own home.

To view the full Press Release, click here.

February 12 - May 15, 2011

Tsukioka Kogyo (1869-1927) was a master print designer of Japan's Meiji and Taisho periods. He is best known for the hundreds of prints he produced depicting noh theater, a highly stylized form of performance dating to the 14th century, that incorporates the arts of recitation, song, dance, and mime. Influenced by Western watercolors and photographs, as well as an interest in representing movement and three-dimensionality, Kogyo developed a unique artistic style and created a new vision of the actors in the Japanese print tradition. In his celebrated series "One Hundred Noh Plays," the richly colored, meticulously printed, striking images of individual actors in each composition monumentalize the emotion and delicate movement expressed by each actor.

Selected from the Museum's Roland A. and Mary Louis Way Collection, this exhibition showcases approximately 60 prints from Kogyo's series "One Hundred Noh Plays," supplemented with loans and related objects including a noh robe, mask, and noh-themed netsuke. This exhibition is co-curated by Susan Tai, Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art and Katherine Saltzman-Li, professor of Japanese literature and drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara with the assistance of her students.

To view the full Press Release, click here.

January 22 - May 1, 2011

Organized by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, this exhibition represents the first important museum presentation and catalogue in 28 years devoted to the art of Charles Garabedian. Bringing together approximately 60 works created by the artist, the exhibition represents his entire career with an emphasis on paintings and drawings produced during the years since his first (and last) major solo museum exhibitions in 1983.

With a career that spans nearly 50 years, Garabedian explores themes of war, music, the body, dismemberment, heroism, comic pretension, love, and death–all conveyed with a sense of immediacy, intimacy, and poignancy. Underlying the work is the artist's own elegiac confrontation with the joys and struggles that pervade our daily lives.

Each painting or drawing creates its own world yet also reflects the turbulent times in which it was made. Garabedian's accomplishments and influence among artists on the West Coast in the last 30 years have been substantial. His exploration of figure and landscape paved the way for new generations of artists who demonstrated a renewed focus on imaginative representations of the figure.

To view the full Press Release, click here.