New contemporary art exhibit opens at SB Museum of Art

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – The SB Museum of Art is opening a new contemporary art exhibit that will open later this month until March 2025.

Below is a press release on the newest collection available for the public to see starting July 21:

Since first opening its doors in 1941, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) has been a platform for contemporary artists. With artworks dating from 1965 to 2023, In the Making is an expansive take on an evolving collection and illustrates the impossible task of pinning down the contemporary, which is never still. Nearly a century ago, Gertrude Stein is reported to have said that “You can be a museum, or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” However, if you admit that a contemporary collection can only ever be “in the making,” or always in formation, then there is a way out of Stein’s dead end. A museum can be modern, but only if it commits to continuous growth and change.

Cutting across seven decades, this exhibition provocatively mixes artists rarely seen together and reveals their shared preoccupations with optical effects, fantastic otherworldly landscapes, allegory and history to unlock national and ethnic identities, abstract painting’s expressive power, and the aesthetic appeal of mathematical graphs and constructions. Artworks from 50 years ago that can no longer be called contemporary sit alongside those from the 2020s.

One thread that links artists in this show is a shared interest in optics and optical effects, whether the iridescent luminosity of Gisela Colon’s Skewed Square (Phosphorus) (2022), or the eye-twisting moire effect in Eduardo MacIntyre’s painting Tramas sobre negro (1965), or Jesús Rafael Soto’s untitled mobile sculpture from 1970. Garth Weiser’s huge blue painting Trends and Predictions for the Year (2012) conjures these same dizzying effects by removing layers of paint.

The landscapes in this exhibition all seem to arise out of a careful rendering of parts of the natural world with their beautifully crafted details, but these landscapes all have an element of reality stretching fiction if not outright fantasy. Mimi Lauter gives us an impossibly lush and dense garden, while Whitney Bedford’s florescent colors seem to be out of a feverish dream. Jane Dickson’s view of a Los Angeles bungalow at dusk is full of dark portents, as if something terrible was about to happen. Marc Handelman’s violet mountainscape looks like a film negative or x-ray and alludes to repressed histories in America. A landscape can also be sculpted. Elliott Hundley’s tearing flesh from bone (2011) is a tree made with metal leaves, mattress springs, rope, and goats’ hooves. 

SBMA