Yosemite: Then and Now

 October 2, 2010 - January 23, 2011

The bridge from the past to the 21st century is created in views of the majestic Yosemite landscape. Since the moment the first photographs of this natural wonder were seen, this unparalleled landscape became a photographer’s mecca. From the traditional views, made by Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge in the 1860s, to modern abstractions by David Stroup and Kate Jordahl, Yosemite is both sublime subject and spiritual metaphor.

In 1864 President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill preserving Yosemite, embracing nearly ¾ million acres. The photographs in this exhibition demonstrate not only the changing medium of photography but also the changing perception and meaning of this iconic national park, which has since been named a World Heritage Site.

Drawing from the growing collection of photographic images in SBMA’s permanent collection, the exhibition ranges from the 1860s to 2004 and includes mammoth-plate images by the pioneers of the 19th century, the well-known views of Ansel Adams in the 20th century, and the time-lapse images of Trevor Paglen in the 21st century.

The anchor of the Reframing America series of exhibitions is An American Century, a look to the past of American art of the 20th century and SBMA’s significant collection of works on paper. Comprising more than 75 works, the exhibition represents some of the nation’s best artists across almost a full century. At every point of significant shifts in style and subject matter—from the realist works of the Ashcan artists to abstract modernists—SBMA’s collections contains major works by major artists. The exhibition represents a history of American art, surveying both the diversity of techniques and materials that artists may use when they draw, and the period when art production in the United States became internationally significant. The collection also has a strong California flavor, and is prosperous in drawings that document the ways in which California artists have explored their own preoccupations, until they arrived on the national scene in the last few decades.

Marion Post Wolcott, Jitterbugging in “Juke Joint,” Clarkdale, Mississippi, 1939. Gelatin silver print. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum purchase with funds provided by Mercedes H. Eichholz.

Complementing the drawings in An American Century, this exhibition showcases photographs and paintings from the Museum’s extensive collection of American art. While An American Century surveys the whole century, the 37 works in American Modernism concentrates on the decades of the early 20th century, beginning in 1910. In that crucial period – the build-up to World War I and the turbulent years between the World Wars, both American artists and their audiences experienced modernity in very personal ways.

The exhibition features three sections: the modernists who explored landscape and nature as a way of retreating from industrial and urban change; the artists who explored the vernacular and colloquial forms of American culture; and an outsider artist, who strove to integrate his indigenous past with Southern Californian realities.

Chasing Moby-Dick: Selected Works by Tony de los Reyes

September 18, 2010 - January 2, 2011

Tony de los Reyes carries the theme of merging iconic subject matter and historic aesthetic styles further in this exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculpture. For the past five years, his attention has been fixated on what is referred to as the Great American Novel—Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). The style of these works, which are the focus of this exhibition, references Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, movements associated with rugged individualism and "pure" materiality. The depiction of various nautical imagery with various materials, including dark inks and bronze, alludes to the complex multiple perspectives in the narrative. Yet the most powerful effect of this work is its examination of Melville's epic as a mythic vision of America. The artist's distinctive comparisons of Ahab and the U.S. enhance the insatiable and potentially self-destructive nature of both.

This exhibition features works by 11 mostly young, mostly Southern California artists whose inspiration rises from both fact and fiction, and the surprising results of the conflation of the two. References to literature, history, allegory, and fantasy converge in these works, posing new fictions and realities, and challenging the fine line between both. Archetypal American subjects dominate these works, which range in reference from colonial history, to religious iconography, to 1970s literature and comics, and to contemporary film and pop music.

Artists represented in the exhibition are Eric Beltz, Dawn Clements, Erin Cosgrove, Noah Davis, Kerry James Marshall, Aaron Morse, Allison Schulnik, Jeni Spota, Devin Troy Strother, Frohawk Two Feathers, and Nicolau Vergueiro.

YOON, JeongMee, Seo Woo and Her Pink Things, 2006, from The Pink & Blue Project (2005–8). Chromogenic photograph. Museum purchase with funds provided by Photo Forum 2007, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Click here to view an interview with Karen Sinsheimer, SBMA's Curator of Photography, and David Starkey as seen on "The Creative Community."

Chaotic Harmony: Korean Contemporary Photography

July 3 - September 19, 2010

The first major exhibition in the United States of photographs made by contemporary Korean artists presently living in Korea, Chaotic Harmony: Contemporary Korean Photography opens a window to the dynamic photographic scene in the Republic of Korea, known in the West as South Korea. Bringing together work by 40 contemporary photographers, this presentation of 42 large-scale images surveys the range of contemporary issues through the themes of land and sea; urbanization and globalization; family, friends, and memory; identity: cultural and personal; and anxiety.

Within the exhibition, two distinct generations of Korean artists are represented: those born in the mid-1950s and 1960s, during a succession of military dictatorships when the country was still largely agrarian, and those born in the 1970s, predominantly in urban areas and who came into maturity in the new democratic era which began in 1987.

Co-organized by Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Anne Wilkes Tucker, The Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, this groundbreaking exhibition is not a presentation on “Koreanness,” although issues of cultural and personal identity are strong components. Rather, it is an attempt to identify Korea as a source of complex and stimulating visual ideas expressed through the medium of photography.

Dan Christensen, Rana, 1968. Acrylic on canvas. Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Betty Freeman.

Colorscope: Abstract Painting, 1960-1979

March 20 - August 15, 2010

In the early 1960s the popularity of Abstract Expressionism waned in favor of new modes of abstraction that delivered through a succession of museum and gallery exhibitions and articles in the mainstream press that continued through the decade. Post-painterly Abstraction, Color Field, Op Art, Hard-Edge, Lyrical Abstraction—these are names of some but not all of the fractures that abstraction experienced from the 1960s through the 1970s. There are clear as well as arguable differences among these genres, but central to them all is one factor—an emphasis on color.

Colorscope features a selection of paintings, mostly from the Museum’s permanent collection, that reveal innovative ways in which color was made essential during this pivotal time. The exhibition features a range of artists—from influential figures to under-recognized talents—manipulating hues that ebb, flow, blend, undo, and inspire. Artists: Richard Anuszkiewicz, Alice Baber, Jerrold Burchman, Dan Christensen, Roy Colmer, Thomas Downing, Lorser Feitelson, John Ferren, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, June Harwood, Hans Hofmann, John McLaughlin, Kenneth Noland, James Parker, Larry Poons, Ernest Posey, Paul Reed, Bridget Riley, John Seery.

Saint Mirabai, Pemji of Chitod, India, Mewar, dated 1838, color and gold on paper. Gift of Pratapaditya and Chitra Pal.

From India and Beyond: Gifts from Stephen Huyler and the Pal Family Collection   

March 6 - June 6, 2010

Listen to an interview with Drs. Huyler and Pal on AM1290's Art and Antiques program with host, Elizabeth Stewart

The Pal Family collection gift, dating from the 2nd century to the early 20th century, has greatly expanded the scope of SBMA’s collection of Indian pictorial art, including manuscript illustrations, miniature paintings, drawings, popular paintings from Orissa and West Bengal, and works from the British colonial period. It also includes important Hindu and Buddhist stone and bronze sculptures from Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet as well as paintings from Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka.

The examples of pictorial art usually illustrate the most significant cultural and religious tales. Goddess Durga is the consort of the Hindu god Shiva. Together, Shiva and Durga represent the male and female principles of the cosmos. The above, far right image, is a representation of Durga with both principles combined symbolically to suggest that they are in fact inseparable, a non-duality. The feminine face of Durga is shown with a beard and holding some of Shiva’s attributes —an hourglass-like drum, a trident, and a beggar’s bowl. She is not, however, without attributes to identify her as the great goddess Durga. In her hands one finds swords and a garland of white flowers as well as a voluminous scarlet pouch hanging from her left shoulder. Her animal vehicle, the lion, licks its paws, ready to give her a ride.

From India and Beyond celebrates the beauty and diversity of South Asian art through the distinctive visions of two scholars whose life-long collecting and generosity have so enriched this Museum. In recent conversations with the collectors, both Dr. Huyler and Dr. Pal expressed a growing sense of detachment from worldly possessions, in the spirit of Hindu and Buddhist teachings that led to the gifting of their collections.

More About the Donors:
Dr. Stephen Huyler grew up in Ojai and credits his lifelong fascination with the arts and crafts of India to the mentorship of his neighbors, F. Bailey Vanderhoef, Jr., late Trustee and major benefactor of the Museum, and Beatrice Wood, renowned ceramic artist. In 1986 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Huyler assisted in curating the first major exhibition devoted to the subject of Indian terracotta art, From India Earth:
400 Years of Terracotta Art. Ten years later, he published Gifts of Earth: Terracottas and Clay Sculptures of India (1996), an intensive study of the Indian potters' and clay sculptors’ art today.

Dr. Pratapaditya Pal remains one of the most influential forces in advancing the interest and understanding of South Asian and Himalayan art. Over a four decade long curatorial career, Pratapaditya Pal has been associated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena and the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently he is General Editor of Marg Publications, Mumbai. Dr. Pal characterizes his private collecting as driven by idiosyncratic preferences and, to avoid conflicts of interest, outside the main focuses of the museum collections he oversaw. Consequently, the Pal collection is diverse, offering fresh insight into the rich history of art and culture in South Asia.