Inside/Outside
Ilana Savdie, Lágrimas y mocos (exploiting a suitable host), 2021.Oil, acrylic, and beeswax on canvas stretched on canvas. SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation and The Museum Contemporaries.
Narsiso Martinez, Self-Portrait En La Cherry (with Strawberry Fields Forever in the Background), 2020. Ink, charcoal, gouache, and acrylic matte gel on produce cardboard boxes. Museum purchase with funds provided by The Basil Alkazzi Acquisition Fund.
Rose Salane, Nesting Tables, 2016. Wooden tables, plaster cast, ink on newsprint, glass. Museum purchase with support from the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation.
Keith Mayerson, Someday we'll find it, the Rainbow Connection, the lovers, the dreamers and me, 2023. Oil on linen. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Luria/Budgor Family Foundation.
When visual artists make an image, they have to bring the inside outside by giving thoughts, fears, dreams, and life stories visible form. In this exhibition, each artwork has external signs telling about an inner world, whether real, fictional, or in-between. Ilana Savdie’s Lágrimas y mocos (exploiting a suitable host) seems to show a parasitic relationship. Rose Salane’s nesting table and ice skates are props in a mysterious drama about air travel. Keith Mayerson paints a puppet peddling to a better life in California, which might be an alter-ego. In a self-portrait, Narsiso Martinez is listening to music on headphones, which partially transports him to another world away from the heat, pesticides, and hard labor of harvesting cherries. Each of these artists negotiates what is seen and unseen, hidden and revealed, inside and outside.
The artists in the exhibition include Whitney Bedford, Narsiso Martinez, Keith Mayerson, Jesse Mockrin, Rose Salane, Shizu Saldamando, Ilana Savdie, and Kon Trubkovich.
All of the artworks have been recently acquired by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art thanks to the generosity of Peter Remes, Dan Aloni and Sarah Brown, The Basil Alkazzi Acquisition Fund, The Museum Contemporaries, and Kandy Budgor, Luria/Budgor Family Foundation.
Reading and Conversation with Eileen Myles
The Museum welcomes acclaimed poet, novelist, performer, and art journalist Eileen Myles. A trailblazer whose decades of literary and artistic work, in the words of The New York Review of Books, “set a bar for openness, frankness, and variability few lives could ever match.”
Seeing From the Rupture: A Reading and Conversation with Jenny Xie
In this conversation, resonating with both the past and tradition exemplified in the exhibition Flowers on a River and with the distillation and duality explored in Inside/Outside, Jenny Xie opens up, as US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera described, “multiple terrains of seeing.” With longing and memory, nuance and subtlety, the “anxiety of bilingualism,” and the unknowability of the self, Xie takes us deep into what is irreducible with pure piercing beauty.
Inwardly Defiant: Yunte Huang and Celine Shimizu
Celebrated author, Guggenheim Fellow and UCSB professor Yunte Huang reads from his latest book, Daughter of the Dragon, an in-depth exploration of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star who both encouraged and defied the Hollywood industry’s efforts to categorize her. Huang is interviewed by Celine Parreñas Shimizu, film scholar, filmmaker, and Dean of the Division of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media at UC Santa Cruz.
Translating the Self: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Artforms: Jill Levine, Aldon Nielsen, and Jeanne Heuving
Three writers read and discuss their works. Distinguished scholars and creative writers discuss how their work has involved them in intensive explorations of cultures and arts apart from their immediate backgrounds.
