In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA

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 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 identity, abstract painting’s expressive power, and 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.

This exhibition is made possible by The Museum Contemporaries.