Exhibitions at SBMA

Featuring works from the turn of the last century by Ferdinand Khnopff, Alfred Kubin, Odilon Redon, and Félicien Rops, as well as the Italian surrealist Giorgio Manzu and his Russian contemporaries, Ossip Zadkine and Alexander Archipenko, this exhibition dwells on the dark side of humanity through a host of cruel but unforgettable imagery.

Through opacity, portraiture can most fully and authentically represent the shadowy parts of a person, those hard-to-explain aspects that cannot otherwise be depicted in conventional ways.

Like the US dollar, air travel, and space satellites, abstract art encircled the globe or at least the capitalist West during the middle of the 20th century.

Featuring the work of 13 artists, this exhibition reveals an intriguing range of profound meanings that architecture can express when imaginatively captured by the photographic lens.

From the spontaneous and joyous to the posed and quiet,  renowned photographer Santi Visalli’s portraits all relay a storia, an Italian word meaning tale, story, and history. This select exhibition features 29 perceptive portraits of well-known figures in the 1960s and 70s worlds of film, literature, art, music, and popular culture.

This exhibition of 25 photographs from SBMA’s collection features the human face as its captivating subject. Artists include Kwame Brathwaite, Tseng Kwong-Chi, Genevieve Gaignard and Trude Fleischmann, whose work engages photography’s unique ability to suggest narrative, biography and psychology via the photographic portrait.

This exhibition highlights recent acquisitions to SBMA's permanent collection of contemporary art.

The first solo U.S. museum exhibition of Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s art in over two decades, this captivating immersive presentation of four light-based works embodies this internationally renowned artist’s career-long philosophy: Keep Changing, Connect with Everything, Continue Forever.

Drawing primarily from SBMA's permanent collection and supplemented by loans from area collections, this exhibition explores a diverse range of artistic representations of the cosmos roughly coinciding with the 'Space Age' of the last sixty years.

A new multimedia installation by Los Angeles-based sound and performance artist, Chris Kallmyer, invites viewers to collectively make music.

Illuminating the hidden peculiarities of everyday life, this installation of 13 photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo reveals how this internationally renowned photographer embraced European Cubism and Surrealism while maintaining a focus on Mexican subject matter such as religious rituals, agricultural scenes, and cityscapes.

The malleable interior of traditional Japanese houses could be redecorated to suit particular purposes — at times adorning with glistening screens and objects of color and gold. This exhibition explores the aesthetics of these public and private interiors by featuring folding screens, scrolls, and examples of lacquerware.

The tumultuous period between the two World Wars is the backdrop for this intimately scaled and timely exhibition, which explores the little known relationship between modern art and totalitarianism in the work of the French Fauves, Maurice de Vlaminck (1876-1958) and André Derain (1880-1954).

Inspired by several large drawings in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s permanent collection, this exhibition demonstrates a variety of experimental practices during the 1970s and represents images and issues relevant to contemporary art and culture.

Before the invention of photography, painted portraits were the most coveted means of commemorating important members of society. This exhibition, drawn exclusively from the permanent collection, explores American, British and French portraitists from the Colonial period through the Industrial Revolution.

Drawn entirely from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s distinguished and growing collection, this extensive exhibition of over 100 photographs by approximately a dozen artists reveals unusual facets of the work of well-known artists, as well as new-to-the-collection photographs that will be on view for the very first time in the SBMA’s galleries.

Valeska Soares: Any Moment Now brings together forty-nine artworks, consisting of installation, sculpture, photography, and video, dating from the early 1990s to the present.

You Are Going On A Trip brings together a selection of highlights from the Museum’s wide-ranging collection of Modern and Contemporary prints.

A landmark in the history of video art, Christian Marclay’s Telephones (1995) is an expertly edited sequence of black-and-white and color film clips featuring people dialing, answering, talking, listening on, and finally hanging up an assortment of telephones, all from the pre-smart phone era.

David Wiesner (b. 1956) is one of the most highly acclaimed picture book artists in the world. Winner of the prestigious Caldecott Medal for Tuesday in 1992, The Three Pigs in 2002, and Flotsam in 2007, Wiesner is only the second person in the history of the award to have received it three times.

A diverse selection of works on paper by contemporary artists who rose to prominence in emerging Los Angeles galleries in the early 1990s through the mid-2000s.  Featuring Ingrid Calame, David Korty, Aaron Morse, Jon Pylypchuk, Dario Robleto, Thomas Scheibitz, Jeni Spota, and others.

Adjacent to the British Art from Whistler to World War II exhibition, is a series of dramatic World War II photographs by Sir Cecil Beaton (1904–1980).

This exhibition celebrates the complexity of South Asian representation and iconography by examining the relationship between aesthetic expression and the devotional practice, or puja, in the three native religions of the Indian subcontinent.

This exhibition, drawn from the permanent collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, highlights works by Latin American photographers, or artists who have adopted it as home, so that those from outside the region may look into the lives of Latin America.

Using distinctive materials including Day-Glo acrylics and Roll-a-Tex, Peter Halley’s paintings present variations of geometric forms that he and others have designated as prisons, cells, and conduits.

Featuring paintings from The Armand Hammer Foundation that complement works from the Museum’s collection, this exhibition presents a representative overview of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism with a nod to the schools of Barbizon and Romanticism that prepared the way.

Twelve photomontages by Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer grapple with memory and the dilemmas posed by individuality and national identity to recover some of the wonder – and dread – of the rapidly shifting dynamics of modern German history.

Ray Strong: Beyond Santa Barbara highlights a selection of works by esteemed artist Ray Strong (1905 – 2006) from the collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA).

On view in this exhibition, one of the best collections of Italian painting in the world, with 50 works spanning 500 years of Italian art history, offers a unique opportunity to learn firsthand what made the Italian Renaissance a gold standard for artistic excellence.

This exhibition brings together a selection of painting and sculpture from the Museum’s permanent collection dating from 1958 to 2014. Recent works inventively reference and reinterpret the past – including both popular and obscure forms of painting, architecture, and design.

This exhibition examines the lesser known yet foundational role of drawing in the artist’s work, which she continued to develop over the next eight decades.

Spanning the period from the late 1960s to the present day, this exhibition presents the work of an artist who radically combined site-specific earthworks with the medium of drawing. Michelle Stuart has become internationally known for a rich and diverse body of work engendered by her lifelong interest in the natural world and the cosmos.

Portraits of Jesus Christ, His mother and His saints invoke the presence of God, to whom every Christian prayer is addressed. Before the Reformation, such images were habitually used by believers all over Europe, both in church and in private.

This exhibition features the work of artists who bring 21st-century urgency to 19th-century principles of virtue through work and craftsmanship.

Showcasing the Museum’s significant collection of 20th-century Latin American art, this exhibition examines the multifaceted art produced in Latin America during this dynamic 60-year period.

Ori Gersht depicts scenes of natural beauty that perceptively disguise and reveal a history of violence.