- This event has passed.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara Announces Debut Solo Museum Exhibition by Acclaimed Minneapolis Based Artist Cameron Patricia Downey
September 17, 2023 @ 12:00 pm PDT
The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition after reopening in January. Cameron Patricia Downey: Orchid Blues will open with a free public reception from noon to 4 p.m., Sunday, September 17, 2023. The exhibition will be on view September 17 – December 23, 2023.
An anti-disciplinary artist and environmental scientist from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Downey mediates concepts and bounds of world-building and survival artistry by way of Black, fantastical, and precarious spaces and forms. In sculpture, film, photography, the written and the performed, their work engages and engulfs a language of epics out of the minutiae.
In the artist’s debut solo institutional exhibition at MCASB, Downey’s Orchid Blues crosses, circles around, and dwells in found, amassed, and preserved objects — known to be personally and communally dear. Across sculpture, installation, and image making, building materials, trash, junk, and the well-used, converge and deteriorate.
About the artist:
Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998) (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, Minnesota whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. Seeing instruction in the incidental, the precarious and the misremembered, their work strives to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Downey graduated from Columbia University in 2021 with a double concentration in visual art and environmental science.
Downey’s art has been exhibited by HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis; Aronson Gallery, New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; Engage Projects, Chicago; as part of Midway Contemporary Art’s Off-Site program; M+B Gallery, Los Angeles. They are the 2023 recipient of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize, and are currently in residence with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department.
Special Thanks:
Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Sofia & Randy Greif, Resonance Foundation, HAIR + NAILS
About MCASB:
Gallery hours Tuesday – Sunday, 11 – 6 p.m. each day.
MCASB encourages anyone interested in getting involved, whether it be through the new MCASB volunteer program, or by making a donation, to please email hello@mcasantabarbara.org or visit mcasantabarbara.org/donate.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) seeks to enrich lives and inspire critical thinking through meaningful engagement with the art and ideas of our time. MCASB provides Santa Barbara and the Central Coast with exhibitions and programming that encourage discovery, cultivate new perspectives and challenge the way we see and experience the world, ourselves and each other.
MCASB was founded as the alternative arts space Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (CAF) in 1976 by artists and art supporters seeking a venue dedicated solely to contemporary art. These initial organizers envisioned a “forum” for the display of and discussion about artwork being made today — locally and in the larger national and international art community. Initially a roaming space, CAF found its first home in the historic Balboa Building in downtown Santa Barbara. By 1990, MCASB had moved into its current gallery space, roughly 3,500 square feet in the Paseo Nuevo Shopping Center.
In 2012, trustees guided the organization toward what they saw as the next step in its history, and CAF became the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) with a refined mission toward education and the arts. What began as a grassroots, artist-run organization with nominal funding now serves as the leading contemporary arts presenter in Central California. MCASB became an American Alliance of Museums accredited institution in 2016. Operating as a kunsthalle, MCASB continues to function as a non-collecting, non-profit museum dedicated to innovative and experimental contemporary art and arts education. Both adaptive and responsive, MCASB is an incubator for new ideas and risk-taking artwork as it positions itself to be a contemporary museum for the 21st century.