The Santa Barbara Sea Glass & Ocean Arts Festival (SBSGOAF) is having an Instagram silent auction from October 11-18, with 100% of the proceeds going to @sbmaritimemuseum. The Santa Barbara Maritime Museum has been closed for the duration of the pandemic and may not be able to reopen until the end of the year. We wanted to help them out, and we are hoping you will support our efforts. 12 amazing professional artists are transforming wood fish into beautiful original art for you to bid on!

Makers Market is the best outdoor market that Santa Barbara has to offer. Meet the artisans in person. This market offers unique one of a kind items in an outdoor European style setting.

Part I (March 22 – July 5, 2020): Works on Paper
Preston Morton Gallery

Part II (May 10 – August 30, 2020): Painting & Sculpture
Davidson Gallery

This two-part exhibition highlights recent acquisitions to SBMA’s permanent collection of contemporary art. Featuring over 40 artworks in a variety of media, including painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and sculpture, the majority of the objects are on view at SBMA for the first time. These include painted works on paper by emerging artists acquired through the recently established Basil Alkazzi Acquisition Fund, as well as significant pieces by internationally recognized artists such as Sterling Ruby, Andrea Bowers, and Nigel Cooke. Tying these artworks together is a distinct sense of individuality, innovative use of materials, and playful ambiguity between traditional artistic genres.

The exhibition is comprised of works from artists in various stages of their careers, ranging from the emerging to the well-established. Artists include: Scott Anderson, Edgar Arceneaux, Elizabeth Bonaventura, Andrea Bowers, Bruce Conner, Nigel Cooke, Miles Coolidge, Petra Cortright, Noah Davis, Wim Delvoye, Jacci Den Hartog, Daniel Douke, Jim Drain, Vernon Fisher, Helen Frankenthaler, Peter Halley, Frederick Hammersley, Zach Harris, Naotaka Hiro, Mustafa Hulusi, Nathan Huff, Jim Isermann, Raffi Kalenderian, Tom Knechtel, Emma Kohlmann, Hew Locke, Eamon Ore-Giron, Carl Ostendarp, Cheryl Pope, Nathlie Provosty, Sterling Ruby, Aaron Siskind, Jeni Spota C., Donald Sultan, Stephanie Washburn, and Jane Wilbraham.

This exhibition is curated by Julie Joyce, Senior Curator, ArtCenter College of Design (and former Curator of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art) with assistance from Rachel Heidenry, Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

Image: Nathlie Provosty, "Council, Untitled (16-38)" (detail), 2016. Watercolor on paper, diptych. SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by The Basil Alkazzi Acquisition Fund, 2018.10.2a,b. © Nathlie Provosty.

The Preston Morton Collection, which forms the core of American art at SBMA, was gifted in 1961 upon the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Museum’s founding. In so doing, Preston Morton ensured that SBMA could boast one of the most comprehensive overviews of American art from the 18th to the mid-20th century among mid-sized institutions. The timing of the gift was significant, representing a corrective to the European bias of midcentury canonical modernism and a proud reassertion of home-grown American art.

This selection of small format paintings is a reminder of the breadth of the Museum’s holdings in this area. Oil and brush conjure the illusion of near and far persuasively, from the close perspective of still life, to the life-size proportions of bust portraiture, to sublime expanses of land and sky. Whether within hand’s reach or at an immeasurable distance, both types of visual experience are captured within the confines of a canvas no more than 15 inches in diameter.

Artists represented include William Merritt Chase, Frederic Edwin Church, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Eakins, Walter Gay, George Inness, George Luks, Jervis McEntee, John Frederick Peto, Levi Wells Prentice, Edward Henry Potthast.

Image: William Merritt Chase, "Children on the Beach" (detail), 1894. Oil on board. SBMA, Bequest of Margaret Mallory.

The UC Santa Barbara Department of Music will present the fifth annual UCSB Summer Music Festival on Saturday, August 22 and Sunday, August 23, 2020 as a virtual event. Sponsored by the UC Santa Barbara Office of Summer Sessions, the virtual festival will feature performances by the Los Angeles-based new music piano duo HOCKET, multi-percussionist and vocalist Miguelito León, UC Santa Barbara Composition alumnus and pianist Marc Evanstein, the Nesta Steel Drum Band, University Carillonist Wesley Arai, and Gamelan Sinar Surya, under the direction of UC Santa Barbara faculty member Richard North. The festival will also feature a children’s concert led by Miguelito León and a demonstration of a variety of Medieval and Renaissance instruments by UC Santa Barbara graduate Composition student Matthew Owensby.

A Virtual world premiere concert event featuring KT Tunstall. $15 tickets on sale now at lobero.org.

Mindful Heart Programs presents: Healing and self-care in Mindfulness, Compassion and Nature Connection with Michael Kearney, MD and Radhule Weininger, PhD

Join in a reading and conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar in the second in a series of Parallel Stories offered via Zoom. A writer of exquisite gentleness and elegant pacing, Matar discusses his second memoir, "A Month in Siena," which speaks eloquently to a sense of loss and of suspended time, solitude, loneliness, love, and the way in which art can both console and consume us. Still grieving for his Libyan father who was kidnapped and had disappeared, Matar turns to Siena and the art of the 13 – 15th century, an art forever changed by the devastation of the Black Plague, for comfort and clarity. Within the gated confines of that city, he explores his own inner landscape, as if walking the outline of an idea, and in his story reveals much that is timely and connected to our own: the limits of grief, how the imagination is altered by events, the indifference of pestilence, and the acknowledgement that both love and art are an expression of faith.