Art Matters Lecture with Joyce Tsai
Director, Clyfford Still Museum

The American Abstract Expressionist artist, Clyfford Still, held on to 93% of everything he ever made and willed this extraordinary corpus, not to an existing art museum or gallery, to an unnamed American city. In so doing, he invests his art with civic potential. Joyce Tsai, director of the Clyfford Still Museum will illuminate the ways her institution seeks to fulfill that ambition.

Generous support for Art Matters is provided by the SBMA Women’s Board.

UCLA professor of Art History Hui-shu Lee provides a deep and contextualized reading of the centerpiece of the exhibition—Bada Shanren’s Flowers on a River of 1697—a symphonic landscape of lotus and attached poetic ballad that unfurls in a scroll over 42 feet in length. Flowers on a River counts as one of the most important works by the secretive

4:00–4:45 PM: Visitors are encouraged to arrive early to visit the Day of the Dead altar on display in the Library’s Ethnic & Gender Studies Collection (2nd Floor, Ocean Side). Students from UCSB’s Las Maestras Center will be in the space to talk about the altar they created.

5:00 PM: Reception and panel discussion in the Library’s Special Research Collections (3rd Floor, Mountain Side) begins.

Moderator: Angel Diaz, the Curator for CEMA and the Interim Directory of Special Research Collections at UCSB Library will moderate the panel discussion.

Panelists:
Marvella Muro is the Director of Artistic Programs and Education at Self Help Graphics (SHG) in Los Angeles. Prior to joining SHG, she was the Community Engagement Manager at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, developing and executing art programs with community partners, artists, and social service groups in the neighborhoods of East Los Angeles, Compton and North Hollywood.

Linda Vallejo is an American artist known for painting, sculpture and ceramics, creating work that visualizes what it means to be a person of color in the United States. She states that these works reflect what she calls her “brown intellectual property”—the experiences, knowledge, and feelings gathered over more than four decades of study of Latino, Chicano, and American indigenous culture and communities.

Phung Huynh is a Los Angeles-based artist and educator whose practice includes drawing, painting, public art, and community engagement. Her work challenges beauty standards by constructing images of the Asian female body vis-à-vis plastic surgery to unpack how contemporary cosmetic surgery can whitewash cultural and racial identity. Her work of drawings and prints on pink donut boxes explores the complexities of assimilation and cultural negotiation among Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who have resettled in the United States.

In this talk, David Ake Sensabaugh, Head of the Asian Art Department at Yale University, will explore the history of the flower-and-bird painting genre in China.