SBMA: exhibitions

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Upcoming Exhibitions
Allison Smith, Stockpile, 2011. Unfinished wood and mixed media. Courtesy of the Artist and Haines Gallery. Image courtesy of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and John White/Phocasso.		Labour and Wait July 2 – September 22, 2013 This exhibition features the work of artists who bring 21st-century urgency to 19th-century principles of virtue through work and craftsmanship. Inspired in part by developments that stem back as far as the Industrial Revolution, the presentation examines contemporary culture’s obsession with authenticity, the hand-crafted, and the politics of manufacturing and labor. Works in the exhibition date from the early 1990s to the present, a period in which artists turned from industrial fabrication and a seamless aesthetic to hand-made or “do-it-yourself” sensibilities. Labor and Wait is organized by Julie Joyce, Curator of Contemporary Art, and features artists/artist collaboratives from Europe, South America, and the United States, many which are under-represented in museums on the West Coast. Artists include Tonico Lemos Auad, Andrea Bowers, Colin Darke, Wim Delvoye, Theaster Gates, Dewar & Gicquel, Fischli and Weiss, Tim Hawkinson, Josiah McElheny, Grayson Perry, Mika Rottenberg, Allison Smith, Ricky Swallow, David Thorpe, and Jane Wilbraham.
Leroy Grannis, Greg Noll Surf Team at Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, Sunset Beach, 1966. SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by Jane and Michael G. Wilson.		Un/Natural Color July 7 – September 29, 2013 This exhibition looks at the powerful relationship between color and memory by considering photographs and the ways in which their unique color palettes evoke specific moments of the historical past. From the pastel hues of 19th-century hand-painted portraits, to the vibrant colors of late-1930s Kodachrome transparencies, and the faded, shifted tones of snapshots from the 1970s, different kinds of color reproduction are closely associated with the time periods that they most frequently represent. Each experiment in color photography was originally meant to convey a sense of the natural hues of the world, but as our expectations for realistic representation have evolved, these earlier technologies for representing color have also taken on new meaning. Today, the distinctive colors found in many vintage photographs speak as loudly to contemporary viewers about the period in which they were made as the content that they render visible. The exhibition suggests that the aesthetics of color are closely related to the evolution of photographic technology over the past 100 years, and encourages visitors to rethink the significance of color in contemporary photography through the lens of its multi-colored past. This exhibition is curated by Kim Beil, professor at University of California, Santa Cruz.
John Divola, Forced Entry, Site 13, Interior View A, 1975. Gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Artist.		John Divola: As Far As I Could Get October 13, 2013 – January 12, 2014 With a career spanning four decades, John Divola is as distinctive for his commitment to the photographic community as for his thoughtprovoking work. Divola was born in Los Angeles in 1949. After graduating with a BA from California State University, Northridge, he entered the MFA program at the University of California Los Angeles. There, under the tutelage of Robert Heineken, the artist began to develop his own unique photographic practice, one that merges photography, painting, and conceptual art. In addition to his own studio practice, he teaches contemporary art in the underserved California inland empire and writes on current photographic practice for a national audience. Though his influence and practice are widely recognized by curators, critics, scholars and publishers alike, As Far As I Could Get will be the first solo presentation of Divola’s work which remains under-studied and under-represented. This exhibition is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and shown simultaneously at SBMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Pomona College Museum of Art from October through December 2013. Though Divola’s photographic series are diverse in subject matter, this approach as one exhibition among three Southern California venues emphasizes the consistent conceptual and performative threads that run through Divola’s entire body of work.
Eugene Delacroix, Collision of Moorish Horsemen, 1843–44. Oil on canvas. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland (37.6, acquired by William T. Walters, 1883).		Delacroix and the Matter of Finish October 27, 2013 – January 26, 2014 Organized by SBMA Assistant Director and Chief Curator, Eik Kahng, this exhibition features approximately 35 paintings and showcases the surprising variety of painterly finish in the 19th-century French master’s practice, whose groundbreaking Romanticism is normally associated with a jewel-like palette and loose, sketchy brushwork. This is the first presentation to dramatize the clear distinction between Delacroix’s hand and that of his best-known students, thereby reopening questions of authenticity that have dogged some works of art, at times, unjustifiably.
		Alice Aycock: Drawings January 26 – April 20, 2014
		Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature January 26 – April 20, 2014
Robert Parke-Harrison, Departure, 1997. Photogravure with beeswax.		Heavenly Bodies February 22 - May 25, 2014 One of the strengths of SBMA’s permanent collection is the work that addresses the unshakable connection of science and photography. This exhibition, drawn mainly from the permanent collection, will draw upon this strength and focus on images of astronomy. Ranging from the 19th century until today, the photographs in Heavenly Bodies address the miraculous universe, seen through the ever-changing lens of photography.