‘Seen (Detail),’Sanford Biggers Museum of Contemporary Art SB
Miki Garcia knew something was working when Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum (aka CAF, as most locals call it) changed its name to MCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art. She was standing outside and heard a couple walk past, on the way from the carpark to the steps leading to the ground floor of Paseo Nuevo. “Oh, there’s a museum here!” said one to the other. Maybe they had passed the Forum many times, maybe this was their first time here, but the point was taken: it’s a museum and everybody knows what that does.
For regular visitors to CAF, the switch may have seemed cosmetic and unheralded. But it’s that couple that Ms. Garcia keeps in mind.
‘Homage to Innocents (detail),’ Sue Van Horsen David J. Diamont photo
Greeting visitors to the current exhibition at Arts Fund Gallery, “Specimen,” is a kindly, smiley skeleton placed strategically and without explanation. It seems a combination greeter, sentry and memento mori, all at once, befitting a deliciously bizarre and strangely comforting show about pseudo-science, dead things, decontextualized memories, found objects redirected into the direction of art, and other cultural specimens.
Curator Ted Mills, himself an artist, filmmaker, and also journalist-critic (whose writing is oft-found in the pages of the News-Press) had the notion of collecting left-of-center collectors and assemblage artists. The end result, imposing a bit more weird atmosphere than the Arts Fund Gallery has yet known, is a gathering of radiant junk, artfully constructed “cabinets of curios” and general obsessive oddity, all under one roof.
While the Solstice Parade makes its way up State Street to spill into Alameda Park, the Funk Zone will be setting up its own celebration for the first time. Called Bohemia at the Beach it’s the brainchild of Funk Zone resident James O’Mahoney, owner of the Surf Museum of Helena Ave., creator of Skateboarder magazine, and collector of fantastic ephemera. Instead of a grand event under one roof, Bohemia at the Beach has asked Funk Zone tenants — from galleries and art studios to bars and wineries — to do something special on Saturday afternoon to continue the Solstice themes, but with more of a gypsy, bohemian, beatnik bent.
“I’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” says Mr. O’Mahoney as we sit up on his rooftop lounge that overlooks Helena Ave. and Cabrillo, with the lagoon, beach and wharf beyond. “You’ve got 60,000 people going up to the park. You’ve got your drum circle and you can hold a stick of patchouli. And it’s always hot, so why not come to the beach?”
Several months ago, Brad Nack brought four abstract artists to MichaelKate Interiors, each dealing in their own way with topography. After that, another quartet dealt with flight and birds. But this month’s exhibition, “Bright Lines and the Void” (through June 30), complicates matters further with a disparate selection of paintings from four vastly different artists. Thomas Van Stein’s nocturnal landscapes; John Carlander’s bold abstracts; Hilary Baker’s enigmatic yet representational work; and Norman Lundin’s witty realism — this is a conversation between four distinct personalities, and like a great dinner party, it’s worth sitting in and checking out what comes up.
Mr. Lundin comes from the grey climes of Seattle and you can see it in his paintings, as if somebody had told Edward Hopper to tone down the color and get the people out of the room. These are interiors and exteriors (sometimes both, seen through windows) honoring still moments on endless overcast and wet days. I say witty, because check out “Sun Break, Studio” which only shows its sun through a thin strip of light that defines the shadows on the window sill. The rest, from our perspective, is yet another gloomy, almost smoky day, looking out across the landscape in search of a horizon. These are the funereal rooms of Tarkovsky and Bergman, where time has slowed down, crawled, and given up. On the other hand, the entropy is so finely rendered that the paintings energize in a perverse way.
Featured artists at this year’s I Madonnari are Wayne and Cheryl Renshaw. The artists have been preparing their chalk works for the opening of the festival today. MIKE ELIASON/NEWS-PRESS
Lovers of street painting, the weekend you’ve been waiting for has arrived.
The 20,000-square-foot area in front of the Santa Barbara Mission will be turned into a walkable art gallery starting today when the I Madonnari chalk art festival returns for its 27th year.
The festival of the traditional Italian art form was the first in the U.S. and is an inspiration to others that have appeared since.
At 53, Lydia Lunch shows no signs of smoothing out the edginess that made her one of the powerful forces in late-’70s New York and the No Wave scene. To talk to her is to jump into a fiery whirlwind of creativity, one that whips up everybody else. It makes sense, then, that her upcoming workshop in Ojai — dubbed the Post-Catastrophe Collaborative Ojai Artists’ Workshop by and for Women — is designed to do just that for all the attendees, creating an environment for women, whether veterans of the arts or new recruits, to express their artistic sides. But what is this catastrophe in the title?
“Did you wake up today? Did you watch the news?” Ms. Lunch laughs. “Do I have to itemize things here? It’s easy in California to forget the amount of catastrophe that’s out there. … The weather is terrifying. The 800 military bases that the U.S. has is terrifying. Wars continuing all over the world is terrifying. Man-made economic crisis is terrifying. … I don’t have fear, myself, but maybe that’s because I have so many vehicles to express my concern.”
Gerhard Richter has had a career as both an abstract painter and a creator of realistic portraits, in between going all nihilist with his series of flat grey paintings and then sensationalist with his grubby, ill renderings of photos of the Baader-Meinhoff gang.
He’s been called great, and he’s been called rude words. In Corinna Belz’s inquisitive documentary, “Gerhard Richter Painting,” she circles around the question of the man behind the name as he prepares for several retrospectives and new openings — and, yes, also as he paints.
Working on The Moth is an endless stream of fascinating,” says Maggie Cino, senior producer, story coach, and director of the Peabody Award-winning organization/ show/workshop/podcast. This evening of storytelling – no scripts, no words on the page – comes to Campbell Hall on Thursday with a cast of familiar and unfamiliar faces.
The Moth has gained notoriety and momentum over the last five years due to its podcast and public radio show, but it was started back in 1997 by George Dawes Green, a poet and novelist who wanted an evening that recreated the sort of laid-back summer evenings of his native Georgia, where funny and poignant yarns would be spun among friends.
The other day I was biking around and noticed a photo laying face-down in the street. Hours later when I returned to the spot, the photo was still there. Picking it up, I discovered it was a nude self-portrait of an unknown woman. Who was she? How’d it get in the street? Who was it taken for? Should I keep it? My find would be perfect for the magazine Found, Davy Rothbart’s cult sensation that honors weird things picked up in the street. His talk and slideshow comes to Contemporary Arts Forum this Thursday.
“That’s awesome,” says Mr. Rothbart when he hears of my find. “It really is amazing how many people these days are taking photos of themselves naked, and also how many people lose them.”
The bees are dying, even in Montecito. Colony collapses are the thing of apocalyptic news reports, with everything from pesticides to cellphone use as the culprit. So with this new and rare art show called “Swarm” at Lotusland, the question can be asked: Is this a celebration or a memorial? Nancy Gifford, artist, collector, and curator, got a chance to turn several rooms in Madame Ganna Walska’s house into a place to examine what bees mean to art, humanity and nature. The results are worth your time to attend.
The centerpiece of the show is Penelope Stewart’s beeswax tiles, which completely cover one side of the entrance room and serve as a gateway into the other rooms. Using pounds upon pounds of beeswax, which in this enclosed space smells lovely, Ms. Stewart has used Lotusland as inspiration for the shapes that jut out of the bas-relief installation. Lotus pods, succulent blooms, decorative doorknobs, candelabras and more have been molded from wax and now stick out of the wall. The various colors of wax, based on the bees’ location and diet, make for fascinating exploration alone.
