Courtesy photo.
SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present FREE Free Parallel Stories lecture with Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Hisham Matar at 11 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 23 at 1130 State St., Santa Barbara.
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.