SANTA BARBARA — Over the next eight months, SBMA’s exhibition program invites visitors to look more closely at how images shape perception, memory, and meaning. From Latin American photography and immersive video to experimental photographs and Mary Cassatt’s tactile works on paper, these exhibitions explore the ways artists transform observation into something more layered, mysterious, and revealing.
EXHIBITION OPENINGS
For Your Reference: Mungo Thomson
May 17 – October 25, 2026 | Colefax Gallery
This exhibition presents three films by Mungo Thomson that animate ordinary reference books into expansive meditations on knowledge, time, and perception.
Perceptual Shifts: Photographs from the Collection
June 28 – September 20, 2026 | Photography Gallery
Bringing together works that blur the line between observation and illusion, this exhibition explores how photography can complicate rather than clarify the act of seeing.
Cassatt and Friends
September 20, 2026 – January 3, 2027 | Von Romberg and Emmons Galleries
Centered on a rare counterproof by Mary Cassatt, this exhibition explores the tactile relationship between drawing and printmaking in the work of Cassatt and her contemporaries.
Stage Craft: Pictorialist Photography and Performance
October 11, 2026 – January 31, 2027 | Ala Story and Photography Galleries
This exhibition considers Pictorialism as a meeting point between photography and
performance, where the studio, the stage, the city, and the natural world became settings for poetic visual drama.