Tag: Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA)

SBMA announces Winter-Spring 2026 exhibitions

In the new year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art offers a sweeping look at how artists engage with time. Works grounded in personal histories, inherited traditions, and collective memory speak to the past while giving us new ways to access it in the present. Contemporary materials and lived experience illuminate the world as it is now, yet they also open space for reflection and reinterpretation. Digital experimentation and visionary forms gesture toward the future, and at the same time expand how we record, memorialize, and remember. Seen together, these exhibitions reveal art as a continuum—one in which past, present, and future coexist, overlap, and remain vividly alive today.

Santa Barbara Museum of Art Celebrates “A Legacy of Giving” with Free Community Day on Sept. 8

Celebrate the exhibition A Legacy of Giving: The Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree Collection with free admission for all (1 – 4 pm) with related art activities, family gallery guides, docent tours, music, and refreshments. This event also coincides with SBMA’s Free 2nd Sunday for Tri-County Residents (Santa Barbara, Ventura, San Luis Obispo) (11 – 5 pm).

April 18 — SBMA presents FREE lecture on ‘Julien Levy: Maestro of the Art World by Beth Gates Warren’

Noted photography scholar Beth Gates Warren will present a fascinating lecture on Julien Levy (1906–81), who is best remembered today as the art dealer who brought Surrealism to the United States. His eponymous New York City Gallery (1931–49) was generally regarded as the best place to view cutting-edge work by such artists as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Frida Kahlo, and Man Ray.

May 11 — Santa Barbara Museum of Art to present Art Inspired Cooking with Pascale Beale

Join us for a special Mother’s Day weekend event at SBMA with food writer and chef Pascale Beale, who will share her love for art and how it inspired her 10 cookbooks and cooking career over the past 25 years. A special lunch and cooking demonstration from a few of her much-loved recipes will follow the talk. Attendees will also receive a gift subscription to her latest multi-media food memoir, 9′ x 12′ Culinary Adventures in a Small Kitchen.

Through Aug. 25 — Santa Barbara Museum of Art Presents Made by Hand/Born Digital

SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) exhibition Made by Hand/Born Digital features 12 artworks and 9 artistswho use brushes, AI, paint, 3D printers, scissors, magazines printed on paper, digital looms, potter’s wheels, Photoshop and Apple Photo. By continuing to craft ceramics, paintings, and textiles by hand and also using the latest digital tools, many of the artists in the exhibition blur a distinction between the handmade and digital.