Proscenium: Elliott Hundley

Proscenium: Elliott Hundley, a mid-career solo exhibition, sets the scene. Sculptures and paintings are activated as dramatic devices, stages rife with an overabundance of sets, props, actors—though not necessarily proffering straightforward scripts.

By Achilles’ Tomb: Elliott Hundley and Antiquity @ SBMA 

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is organizing a mid-career solo exhibition with Elliott Hundley and has also invited him to rethink the display of Greco-Roman antiquities in SBMA’s Ludington Court. 

By Achilles’ Tomb juxtaposes the Museum’s renowned collection of antique sculpture and glassware with Hundley’s sculptures, paintings, and newly made collages. 

Guides to Enlightenment: Tibetan Paintings from the Museum’s Collection

In Eichheim Gallery on the Upper Level, Guides to Enlightenment: Tibetan Paintings from the Museum's Collection showcases twelve paintings from the SBMA permanent collection ranging from 13th century ritual cards to a 20th century sand mandala, a cosmic diagram ‘painted’ with colored sand that represents the enlightened mind and acts as a divine palace.

Math + Art

Geometry, numbers, and graphs are means to understand nature and help overcome our human inconsistencies and emotions. The artists in this exhibition, however, infuse these same tools with messiness, warmth, and humor, not to mention elegance and wonder.

Sea of Ice: Echoes of the European Romantic Era

Inspired by James Casebere’s photograph, Sea of Ice (2014), itself based on 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of the same name, this exhibition includes a variety of SBMA works and a major loaned video that reflect the Romantic era’s revolutionary emphasis on nature as a symbol of human feeling, sensation, and intuition.

Modern Life: A Global Artworld, 1850-1950

We live with linked economies and global instantaneous communication. Change is constant. People are on the go. Modern life with its incessant movement began in the mid-19th century, as undersea telegraph cables, railroads, steamships, and colonial powers encircled the world. These same changes created a global art world with centers in cities such as Paris, Mexico City, and New York.

Dario Robleto: The Signal

Dario Robleto: The Signal features the artist’s feature-length film Ancient Beacons Long for Notice (2024) and a selection of artworks that relate to his dazzlingly inventive mining of the history of science and technology.

Portrait of Mexico Today

Portrait of Mexico Today is one of the only intact murals painted by David Alfaro Siqueiros while he was a political exile in Los Angeles in 1932.

Highlights of East Asian Art

The refreshed and newly configured Sterling Morton, Campbell, and Gould Galleries next to Ludington Court showcase a selection of works from China, Japan, and Korea, drawn from the Museum’s extensive permanent Asian Art collection and organized by SBMA Elizabeth Atkins Curator of Asian Art Susan Tai.

Highlights of South and Southeast Asian Art, Himalayas

Made from a variety of materials: clay, wood, metal, stone, textile, and paper, these works provide a broad view of the artistic expressions and devotional practices in India and their development and transformation in the Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and the Himalayan lands of Nepal and Tibet.