In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA

Since first opening its doors in 1941, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) has been a platform for contemporary artists. With artworks dating from 1965 to 2023, In the Making is an expansive take on an evolving collection and illustrates the impossible task pinning down the contemporary, which is never still. Nearly a century ago, Gertrude Stein is reported to have said that “You can be a museum, or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” However, if you admit that a contemporary collection can only ever be “in the making,” or always in formation, then there is a way out of Stein’s dead end. A museum can be modern, but only if it commits to continuous growth and change.
 Cutting across seven decades, this exhibition provocatively mixes artists rarely seen together and reveals their shared preoccupations with optical effects, fantastic otherworldly landscapes, allegory and history to unlock national and ethnic identity, abstract painting’s expressive power, and aesthetic appeal of mathematical graphs and constructions. Artworks from 50 years ago that can no longer be called contemporary sit alongside those from the 2020s.

This exhibition is made possible by The Museum Contemporaries.

In Conversation with Jane Dickson

Saturday, February 15, 2025 | 3:30 – 5 pm
Mary Craig Auditorium

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As part of In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA, the Museum is pleased to invite featured artist Jane Dickson for a conversation with James Glisson, SBMA Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art.

Jane Dickson (b. 1952, Chicago, Illinois) makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-seventies counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographic snapshots, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives in New York.