Modern Manners in the House

In an odd but pointed way, the new exhibition In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA eagerly seeks to invalidate and disprove a Gertrude Stein quote, strategically placed at the entrance to the show. Almost a century ago, in an age before modern art and museum culture had found a way to get along, Stein said, “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.” 

Oh, no, you didn’t, say the institutional forces that be at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.

We proceed into the Colefax Gallery and are greeted by a plenitude of contemporary work dating between 1965 and 2023. The evidence is in: SBMA’s permanent collection is well-fortified with modernist ideas and implementations, defying potential accusations that our museum has been resistant to the shock and assertions of the new in art.

By its very nature, contemporary art is a changeable entity, striving toward new ideas and reversals of past art-world truths. Thus, this historically broad sampler plate exhibition covers a wide range of expressions and manifestations, covering multiple stylistic impulses and media (singular and mixed and mangled). Diversity rules here, while contributing to the show’s general thesis of showcasing the cause of supporting contemporary art in the museum vaults.

From the fresher crop, placed near the entrance to the show, Gisela Colón’s 2022 “Skewed Square” is an oblong, lozenge-shaped piece serving as a vessel of refracted color and light, as if a window on some alternate dimension. Baghdad-born Vian Sora’s “Dilmun” (also from 2022) is a visually alluring quasi-landscape, with abstract logic in the bones.

Reaching back to 1970, Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto’s untitled mixed-media piece is a felicitous yet slightly disruptive blend of order and unrest, with its painted wood base and protruding tendrils of metal and nylon nudging into three-dimensionality. His stated influences, between De Stijl artist Piet Mondrian and exacting serialist composer Pierre Boulez, can be readily detected.

There are some welcome repeat visitors to the museum’s walls in this exhibition. Al Held’s somehow large and yet gently spoken, screaming-yellow “Bruges II” begs for our attention, and gets it, again. Whitney Bedford’s “Veduta” and Jane Dickson’s “El Niño” — reworked variations on landscape and suburbia-scape themes, respectively — were recently seen in the Inside/Outside show upstairs in the contemporary gallery, and make for fine gallery mates with other new-ish vault art here.

On the back wall, Russian-born Sidney Gordon’s relief sculpture-meets-painting “November 1967 #1 Three-Dimensional” is a fruitful fusion of painterly and sculptural elements. Across the way are other combined forces at work and play in Garth Weiser’s “Trends and Predictions for the Year” (2012), a post–Op Art optical mesh fashioned from a dense weave of paint layers.

Another welcome return to the embrace of museum space and our sense is the 2000-vintage “Agua Bendita (Holy Water)” construction/painting by Rafael de la Cabada, who has been a prominent and flexible fixture on the local art scene for many years. Here, Cabada takes on cultural signifiers, religious references, and pop-cultural debris relating to his native Mexico, including Mexican flags stuffed unceremoniously in a fringe of plastic Coke bottles.

For deft comic relief, we have a welcome blast of the word-based dry humor of Jenny Holzer — whose art has graced SBMA at various times over the decades, through “silent radio” pieces and more. In this case, her language gaggery takes the sly form of extended text on a marble bench such as we’d find in a cemetery. The text is also the work’s title, from The Living Series: “THERE IS A PERIOD WHEN IT IS CLEAR THAT AYOU HAVE GONE WRONG BUT YOU CONTINUE. SOMETIMES THERE IS A LUXURIOUS AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE ANYTHING BAD HAPPENS.”

A sense of time, fate, and mortality hum implicitly in the background as you read. PS: Tempting as it may be, do not sit on the art.

Black artist Betye Saar is represented by a small but impactful assemblage piece, “Memories of Kemi” (1974). Objects of wistful, personal, and ritualistic import are carefully situated in a jewelry box imbued with both faded glory and timeless memory.

On a somewhat local note, Saar’s piece appeared at New York City’s Whitney Museum of Art in a show curated by art historian-curator Marcia Tucker, who spent her last years living in Santa Barbara. To revisit the notable quote zone from whence this SBMA exhibition began, Tucker was also the founder of the New Museum in SoHo, with its only half-ironic goal of focusing on “the last five minutes of contemporary art.”

In the Making, in its humble way, presents a highly selective view of the last 60 years of contemporary art, as found lurking in the SBMA collection, awaiting its spotlight due.

In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through March 9, 2025. See sbma.net for more info.