Santa Barbara’s Storied Art Gallery Celebrates 40 Years

Santa Barbara’s Storied Art Gallery Celebrates 40 Years

Patricia Sullivan and Frank Goss’s Legacy
Lives On in Nathan Vonk and His Team

By Roger Durling | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom
November 14, 2024

Nathan Vonk invites me into his home at the corner of a busy intersection in downtown Santa Barbara. The house was built 100 years ago. A sense of history is felt in its interior as well, with the walls covered with significant works of art that illustrate Vonk’s eight-year tenure as owner of the gallery Sullivan Goss — an art institution at the heart of our city. I see works by his favorite painters who have now become not only artists he represents but also good friends.

He encourages me to sit in his dining room, and I admire the beautiful redwood table in front of us. He explains with pride that he and his father built it together with repurposed planks that came from George Lucas’s home. 

“Art is an aesthetic object which becomes more meaningful the more you learn about it,” he shares with me. “A work of art comes with a story about who made it and how it was made. It is a story that travels with the object throughout its life. And this story, you share with your family and friends when they visit your home. It travels with the object throughout its life. And when you get to live with a piece of art, you get to become part of its story.”

It is this home, where we meet, that he mortgaged eight years ago in order to be able to buy Sullivan Goss from its founder Frank Goss on December 23, 2016. The gallery is considered Santa Barbara’s finest, and it has acquired a national and international reputation. They represent some of Santa Barbara’s most important painters, including Patricia Chidlaw, Phoebe Brunner, Meredith Brooks Abbott, Whitney Brooks Abbott, Angela Perko, and our city’s most highly regarded living artist, Hank Pitcher. This month, this treasured institution is celebrating 40 years. 

Located on Anapamu Street, across from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Central Library, Sullivan Goss has three concentric circles of specialty: Santa Barbara art, California art, and American art. Walking into it feels more like entering a museum than a business — they do 20 carefully curated shows a year in its three rooms, and there’s a new exhibit every month.

“What we’ve done successfully is further entrenching the gallery into the community,” explains Vonk. “Galleries are seen as exclusive, elitist, and off-putting to a lot of people. One of the things we strive for is to demystify the art world to people. I want people to come into Sullivan Goss to take their mind off of things.”

In 1984, Patricia Sullivan Goss opened a gallery devoted to fine prints in Sierra Madre, California, and that eventually expanded to include California paintings and contemporary art. Her husband, Frank Goss, was the president of a large environmental engineering company. In 1992, the Landers Earthquake damaged that gallery, and Goss sold his engineering firm. The couple opened Sullivan Goss Books and Prints on State Street in Santa Barbara in 1993 as a bookstore gallery modeled on L.A.’s historic Zeitlin & Ver Brugge. The next year, they bought the building at 7 East Anapamu Street, devoting themselves to books on art and architecture and historic and contemporary California art. They also opened a restaurant in the back — the beloved Arts & Letters Café, which served a celebrated pumpkin soup that locals still long for.

Hank Pitcher recalls, “I started working with Frank when Arts & Letters was mostly art books and a secluded patio restaurant. Walking into Frank’s world felt like walking into an Italian movie. You never knew who you were going to meet or who you were going to see sitting around the fountain in his restaurant. His large and omnivorous appetite for life was on display, and his deep voice tied everything together with a sense of drama and the unexpected. Though painting was not his focus at first, I sensed that it was worth a chance working with him, and I am happy that I did.”

Steadily, Frank and Patricia made themselves integral to the local art scene. First, they began to buy and sell the turn-of-the-century plein air landscape paintings of National Academician Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932). Subsequently, they began to show area artists like Jon Wilshire (1940-1999) and Robin Gowen. 

“I remember Frank Goss telling me that he saw me like some volcano erupting on the horizon, just breaking the line of the ocean, making a whole new land, creating work in an unending stream,” said Gowen. “What a welcome and unusual recognition of the strange power and glory that every artist, if fortunate, experiences — this unending need to make.”

One day, the estate of Don Freeman and Lydia Cooley came up for sale, and Goss put part of the purchase on their credit cards, filling his wife with anxiety. The first exhibition from this purchase proved a great success. From this, a business model was born. The gallery went on to acquire increasingly prestigious artists’ estates affiliated with Santa Barbara or California: Colin Campbell Cooper, Dan Lutz, Grace Vollmer, Ben Messick, Lyla Harcoff, and Nell Brooker Mayhew. Eventually, the gallery would come to own or represent additional artists’ estates with no local affiliation at all.

Vonk admires how Goss seemed to learn on the go and how he increased the gallery’s capabilities. Goss hired two key employees: Jeremy Tessmer in 2002, currently the gallery director, and Susan Bush in 2005, currently the gallery’s contemporary curator. In 2006, the gallery expanded into the building next door, at 11 East Anapamu Street, to grow its offerings of contemporary art. It opened with an exhibition that included Chuck Close and Leon Golub. 

“As an art historian,” Bush said, “the shift from mostly historic work to more contemporary was definitely an adjustment in my mindset of what I came to work to do every day (research and writing about non-living artists, and selling their artwork). What it has shown me is that there is great delight in having access to living artists — their studios, their thoughts, and creative processes in real time, rather than reading about it after the fact.”

Goss also encouraged Tessmer, who had an extensive background in graphic design, to start publishing books about their artists. “That was a passion project of mine, and Frank and Nathan have indulged it,” said Tessmer, who does all the layouts for the publications. “We do think that it helps our artists’ long-term prospects in a very significant way. We are running a gallery day to day with a staff of four and doing research for hardbound books. At this point, every single staff member is involved in organizing the materials, which is fantastic.” (In 2021, Lauren Wilson was added to the team.)

In 2008, Vonk came in to volunteer on a Monday in October and was hired full-time by Friday. “I may have been one of the only people in America to be hired during the last week of October 2008,” recalls Vonk, referring to the recession of that year. “It was a blessing in disguise to be hired during that time. I started from a place that we could only go up. Every year after that, it just kept getting better.”

In 2014, in preparation for retirement, Goss closed the Arts & Letters Café and sold the 7 East Anapamu Street building. The art was consolidated at 11 East Anapamu Street. Goss then solidified his legacy and the gallery’s by selling the business to Vonk in 2016. 

“In the transition, nothing has been lost,” Gowen confides. “And I would have told you that was impossible — that no one could continue what Frank started without some break or recalibration of expectation. But Nathan has Frank’s spirit. He possesses a kindred generosity and kindness, an openness to experience.”

Nathan Vonk is a farm boy born in rural Iowa, near Iowa City and Cedar Rapids. He graduated from Mount Vernon High School in 1996 and went to Reed College in Oregon. “What I wanted to do was astronomy,” he confesses. “I was really into Stephen Hawking. I liked his big ideas. I soon had to come to terms that studying physics and astronomy was simply a romantic notion.” 

He traveled abroad in 1999, visiting 10 different countries through a Semester at Sea program. When he got back, he studied religion, philosophy, and English. He admits he wasn’t well-read. In 2001, he worked as a cabin manager for a year at the college’s ski cabin in Mount Hood and tried to remedy that. “I had a list of 25 books to read, from Faulkner to Thomas Fielding.” 

After graduation in 2002, he moved to Portland, Oregon, and worked as a valet at a hotel. Then he was invited by a friend, who was a reporter for the Ventura County Star, to go to Burning Man, the prominent festival that’s an experiment in community and art. “I was fascinated by the enormous, resource-intensive art projects that are then gone forever,” Vonk recalls. “I found that fascinating. That propelled my interest in art.” 

In 2003, he went to grad school in Brighton, England, at the University of Sussex. “It was there that I dove into the arts,” he explains. “The campus was only one hour from London, and I visited galleries and museums and taught myself art.” He finished his dissertation early so he could go back to Burning Man the following year. Then he came to Santa Barbara,  befriending and following artists who’d participated in the festival.

In 2004, he got a job at Ventura College as an adjunct professor. He also worked during the day as a dog walker for Paws Over Santa Barbara, eventually buying the business and making it profitable. He sold it before 2008, which allowed him to buy his current home. He also met Erin Smith while she read Shakespeare at the Press Room, and he was smitten. They married and now have a son named Lowen. 

“I originally wanted to work for Frank as long as possible,” Vonk says about Goss retiring and his purchasing the business. “The fear of losing Sullivan Goss was the driving force to purchase it. It would have taken over 30 years to build the equity that the gallery has. The thought of losing it was what put me over the edge.”

After the deal was done, he was nervous. “It was super scary taking over,” he said. “The Montecito slides happened, and then the Thomas Fire, followed by COVID. For people to buy art, they need a level of certainty in their lives before they buy things to enrich their lives.”

The most significant change that Vonk has implemented is modifying the gallery’s focus from primarily vintage artwork sales to mostly contemporary works. “That shift happened because the demand for historical art has gone down drastically in the past years,” he said. “We don’t sell as many historic paintings as we used to.” Plus, the gallery is passionate about supporting working artists. They’ve brought in some new artists like Patricia Chidlaw, María Rendón, and Inga Guzyte since Vonk took over. 

“The long-term goal for us in regard to the artists that we represent is to get them the most exposure they can have and increase the value of their artwork over time,” said Bush. “That means regular exhibitions at our gallery, participation in significant group shows at other galleries, a monograph (that we write and publish), working with museums to get their work into institutions, and lots of marketing.” 

Finding artists from this community and championing them is very exciting. Sullivan Goss has also done three solo shows of abstract artist Wosene Worke Kosrof, who hails from Ethiopia, lives in Berkeley, and displays his work in New York and New Orleans. We normally don’t sell abstract art in S.B. “He’s become a close friend,” Vonk proudly states. 

Sullivan Goss also has an extensive database recording every work of art that they’ve sold. “I think of it as an institution of record,” explains Vonk. “We are, at least in S.B., the only ones to do that. We treat anything that comes to Sullivan Goss as something that will potentially be in a museum. Our database will someday be part of the archives of American Art.” 

About 25,000 works of art have gone through Sullivan Goss since Vonk took over. The database archives each with a photograph of the painting, its name, the artist, its size, and any previous exhibitions, as well as any interesting provenance and ownership history. “It’s hard to guess what the future will find important,” he shares. “We need to treat every piece as if it were the most important.”

What advice would Vonk give to a first-time art collector? “The most important thing is that you have to love the work,” he emphasizes. “See as much art as possible. Find out what you’re excited about. My joy in life is helping people find something they will cherish for the rest of their lives.”

Sullivan Goss Gallery is celebrating its 40th anniversary with an extraordinary exhibition of each of the gallery’s currently represented artists and artists’ estates, along with major works by artists who are important to their program. “You walk into Sullivan Goss, and you are welcome,” said Gowen. “Nathan looks at you and sees you clearly, and you know when you speak, you will be heard. He continues Frank’s hospitality and follows his brilliant intuition.”

The Sullivan Goss 40th Anniversary Show is on view through December 30. For longtime followers and friends of the gallery, it is a chance to revisit old favorites. It is also a chance to see how the gallery has evolved with the community, and get an idea of where it is headed in the years to come. 

Sullivan Goss is located at 11 East Anapamu Street. See sullivangoss.com.