More than Words: Exploring Language with ‘Public Texts’ Exhibition at UC Santa Barbara

California Artists on Display at UCSB’s Art and Architecture Museum Through April 27

Public Texts: A California Visual Language will be showing at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum through April 27. 2025 | Credit: Jeff Liang

Written language, and the layered meanings we gather from signs, symbols, and texts, are deeply tied into culture, history, and our place in the world. At UC Santa Barbara, these connections are the foundation of Public Texts: A California Visual Language, a collection of works by California artists exploring the boundary between image and the written word.

Associate Professor of Print and Publication Alex Lukas — who specializes in researching and teaching the art of printmaking, zines, sign-painting, and graphic design — curated the show as a portrayal of California’s impact on art through these subcultures and a study of the evolution of text as tool for both communication and personal expression.

“I think a lot about how it feels like we’re reading more than ever, just because we’re always on our phones, scrolling,” Lukas said. “There’s this huge volume of text we encounter. But for me, there’s this tactility of something that is detached from the phone, that you spend time with on your couch. There’s all these different ways that we have to read, and we have historically relied on that activity.”

The collection features the works of more than 20 artists, spanning more than a half-century of California-based art playing with the use of text through painting, prints, sculpture, protest signs, and street art. On view at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A) through April 27, the exhibition offers a look into California’s deep-rooted connection to public art, pop culture, graffiti, activism, and technology.

Second-generation San Francisco sign painter Rose D’Amato worked on-site to complete her latest work, “Diamond Street to Ingalls.” | Credit: Alex Lukas

Lukas said he’s particularly interested in the interplay between literal and subversive meanings of written language, and how the way things are presented or their relationship with subcultures can alter how we understand messages.

There’s the way that California graffiti culture — itself a way of reclaiming public space and a message of defiance sprung from traditionally marginalized groups — adopted the use of Old English lettering and other highly stylized fonts that were meant to be understood only by those on the same side of the cultural tracks.

This same concept goes for metal band T-shirts, which can be illegible to all but those who follow the bands closely, or in the era of psychedelia posters created by legendary designer Wes Wilson — whose work is featured in the Public Texts exhibition.

Wilson’s posters, known for their bright colors, highly stylized bubble text, and imagery now synonymous with hippie counterculture, became a statement in and of themselves, and a visual nod to the intended audience.

“The words don’t matter as much as communicating what people can expect,” Lukas said. “That’s the idea of like, ‘Okay, we’re holding an event, and it isn’t intended for everybody. It’s not for the squares…. This is just for the people who know what to expect when they see these posters.’”

Over time, this way of communicating by way of design becomes a shorthand in itself, he said. And at the same time, these meanings can be flipped, “morphed, melded, or twisted” by the people who use them.

Protest signs, he said, evolved over decades, changing from handwritten messages on cardboard to union-printed posters and everything in between. But now, there’s a clearer difference between the political and social connotations of the signs and how they were made.

“The design of protest signs has kind of just been whatever’s at hand,” Lukas said. “But thinking about how protest signs look now, there’s this shorthand where MAGA feels very different from so many protest signs of progressive, leftist, and anarchist movements that are more hand-drawn. And that difference between something that looks professional or legitimate and something that feels subversive, like it’s from the people.”

“Siéntese Señora” by Georgina Treviño at UCSB’s UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum| Credit: Jeff Liang

Some works featured in Public Texts delve into how technology has influenced text-based art over the decades. John Baldessari’s 1971 piece, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” reminds the viewer of a Bart Simpson–esque message scrawled in cursive over and over again, each subtly different in a way only the human hand can achieve.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s work combines handwritten messages written over typeset imagery, mixing methods that point back to her time growing up in East Palo Alto in the ’80s and ’90s, when she remembers Xeroxed flyers taking on a unique aesthetic as home computers became more accessible to the public. These posters, which she would see around her hometown, slowly became a hodgepodge of early default computer images alongside hand-drawn designs.

The exhibition showcases this renaissance of analog media, reflecting contemporary artists’ willingness to put down the computer and put a new spin on time-honored mediums like hand-pinstriping and sign painting.

“Sorry, Wrong Number” by Glen Rubsamen, currently on display at UCSB’s UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum | Credit: Achim Kukulies

“People got sick of drawing on the computer.,” Lukas said. “I think there’s this question of the balance between the digital and the analog, but there is an interest in the craft of drawing something by hand now that feels like such an interesting evolution from 10 or 20 years ago when everything was vinyl-printed.”

One of the newly commissioned pieces in the show, “Diamond Street to Ingalls,” was created on-site by second-generation sign painter Rose D’Amato. She worked for five days to finish the 14-foot-tall acrylic painting, which serves as a nostalgic portrayal of a drive through her home city, complete with the front-window signs she would see driving along the two San Francisco streets.

Other works — like Ozzie Juarez’s “Paradise,” Glen Rubsamen’s “Sorry, Wrong Number,” or Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s “Injured: I?” — look plucked right out of a California street, with familiar street art, wheatpasted posters on walls, and strip-mall billboards that bring up questions of commercialism, visual communication, and navigating space.

“Part of this work, and part of looking through the show, is just navigating space so that it feels like a bus stop or a wall you’d see out driving,” Lukas said. “But it takes you outside of the car, questioning how we experience space in California outside of the mythologized automobile. It’s the stuff we’re surrounded by all the time — things that we interact with probably on a day-to-day basis.”
Public Texts will be on display through April 27 at UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. The museum is open to the public Wednesday-Sunday, noon-5 p.m. See museum.ucsb.edu.