Art Review | Where Text and Art Mix and Match Up

In UC Santa Barbara Art, Design & Architecture Museum’s ‘Public Texts’ Exhibition, California Art About and Using Words Rules

"SHHH" by Ana Teresa Fernandez | Photo: Josef Woodard

In the art exhibition at UCSB through this month, words matter. Words also become material as both discourse and visual phenomena, courtesy of the show called Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language, in and around UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum. As an in-house bonus, the exhibition, curated by Alex Lukas, associate professor of print and publication arts, cross-references language — of public signage, graffiti, poster and comic art, and other manifestations — along with the museum’s focus on art, design and architecture.

Language-fueled art takes on many meanings and functions in this intriguing survey. Before even entering the museum, we run across an imposingly large yet semi-secret painting looming tall on the side wall, Rose D’Amato’s “Diamond St. to Ingalls.” As indicated by the title, her iconography is literally grabbed out of the public sightlines in an urban neighborhood, with liquor store and other commerce-beckoning words thrown into kaleidoscopic relief.

From that epic scale, we pare down to the deceptively delicate looking paper pieces of Kate Laster’s “Radiator” in the entryway gallery. The artist uses the crafty aesthetic of cut paper (as seen in the Danish cut paper tradition on view at Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum), but modernizes and personalizes the technique with texts of social, political, and absurdist “fridge-magnet poetry” intent.

Kate Laster, “RADIATOR,” 2025, Cut paper, plastic and spray paint, Courtesy of the artist. On view at Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara. | Photo: Jeff Liang

The conjunction of qualities of art, words, and California instantly trigger, for some of us, the inspired word-based art of Ed Ruscha. Ruscha is not represented in this sampling, although we do get a drolly funny mouthful of words from conceptualist kingpin John Baldessari with his piece “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.” The title’s loaded phrase is obsessively scrawled out in cursive, as if demanded by a disapproving art teacher. As with much of Baldessari’s work, a surface joke ruffles a deeper art-world truth in need of a tickle.

Another dry-witted stop in the exhibition quietly yet boldly seizes a wall of the back gallery in the form of the jumbo-font “SHHH,” spelled out in small circular mirrors on plywood. Ana Teresa Fernández’s “SHHH” is a minimalist pratfall, which could address the semiotic meanings of linguistic gestures, the sanctuary-like quietude of museum/gallery protocol, or just serve as its own self-generating in-joke. Observers’ interpretations are welcome.

From the publication and guerilla DIY corners of texts and media outside the commercial publication space, display cases in the gallery give spotlights to the active culture of graffiti and tagging, as well as the underground comix scene. That alternative mediascape ranges from R. Crumb’s pioneering underground comix to the Chicano and lowrider lifestyle-focused ’70s-era indie comic book Teen Angels.

Leaping forward to a more contemporary slice of Latinx life and urban territory, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.’s “Injured?: I” is an edgy mixed-media piece portraying a paint- and flyer-spattered urban wall. Humble flyers advertising menial and dubious jobs are dwarfed by large posters splashed with beautiful-but-tough businesswomen, projecting an “I will fight for you” vibe, their mugs peddling Veronica’s and Adriana’s Insurance. All is not well or peaceful in this injurious microcosm.

In an inventive but also chilling mash-up of visual vocabularies, Ben Sakoguchi’s compact 1978 painting “General DeWitt” — from the artist’s decidedly California-centric Orange Crate Labels series — flips the narrative by portraying the general involved in the WWII “relocation authority,” sending countless Japanese-Americans to camps. The artist himself was incarcerated with his family in one such camp, in Poston, Arizona.

Paradise gone awry is also addressed in Ozzie Juarez’s big-toned painting “Paradise,” depicting an agitated and saddled, but riderless, horse in a frenzy, with loops of literal barbed wire atop the canvas. This is no rugged Frederic Remington equestrian western fantasy scene.

Christine Sun Kim, “Ghosted Notes (You Don’t Know How Smart I Am in my Language),” (2024), Mural Courtesy of the artist and François Ghebaly Gallery, on view at Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara. | Photo: Jeff Liang

Interestingly, the most epic work in the show is also one of the most spare and subtle. Christine Sun Kim’s “Ghosted Notes (You Don’t Know How Smart I Am in My Own Language” is evenly strewn across the longest wall in the museum. The title’s text is set in an open, spacious way, like “ghost notes” in a musical score. But the visual language here alludes both to music and American Sign Language, this artist’s language of choice and necessity. This literally hushed piece manages to be at once contemplatively beautiful and a commentary on the frustration of many linguistically marginalized Californians — immigrants, the deaf community, and others — in a visually poetic construction.

Never underestimate the superpower of words, and the flexibility of their usage. Leaving the show, you may find yourself more attuned to instances of word-imagery in our public space and faces. Suddenly, I couldn’t help but notice and admire the colorful psychedelic KCSB logo in Storke Plaza, next to the museum. The acronym instantly lit a glow of fondness I have for that independent radio station, while reminding me of the associative power of visualized words.

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.