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(Santa Barbara, CA)—The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum) at UC Santa Barbara is pleased to announce three new exhibitions for the fall 2025 season. The lead exhibition, Beyond the Object: Selections from the Permanent Collection, brings together a range of artworks from the AD&A Museum’s holdings that engage with our lived environment beyond its constructed reality. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper, this exhibition highlights recent acquisitions and gifts primarily from the past five years, demonstrating the Museum’s commitment to expanding its modern and contemporary art collection. Additionally, the Museum joins in the international centennial celebration of the birth of artist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) with a spotlight exhibition of her work in the permanent collection.
The AD&A Museum will also open the exhibition, Mexican Prints: The Garcia-Correa Collection, which celebrates the gift of sixty-one Mexican prints from local collectors Gil Garcia and Marti Correa de Garcia to the Museum. Focusing on lithographs, etchings, and linocuts from the 1920s to the 1980s, the Garcia-Correa Collection of Mexican Prints highlights the importance of the graphic arts in Mexico. This mid-century collection of prints thematically focuses on labor, gender, and domesticity, all key aspects of campesino culture and its farming community that have informed the lives of the collectors. On view are a selection of thirty-one prints that represent a preview of a larger, more comprehensive presentation planned in the years ahead.
Additionally, Environmental Communications: Big Bang Beat L.A. presents the work of the Venice-based collective Environmental Communications (EC), a group of architects, artists, and sociologists who, from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, championed an expanded understanding of architecture—one that encompassed not only individual structures, but the totality of the built environment. This presentation of EC’s materials from the Architecture and Design Collection, following this year’s devastating fires, serves not only as a poignant reminder of the city’s environmental fragility, but also as a tribute to the extraordinary urban creativity that has fueled its resilience over the past five decades.
Organized by the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara, all exhibitions will be on view from September 13 to December 7, 2025. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 13 at 5:30pm.
ABOUT THE ART, DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE MUSEUM
The AD&A Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara is both a teaching museum, committed to the development of critical thinking and visual literacy in support of the University’s goals of education, research and service, and a resource for the wider Santa Barbara Community. Its mission is to stimulate research, support artistic practice, and generate original programming through exhibitions and the Museum’s permanent collections. These include the Architecture and Design Collection, one of the most relevant architectural archives in North America, focused on the development of modern architecture in Southern California, and an encyclopedic art collection, with holdings ranging from the Ancient Americas to today.
Admission to all exhibitions and programs at the AD&A Museum is free, unless otherwise noted. Wednesday-Sunday: 12pm to 5pm. Located at University of California, Santa Barbara, 552 University Road, Santa Barbara, CA. On campus regular parking is $8 for the full day. Visit http://www.museum.ucsb.edu for details or call 805-893-2951.
