Curatorial Democracy in Action at MCASB

In what is shaping up to be a happy tradition in Santa Barbara’s art landscape, we seem to be in a high season for local art surveys on museum walls. Currently, the Westmont Museum of Art is presenting its annual “Tri-Counties Juried Show,” (bit.ly/4vFRdp5), showing 50 artists winnowed down from 422 applicants. 

Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) is showing its third annual Arte del Pueblo exhibition, a giddily jury-free and “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” brand of community art culling. As it happens, a lot does stick in this year’s potpourri show, slicing across ranks of professional and amateur and fine and not-so-fine art. 

In the mission statement on the MCASB website, the project’s objective is made clear in the section called “The Process”: “To ensure true access, we remove traditional barriers. There is no theme. There are no jurors. There are no gatekeepers. Just art, and the community that makes it.” This is a democratic, all are welcome, cross-section of art being made in our pueblo, and the result is fascinating, on various levels.

The show’s built-in diversity factor begins as you enter the museum. The entrance-facing wall features such works as Javier Nuchita’s detailed portrait “Nuchita” and Miriam Slater’s “Four Directions Violin” — an actual violin painted with Cubist- and Orphism-referential gestures. Tucked into the lowest spot on this busy wall is the long, aptly horizontal train painting “Surfliner,” by the artist known as moments in spray (the medium is spray paint on canvas). 

A sizable number of pieces represent the show’s sculptural component, gamely including such sculptural objects as a Wave surfboard in a display case and Bea’s cheeky but useful concoction, “The Dryer Chair,” cleverly combining those two functional objects in a delightfully form-goosing package. Further perception play is at work in Brett Schoonwoerd’s jet-black gun facsimile “Made in America,” with an impression that is initially foreboding, until we realize it’s actually a squirt gun.

Another intriguing sculpture has art-about-art cred, Andrew Garcia’s “Color Makes You…:,” a lionizing treatment of the graphics-centric letters “CMYK.”

Amid the very mass of uncategorized art here, certain thematic ripples and echoes pop up. Cloud play faces off on opposite gallery walls, between Krystal Vander Ark’s mystical painting “Above the Clouds,” and Peter Honig’s soft-focus cloud photograph, half of the dreamy diptych “Assonance.” Another evocatively impressionistic case of nature photography revisited shows up with Kate Connell’s untitled image.

Mostly, contrasts rule the day. Andrew Roy’s splattery abstraction “Working Together” riffs off of Jackson Pollock, contrasting the crisp prismatic perspective study of Olguin Tapia Heredia’s “Colores de mi Tierna.”

Yuliya Greben’s “Sovereignty,” a portrait of a mythic warrior woman lined in kitchen and feminine empowerment, hangs next to Iben Vestergaard’s “Infinity Pool,” one of the finest admixes of abstraction and realism in the house. 

Rough-edged and black outlined neo-expressionism marks the righteously questioning patriotism of the epic painting “State of the Union” — created by the consortium of Rick Stitch, Trane Hulbert, Lucy Seaberg, and Claire Carey. Communal effort and cause is also on view with a generous section of wall given over to a mosaic of social commentary driven paintings from the Santa Maria–based youth collective “Corazon del Pueblo Painting Project,” led by Marlyn Olea. 

One of the surprise treats in the show speak softly, with an enigmatic power, in the form of Juana Martinez’s sexually loaded portrait of a young woman, “Niña,” in acrylic and embroidered embroidery floss on canvas. And tucked up high on that same art-populated wall, like a sneaky side gag, is Demi Boelsterli’s “Sleeper.” Fittingly, it is a sleeper in the show, a folk arty and ostensibly clumsy portrait of a Spanish-headed woman which oozes with off-kilter charm and grabs at your senses with its overbaked colors. 

You never know what you’re going to find, or what might speak to you, at Arte del Pueblo. Long may it hang, freely.

Arte del Pueblo is on view at MCA Santa Barbara (653 Paseo Nuevo) through July 25. See mcasantabarbara.org.