Sizing Up the Season,
the Art of the Matter
Autumn Brings a Host of Refreshed Energy
on the Fine Art Scene in Town
By Josef Woodard | September 17, 2026
Read more of our 2026 Fall Arts Preview here.
Sizing up the art gallery scene in Santa Barbara is always tricky business, it being a fairly moving and morphing target of a subject. Without question, art has had a strong pulse in the 805, and a certain creative spirit pumps through the civic veins of the place.
Thankfully, we have had lasting institutions supplying steady and renewable energies to keep the art-watcher and art-curious awake to possibilities. The list has remained fairly constant over many years, with some notable newcomers — such as the year-old Seimandi & Lepreur Gallery — and veteran spaces missing in action, such as the once inspiring Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College.
But art worth seeing and thinking about remains available, at the anchoring source of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, UCSB AD&A Museum, the Westmont Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and, on the private gallery front, the hardy Sullivan Goss gallery and the Architectural Foundation Gallery, among others.
Suffice to say, there are plenty of options for those seeking art in these parts, especially as fall brings on a new burst of exhibition energy in the “official” and academic spaces.
With the new show Cassatt & Friends (Sept. 20-Jan. 3), SBMA is dipping into the considerable and impressive in-house resources of its permanent collection, celebrating and expanding its holdings of art by Mary Cassatt, the respected American painter in Paris who became integrated into major impressionist circles in the late 19th century. The show also casts an eye on the media of drawing and printmaking in that scene. Also on view at the museum is Stage Craft: Pictorialist Photography and Performance, accenting the role of performance in the early photography movement, which sought to aspire to the medium’s potential beyond commercial and realist functions.
Always worth a trip out to the wilds of Montecito to see, Westmont Museum of Art kicks off its academic season with a fascinating mixed media show, Haptic Knowing (“haptic” related to touch) through November 7. Five artists, working outside typical medium territories in their work, though disparate, are logically brought together in this show, in an exploration of art through which “touch as a way of thinking, learning and understanding the world.”
A major new exhibition livens up the MCASB space, upstairs in the Paseo Nuevo compound, in the form of Falling into the Future: Kinetic Art at the Edge of the World (Oct. 4-May 1), a group show dealing with moving art, which, by definition, moves. Meanwhile, over in the MCASB Satellite Gallery at Riviera Beach Hotel, there are two ongoing shows: Alexis Childress: Migration, Memory, Movementand Tristan Esmino, sa gawi ng araw, both on view September 19 through March 20.
AD&A Museum at UCSB always comes bursting back into action in the fall, just before the arrival of students. Two major shows given valuable wall space to significant artists based in California: Bonnie Ora Sherk: Life Frames Since 1970, which chronicles the work of this important performance and environmentally oriented late artist, mostly from the Bay Area; and Jackie Amézquita: Gemidos de la Tierra, with work by the Guatemala-born, L.A.-based artist.
A favorite Santa Barbara painter, going back decades, Patricia Chidlaw brings her special realist touch, feel for the ambience of supposedly funky or humble scenes and structures, and her affectionate, wistful eye to her new Sullivan Goss show Blue Room (through Oct. 26). This is her first show here since the last memorable encounter, in 2024 with her exhibition Nighthawks, the title referring back to one of her art historical heroes, Edward Hopper.
Architectural Foundation gallery, still at least a semi-secret treasure in town, hosts What Remains (through Nov. 7), blending wood sculptor Don Scott and ambient interior specialist painter Ella Jennings. In a museum-gallery scene circular echo, Jennings worked in recent years at Westmont College Museum of Art. What goes around comes around, in different forms.
You must be logged in to post a comment.