SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.- The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara announces Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language, an exhibition examining the unique and surprising way Californian artists utilize text in their creative practices. Curated by Alex Lukas, Associate Professor of Print and Publication, the exhibition opened on Saturday, January 18 and will remain on view through April 27, 2025. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 12:00pm to 5:00pm. Free admission.

Exhibition

The visual output of Californian artists has, for over half a century, embraced the written word as the site for aesthetic play. Spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, and more, Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language brings together more than twenty artists rooted in the state who play with the boundary between language and image as a central component of their visual practice. Through a lyrical, playful, and colorful use of text, their artworks revel in local and regional influences, including hand-painted signage, music, automobile culture, graffiti, activism, and technology, reflecting the unique cultural space of the Golden State.

From gothic scripts that evoke the aesthetic legacies of colonialism to gentile gradients and psychedelic motifs, this exhibition critically examines what California "looks like" by proposing a distinct aesthetic language that explores underrecognized, marginalized, and subcultural histories, cycles of migration and displacement, vernacular and pop-culture forms, and speculative, celebratory futures.

Public Texts pays specific attention to work that escapes the confines of the gallery to engage in a visual call and response with unexpected, expansive audiences. Printed multiples, from counterculture zines to music fliers, as well as public interventions spanning protest posters and stylized graffiti scripts, are a specific focus of the exhibition.

In that spirit, the exhibition extends beyond the museum, welcoming several new, temporary outdoor commissions to the University of California Santa Barbara campus. These site-specific public works will emerge over the course of the show, offering museum visitors and students opportunities to witness an evolving experience that grows and changes over the course of the exhibition.

Public Texts will also include an interdisciplinary pedagogical space inside the museum designed to support multiple forms of instruction, public programming, and unique opportunities for interactivity, play, and study.