SANTA BARBARA CA.- In the new year, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art offers a sweeping look at how artists engage with time. Works grounded in personal histories, inherited traditions, and collective memory speak to the past while giving us new ways to access it in the present. Contemporary materials and lived experience illuminate the world as it is now, yet they also open space for reflection and reinterpretation. Digital experimentation and visionary forms gesture toward the future, and at the same time expand how we record, memorialize, and remember. Seen together, these exhibitions reveal art as a continuum—one in which past, present, and future coexist, overlap, and remain vividly alive today.
EXHIBITION OPENINGS
As if in a Dream: History, Fantasy, Future (March 1, 2026 – January 3, 2027) explores how artists merge memory with imagination. Landscapes rooted in personal associations, uncanny figures, and visionary still lifes show how fleeting experiences are transformed into inventive new worlds. Featuring works by Alice Baber, Dominic Chambers, Eduardo Chavez, Rafael Coronel, Odilon Redon, Max Hooper Schneider, and others, the exhibition reveals the fluid line between what we remember and what we dream.
Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms (February 22 – August 30, 2026) highlights artists who reinvent quilts, textiles, and hybrid materials. Drawing on embedded histories while reshaping them for the present, these works function like visual remixes—layered, improvisational, and deeply connected. Artists such as Wendy Red Star, Basil Kincaid, Porfirio Gutierrez, Adia Millet, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, and Michael C. Thorpe demonstrate how materials carry memory even as they are transformed into new forms.
RANDOM-ACCESS MEMORY: Internet Art (March 15 – September 13, 2026), the digital realm becomes a mutable archive. Mining online spaces for images and data, artists like Zhanyi Chen, Claire Hentschker, and Andrew Norman Wilson reveal the Internet as a living memory system that blends personal and collective histories while continually reshaping both.
A Few of Our Favorite Things: Staff Selections from the Permanent Collection (April 12 – September 6, 2026) turns to the Museum’s own community. Chosen by SBMA staff from across departments, these works highlight the breadth of the collection and the insight of the individuals who care for it, offering an intimate and celebratory portrait of the Museum in the present.
