The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is pleased to announce the opening of two special exhibitions, Amigos y Amantes (through March 2, 2025) and Acreción: Works by Latin American Women (through April 13, 2025). Both exhibitions delve into themes of identity, resilience, and cultural expression with the diverse work of contemporary artists, offering the public an immersion into notions of friendship, family, immigration, and self-discovery.
These two exhibitions, as well as a public opening event hosted in conjunction with Santa Barbara’s Pacific Pride Foundation, evidence SBMA’s commitment to equity and community engagement. The Museum is also pleased to offer wall signage and name tags in both English and Spanish for works from both exhibitions on view in the galleries, as part of its continued attention to accessibility and inclusion.
Friends and Lovers
The exhibition Friends and Lovers, on view in the Museum’s Loeb Gallery, explores how LGBTQ+ individuals have forged bonds of friendship and created alternative families by seeking solidarity in their own community amid societal pressures.
Drawing on works from SBMA’s collection and loaned pieces, this exhibition features a wide variety of artistic media that capture the intimacy, challenges, and triumphs of the LGBTQ+ experience. The exhibition includes a variety of media and approaches including film, painting, sculpture, collage, and photography.
A centerpiece of this exhibition is Still Life with Triumeq® and Candies Reminding Me of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (2023) (above) by Joey Terrill. The artist incorporates symbols of his Chicana heritage and activism to defend the rights of HIV+ patients in this still life, such as the sarape – an allusion to his roots as a Mexican immigrant – and Triumeq – an expensive drug to treat HIV that is too often made prohibitive by its exorbitant price. The candies stuck to the surface of the painting reference a work by Félix González-Torres in which a pile of wrapped candies evoke his late partner, Ross Laycock, who like him died of complications from AIDS in the 1990s.
Another painter exhibiting here is Pui Tiffany Chow (周佩璇), who challenges classical representations of women with her work Is She Inside? Is She Outside? (2020). The artist recently said: “This painting is a feminist and queer reinterpretation of the Western canon of female nudes.” Chow uses the female nudes of European male artists, such as Jacopo Pontormo, Antonio Canova, and Jean Honoré Fragonard, and turns them on their head by reinterpreting them from the perspective of women looking at and desiring other women. Chow, a Hong Kong immigrant now based in Los Angeles, incorporates elements of Chinese painting to highlight negative space as active and important.
Friends and Lovers
September 22, 2024 – March 2, 2025
Accretion: Works by Latin American Women
September 29, 2024 – April 13, 2025
