Museum Moments

Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s Parallel Stories investigates the concept that while something gets lost in translation, maybe also there’s something to be gained in the process, at least in relation to poetry, serving to build bridges across borders and between cultures via introducing new syntactic strategies, rhythms, and image repertoires. Poet, translator, and literary editor Patricio Ferrari and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, translator, and novelist Forrest Gander will draw from their own work and share examples between languages including Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Kannada in an in-person afternoon discussion on September 11.

Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, which has been focusing on whales over four exhibits and a lecture this year, hosts Charles Vinick, executive director of the Whale Sanctuary Project – who was involved with the film Free Willy and helped move its star orca Keiko to Iceland – in a September 15 talk about his efforts to create the first natural seaside sanctuary for captive whales in North America.

The gallery at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is opening Mary Heebner’s “Prayer Flags & A Tale of Longing,” a three-part exhibition encompassing the artist’s two-sided Prayer Flags, a spiral-bound artist’s book called A Tale of Longing, and the “Elemental Offerings” booklet, all originating with Heebner’s travels to Rumtek Monastery in Sikkim, India, to see how prayer flags are made. Check them all out at the opening reception on September 9.

Book Talk: Chaucer’s Choices 

Antioch University environmental studies professor and local author Dawn A. Murray’s new book Monpa Medicinal Plants, Indigenous Knowledge from a Himalayan Healer illuminates the Himalayan medicinal plants the Indigenous people of Bhutan use for healing and sharing generational knowledge about their ecosystem. Murray muses on the multimedia project that includes colorful and delicate botanical watercolors and photographs of the people and the place at Chaucer’s on September 12…

Local mystery-thriller author Max Talley’s My Secret Place contains 17 short stories about musicians and artists, underdogs and eccentrics, apartment managers and stoned teenagers, among others, all the secret heroes of their own lives who are driven by eccentric quests that bewilder friends and family in trying to make sense of a modern world that may have already left them behind. Talley talks about the book at Chaucer’s on September 14…

Daryl Joji Maeda’s, Like Water, his multifaceted blend of cultural history and biography of Bruce Lee’s legacy, traces how movements and migrations across the Pacific Ocean structured the cultures Lee inherited, the milieu he occupied, the martial art he developed, the films he made, and the world he left behind. Watch the September 15 virtual talk on Zoom. 

Info at (805) 682-6787 or www.chaucersbooks.com.