Santa Barbara Museum of Art

When Amada Cruz took over as Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s new Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Director and CEO about 13 months ago, she had a clear idea of how she viewed the museum’s evolving role in the community. 

“I see a lot of value in the arts beyond the aesthetic,” she said in these pages in November 2023. “I see the museum as a community builder, especially now in this super polarized time. I think that the arts can really bring us together. It sounds corny, but I do feel that art can build empathy. A museum like SBMA that has a general collection of art from different cultures and different eras can really help you to build an awareness of what’s out there outside of your everyday concerns.”

SBMA’s new exhibition Modern Life: A Global Artworld is a giant step toward that goal. The installation in the Ridley-Tree Gallery features a large number of pieces from the museum’s extensive permanent collection, bringing together artists from North America, South America, and Europe representing the globalization changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to showing off some of the spectacular pieces and the breadth and scope of the museum’s collection, Modern Life – put together by James Glisson, SBMA’s Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art – aims to share the story of how the early days of the world getting “smaller” is represented in the art of the times. 

“One of the ideas is to highlight the way artists in the collection traveled and how they were part of the internationalization of the art world at that time, and how they moved between cultures,” Glisson explained. “These artists and artworks are emblematic of how, starting in the 19th century with industrialization and the development of steamships and undersea telegraphs and cables, information in magazines and newspapers as well as people became much more mobile. Where this exhibition begins is one of the first moments that leads to the world that we have today, incredibly interconnected and with a global economy.” 

The exhibition is organized into several schematics, including Abstraction, Art Science & Industry, Global Surrealism, and Landscape – in an effort to “give shape to this bigger story,” Glisson said. But they all share the concept that with increased movement, the old museum concept of showing artwork by geographic reason should no longer hold sway.

“We’re able to encapsulate the story – within the global breadth of our collection and with these things on the walls – that there’s no reason to be ruled by geographical divisions, or show everything by an artist in one room devoted to where they come from. Many of these artists knew each other or at least knew of each other. So the mixing on the walls is a reflection of the mixing that was actually happening in the real world.”

But it’s not simply a history lesson, according to the exhibit’s curator. 

“Art is a tool for breaking through national and geographic boundaries,” Glisson said. “Many of the artists in this show were displaced by the events of the second World War. That brings up contemporary issues around displacement and political instability facing much of the world today.” 

Glisson said the installation also serves as a reflection of the museum’s desire to be more welcoming and inclusive to the broader community, a concept Cruz explained last year as becoming a “more porous institution that is informed by its communities, influenced by the communities, and that reaches out to those communities and makes them part of the story.”

Glisson explained that by creating a show that’s talking about cultural exchange and breaking down national and geographic boundaries, it sends a message about the different kinds of people the museum hopes will feel more engaged and want to come by the museum. 

“We’re really trying to take the museum to a place that’s more open and more inclusive, and to actually show how the permanent collection, the objects and artworks already owned by the museum, are in fact already fairly diverse,” he said. “We’re excited to get a good part of our really phenomenal Latin American painting collection up on view.”

SBMA has also already begun implementing bilingual labels in Spanish and English throughout the facility, going “gallery by gallery, exhibition by exhibition” to complete the process. 

Glisson stressed that many of the museum’s most impressive and beloved pieces from the last 200 years are on view as part of Modern Life. That includes three Monets, paintings by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, Salvador Dali, Wassily Kandinsky, John Singer Sargent and Josef Albers – plus a selection of Rodin sculptures and casts – all of which are part of the new exhibition. 

“There will be a lot of ‘old friends’ for people who know the museum’s collection to come and visit with again, and to invite newcomers to see them for the first time,” Glisson said. 

In some ways, Modern Life is also a re-coming out party of the museum itself, as the exhibit contains an illustrated timeline of the history of the museum from its founding in the early 1940s through today. 

“There are pictures of former directors, pictures of important exhibitions, photographs of artworks in the collection, some of which are very delicate so they’re not often on view,” Glisson said. “It’s really great to remind the public that this museum has been around for over 80 years, and it has a long and varied history. Before, there wasn’t anything that told you about the museum’s history on the walls. It doesn’t capture everything, but it is a great start.” 

The exhibit itself is a reflection of the sheer size and breadth of SBMA’s permanent collection, which makes up the vast bulk of Modern Life. “What we have here in both quality and quantity is far more than you would expect for a city of our size. And the caliber of the collection enables us to tell these big stories about life over the past 150 years.”

With no set end date for the exhibition beyond (at least) until the end of 2025, people will be able to spend time with Modern Life, immersing themselves in the collection many times over to see what emerges. 

“Our hope is that the show will be welcoming to anybody who comes, that they’ll find an artwork that resonates, or an avenue that they can relate to so they’re able to take this work and make it their own,” Glisson said. “The story we’re trying to tell is about people responding to the time they lived in. The art we’re seeing is how artists and creative people of another period dealt with the things in their lives. That’s something all of us can relate to.”