OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2017, FROM 5 - 8PM

In loving memory of one of Santa Barbara’s sweetest curmudgeons, one of its most diligent arts supporters and agitators, and one of the most august artists of the Funk Zone, Sullivan Goss is honored to present a memorial exhibition for Philip Koplin & His Family . An intimate and enveloping installation of Philip Koplin’s assemblages, monotypes, and drawings will be featured in the third gallery of Sullivan Goss along with works by his wife Virginia McCracken and various personal treasures.

Philip Koplin was born in Brooklyn, NY on September 21, 1942 – the eldest son of three. In Coney Island where he was raised, he was surrounded by an extended Jewish family just two generations from the Old Country, Belarus. He graduated from Brooklyn Polytechnic with a Bachelor’s degree in Physics. For most of his adult life, he freelanced as an editor of science books and journals. In the early 1980s, he discovered Santa Barbara and, except for a brief experiment with being a Mainer, stayed. He was a lover of books and words, of art and ephemera – a self-effacing, facetious, and gentle man with unforgettable eyebrows. He was a late blooming artist, not starting in earnest until his early forties. Ann Hamilton, then at U.C.S.B., told Philip that he should just admit that he was making art. He became a passionate assembler, drawer, photographer, arranger, and curator of exhibitions and ephemera. Few knew more about Borscht Belt broadsides, Chinese account books, or the proper patination of American baseballs. In all of his various artistic pursuits, he was a finder of beauty as much as a maker and a lover of texture, history, irony, and the poetic potential of obscurity and obsolescence.