OPENING RECEPTION: 1ST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6TH  |  FROM 5-8 pm

Sullivan Goss Gallery is excited to present a landmark exhibition that celebrates the rich and varied history of Narrative Art in America. Spanning nearly 125 years, The Storytellers offers a survey of the techniques artists have employed to tell stories, spark imagination, and shape our collective understanding of the world.

This exhibition, which anticipates the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles next year, and is scheduled to coincide with the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, will bring together traditional illustration, documentary photography, concept art for Hollywood films, contemporary figurative painting, and cutting-edge AI-generated imagery. The show aims to demonstrate how artists in a wide variety of industries have used their creative power to transport audiences into different times, places, and emotional landscapes through the use of visual storytelling. 

The earliest works in this exhibition date to the early part of the 20th century. LEON DABO’s Pelleas and Melisande illustrates a scene that originates from an 1893 symbolist play which was turned into an opera by Claude Debussy in 1902. Two works by W. H. D. KOERNER are also literary illustrations, one of which was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1929, the other on the cover of a period romance novel from 1932.  A watercolor by the celebrated Ashcan School artist EVERETT SHINN depicts the moment of a curtain call at the end of an evening’s performance. 

An exciting highlight of the exhibition is JULES ENGEL’s storyboard sketch for the Dance of Hours section of Walt Disney’s groundbreaking Fantasia in 1940.  Accompanying this is a rare concept drawing by BEN MESSICK from the first film version of The Jungle Book which debuted in 1942. 

More recent works by ROBIN GOWEN, HOLLI HARMON, and ANGELA PERKO, bring to mind how stories influence our collective understanding or interpretation of history and culture.  NELL CAMPBELL’s photography documents the breadth of human experience, while ROBERT TOWNSEND’s monumental painting Happy Place was created from a cache of lost family vacation photos from the 1960s. Works by HANK PITCHER and PATRICIA CHIDLAW tell stories that define the culture of Santa Barbara or Southern California more broadly. 

A selection of NATHAN HUFF paintings come to life through a cast of recurring animal characters that suggest an allegorical story in which moral is illusive, leaving their interpretation open and their meaning malleable. In this case the stories’ interpretations are less collective or cultural, and more personal or psychological.   

Contemporary artist and award winning illustrator, SCOTT ANDERSON, provides a current look at narration in illustration. His work provides a visual for the written context and has appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and Mad Magazine to name a few.

Finally, CHRIS PETERS’ latest work incorporates cutting edge A.I. image generation software to produce visually striking works resembling mid-century pulp fiction covers, blurring the boundaries between human creativity and machine intelligence. Peters feeds the program with increasingly specific textual prompts for the generation of imagery that become the source material for his paintings. In these works, the intersection of technology and narrative explores new possibilities for storytelling, asking questions about the role of human authorship and how AI can contribute to the ongoing evolution of narrative visual art.