Words, and fragments thereof, have been sneaking onto local gallery walls of late. Earlier this year, a large and “wordy” exhibition at UCSB’s AD&A Museum filled walls and floors with Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language. One of the pieces in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA was a Jenny Holzer, for whom texts have been a primary art material. Now, over at Sullivan Goss, here comes another plunge into the phenom of art involving texts, reconfigured meanings, letter-philia, with an aptly tangled, layered, and witty show title, TL;DR: TEXT / ART (Too Long; Didn’t Read / Too Long; Don’t Read).
••• Press release: Sullivan Goss has transformed “its front gallery in downtown Santa Barbara into a historic parlor filled with cherished works by Colin Campbell Cooper (1856-1937), Leon Dabo (1864-1960), and Lockwood De Forest (1850-1932). […]
Since I wrote a cover story about Hank Pitcher in 2017, one of the richest experiences of my life in Santa Barbara has unfolded — perhaps more satisfying than anything I’ve ever experienced during my tenure in our beloved city. I regularly show up to Hank’s studio to admire his work, but primarily to talk about art.
After four years, Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara is displaying a new solo exhibit for well-known Santa Barbara artist Hank Pitcher, Feb. 28-April 21 at the gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
There will be an opening reception, 5-8 p.m. March 6 during 1st Thursday.
Twenty paintings — ranging in size from a suite of 10 small paintings made on the beach from direct observation, to six large studio paintings — will tell the story of the Pitcher’s last 18 months on the beaches of Montecito. But that is only part of the story.
As a preliminary window on the grand 40th annual event, the ceremonial unveiling of plans — and this year’s official poster image — settled into the humbler but fitting venue of the prominent Sullivan Goss Gallery last week, when Executive Director Roger Durling led a gathering of press and other parties through a brief overview of what’s to come. The gallery setting was ideal, as the 2025 poster, a mythologically tinged and pink-hued image by well-established artist Mary Heebner, was doubly unveiled — both the poster form and its original collage piece currently hung on the gallery wall.
Sullivan Goss recently celebrated its 40th anniversary, marking a noble and highly notable life as an important West Coast gallery. From its reliable perch on Anapamu, launched by Patricia Sullivan Goss and her husband, Frank Goss — originally with a delightful café attached — and now run by owner Nathan Vonk, the gallery has become a staple cultural fixture and model of how to “gallery” (as a verb).
Although its staple artforms and stable of fine artists revolve around the classic arts of painting and sculpture, photography is having a showcase moment in the space, for the first time in nearly two decades. Fittingly, the exhibition on the power of photography is more of a friendly and broadly spun survey than a crisply focused affair.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF HUMAN EXISTENCE can fall away when a lens captures and embraces a moment, preserving it long enough for others to apprehend.
A series of such moments will be shared with visitors when Sullivan Goss, in collaboration with Peter Fetterman Gallery, opens The Power of Photography on 1st Thursday, January 2nd, in an exhibition that will continue through January 27th.
Nathan Vonk invites me into his home at the corner of a busy intersection in downtown Santa Barbara. The house was built 100 years ago. A sense of history is felt in its interior as well, with the walls covered with significant works of art that illustrate Vonk’s eight-year tenure as owner of the gallery Sullivan Goss — an art institution at the heart of our city. I see works by his favorite painters who have now become not only artists he represents but also good friends.
The ‘PST Art: Art & Science Collide’ exhibition features Larry Bell, Fred Eversley, Claire Falkenstein, Oskar Fischinger, Man Ray and Robert Irwin, among others. Sections of the show may focus on math and what some may consider dry subjects, but the through-line is on process: how artists make interesting art.
ABSTRACTING THE BEAUTY OF BEACHES, WEIRS, AND ORGANIC SHAPES, the artists of Provincetown. Massachusetts are synonymous with community and innovation as members o a world-class art colony.
Now through August 26th, Sullivan Goss - An American Gallery is sharing a slice of this Cape Cod hotspot. affectionately known as "P-Town." with its very own audience of Santa Barbara artists and art-lovers.
Iconic California imagery runs deep in the artistic bloodlines of painter Holli Harmon. Whether it’s winding through the environmental landscapes of “The River’s Journey” (exhibited at the California Nature Art Museum, Santa Barbara City Hall, Sullivan Goss Art Gallery, and the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art) or embedded into the human landscapes of the ambitious “Portraits of the Central Coast” (exhibited as Revelations at the Elverhøj Museum of History and Art), Harmon’s thoughtfully immersive approach to what has been described as her “contemporary traditional” artistic style brings a beautiful blend of the head and the heart to the canvas.
Sullivan Goss will present “Labyrinth of Words,” its third solo exhibit by contemporary painter Wosene Worke Kosrof. The exhibit runs July 26-Sept. 23 at the gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
The show features 16 new paintings and will be accompanied by a catalog that includes a new essay by Richard B. Woodward, the founding curator of the African Arts Department at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
Patricia Chidlaw describes her works as “urban landscapes” to distinguish them from people-less outdoor scenes and seascapes in nature.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story of her art.
She could be described as an illustrator of everyday American life.
LAST month I wrote about Storm King, the art center in the Hudson Valley in New York dedicated to outdoor sculpture. I loved it. I realized then that I hadn’t profiled a living, breathing, working sculptor, so today I’ll write about Alex Rasmussen, a Santa Barbara sculptor who works in aluminum.
... Rasmussen is a case study in inventive, contemporary sculpture. He sculpts not stone or wood or plaster or wax or bronze or concrete but aluminum, and he knows it well.
Light Landing, a painting by Maria Rendón, whose work is on view through April 22 at Sullivan Goss, in Santa Barbara, California.
© The artist. Courtesy Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, California
Angela Perko is a self-taught painter here in Santa Barbara. Angela and her husband own a rare bookstore, and she credits the exposure to art books for sparking her interest in painting.
Driving through the Carpinteria Valley to meet esteemed painter Whitney Brooks Abbott, I notice the abandoned greenhouses on the roadside near her house. They stand there in a ghostly manner, both worn out and defiant, surrounded by the beauty of the natural landscape. Not surprisingly, when I walk in Whitney’s studio, I see “Field Notes,” the main work of her first solo show at Sullivan Goss in five years — a painting of the greenhouses.
WITH A VISUAL LANGUAGE ALL ITS OWN, Nathan Huff’s third solo exhibition at Sullivan Goss is now open. Many will remember the ladders, small boats, and oaks that populated his earlier works. They return again, though subtly changed, evoking even more clearly earthly transience and a pull to the ethereal realms.
A new book has just been published on the art and life of artist Wosene Worke Kosrof called WOSENE: Beyond Words.
Making my way in to see Nicole Strasburg’s new Sullivan Goss exhibition Surfacing, diverse enticements were there to behold in this spatially generous, three-gallery-deep art space. This summer’s triple play of shows includes Holli Harmon’s intriguingly multifaceted To Feast on Clouds and the seasonal group show spritzer dubbed Summer Fling in the large middle space, including colorful, eye-buzzing works by Penelope Gottlieb, Robert Townsend, and one of Hank Pitcher’s fetching surfboard “portraits.”
By association, Strasburg’s conceptually elastic variations on seascape paintings should also qualify as summery fare. And yet these seaside scenarios, taken individually and as a variegated and integrated ensemble, can take on introspective and artistically adventurous sub-turns, far from the realm of idle beachgoer’s escapism.
I love to write about artists’ homes. They are never ordinary. This home is no exception. It was built by landscape artist Lockwood de Forest, with help from his son-in-law, architect Winsor Soule. There are numerous examples of de Forest’s paintings in Santa Barbara at the Sullivan Goss Gallery, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Historical Museum, and will also be in the future Chrisman California Islands Center in Carpinteria.
TWELVE GOUACHE PAINTINGS ON FABRIANO WATERCOLOR PAPER may be Holli Harmon’s crown jewel. Each one features a month of the year reproduced from an 1866 Farmer’s Almanac, when hand labor began to be replaced with machine farming. Each piece, inspired by her sketchbook, represents a month of the year at the Jalama Canyon Ranch, floating over deep blue cyanotype prints made using autochthonous vegetation.
Two shows open July 28 at Sullivan Goss: 1) Holli Harmon’s To Feast on Clouds: “An impressive group of 89 paintings of clouds rendered onto vintage tableware will take over the walls of one of the gallery’s spaces. The accumulation of clouds from sunny to stormy and everything in between creates a conversation about water, where it comes from and how it works in relation to the food we grow that eventually ends up on our tables.”
Nicole Strasburg’s Surfacing: “Long associated with 12 x 12 inch paintings on birch panels that seem to float away from the white walls of the gallery, the artist has, in the last two years, adopted a slightly larger square format of 14 x 14 inch panels with beautifully-finished wood sides. Impressive suites of paintings in both formats can be seen and purchased in this special exhibition. They will be joined by a focused presentation of larger paintings that revel in the endless forms and colors offered by those places where ocean, sky, and land meet.”
Santa Barbara, with fewer than 90,000 people, barely makes it into California’s 100 largest cities. But this coastal enclave has an outsize role in the state’s history.
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...[H]ead a couple blocks north on Anacapa Street to Sullivan Goss, a private three-room gallery around the corner from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where pieces can cost as much as a home down payment and the collection leans heavily on evocative portrayals of the American West. Catch the current exhibition by the Santa Barbara-based artist Robin Gowen, called “Last Shadow & First Light” (through July 24), of large-format paintings of Central California’s distinctive landscapes.
IF THE JOB OF THE ARTIST IS TO REVEAL NEW EXPERIENCES, the exhibition Where the Wild Things Grow has succeeded. Even if you've been to the magnificent Ganna Walska Lotusland gardens, you'll see the place anew thanks to 28 different artists who have transferred their Lotusland experience onto paper, sculpture, and paintings. If you listen carefully, you can hear the plants talk.
The community will have a chance to meet local artists while also supporting Lotusland at the same time in Santa Barbara on Thursday from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Sullivan Goss Art Gallery in Santa Barbara is excited to collaborate with Lotusland in Montecito.
Opening May 26 at Sullivan Goss: a solo exhibit by Robin Gowen. “Last Shadow & First Light is an expansive overview of Robin’s enduring relationship to the landscape of the central coast. While she is adept at painting still life, figures, and architecture, the paintings in this exhibition celebrate her deep knowledge of the unpeopled places she visits regularly. Meditations on vast expanses of rolling hills along with native oak and sycamore trees are the main compositional elements.” Below: “Bitterwater Creek Cattle.”
She was born in Washington, D.C., in 1907 to a military family of high standing. He was born in L.A. in 1968 to a Hollywood family of note.
East Coast, West Coast. Modern, contemporary. Grandmother, grandson.
Betty Lane, an artist first and foremost, but a diarist, too. Christopher Noxon, a writer first, but then an illustrator and now a painter.
Opening March 31 at Sullivan Goss: paintings by two artists, Betty Lane and Christopher Noxon (whose studio was a highlight of last fall’s Ojai Studio Artists tour). Below: Noxon’s “Meditation Mount.”
Through April 24th, Sullivan Goss will show Surreal Women as a companion exhibition to its REAL WOMEN: Realist Art by American Women exhibition of 2021. The exhibition embraces intuition, bypassing the intellectual constructs of Breton’s infamous manifesto to go straight for the heart.
HONORING WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH and paying tribute to women who joined the Surrealist Movement that began in France entered the America in the 1920s, Sullivan Goss curators Susan Bush and Jeremy Tessmer chose fifteen contemporary women artists for Surreal Women, on view through April 24th.
Montecito dynamic duo Bill and Sandi Nicholson co-hosted a boffo bash at the Sullivan Goss Gallery for a new feature documentary, Helen Believe, which debuted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
It’s always fascinating to see how creative people evolve and continue to create in different ways throughout their lives. Lynda Weinman was an early pioneer in computer and web graphics who went on to cofound (with her husband, Bruce Heavin) Lynda.com, one of the first online educational enterprises to teach digital tools and skills. They sold the company to LinkedIn in 2015, and Weinman began to pursue an interest in ceramics. She discovered 3D clay printing in 2020, and today she is one of its foremost pioneers, working fluently with geometric and parametric forms. Her 3D-printed ceramic and plastic sculptures are currently on view at Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery.
“Crop the bottom!” said the comment on Instagram about Patricia Chidlaw’s painting for the 38th Santa Barbara International Film Festival poster. It was a reaction that we expected. But it is the bottom half of the piece (which showcases a parking lot with cars stationed against a wall) that elevates the work to the sublime.
“To be sure, Patricia’s work beautifully captures environments while not editing out the visual noise of power lines, graffiti, and disrepair,” says David B. Walker, CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art, where Chidlaw had a major exhibit in 2014. “These elements play antagonist roles in her eloquent compositions.”
AS TECHNOLOGY GROWS AND IMPACTS THE WORLD AROUND US, people turn to the natural world for reprieve and inspiration. Regenerate, the latest exhibition at Sullivan Goss, is bursting with figures that reference but also morph natural figures, shaping them into something are as familiar as they are unrecognizable. Featuring the artworks of J. Bradley Greer and local artist and SBIFF Board of Directors President Lynda Weinman, Regenerate asks viewers to consider their position in between nature and technology and if these things are as far apart from each other as one might initially believe.