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.
Just in front of the 2023 Academy Awards, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) is bringing some of the industry's top stars for a multi-day event of films and tributes. SBIFF Executive Director Roger Durling says in its 38th year, the festival will have 52 world premieres, 79 U.S. premiers and 43 countries will be represented. The festival runs from February 8 to 18. The date has moved in recent years to stay close to the Oscar nominations and awards ceremony. Durling enthusiastically talked about the event as he unveiled the poster from acclaimed local artist Patricia Chidlaw inside the Sullivan and Goss art gallery in downtown Santa Barbara.
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) has unveiled its poster and programming for this year's festival set to kick off on February 8.
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A press conference was held at the Sullivan Goss art gallery on Wednesday morning where Santa Barbara artist Patricia Chidlaw was announced as the creator of this year's poster.
From "Dude" to "Dude" - cultural stereotypes live on in new images. The land of the West is just as captivating as the figures who used to roam it. Where there once cowboys blazing the trail of Manifest Destiny, we now have surfers who keep their gaze fixed on the horizon, waiting for their opportunity to work with the ocean around them.
Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery is presenting “The Search for the Modern West” as its first exhibit for 2023.
The exhibit features paintings, sculptures and prints that address the mythology, history and real life experiences of the American West.
“Imaginary Falls in Charcoal, Ink and Oil,” a solo exhibition by Joseph Goldyne, is on view through Dec. 26 at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
“Mr. Goldyne is a well-regarded and widely-collected print maker, but these imaginary waterfalls are all unique works executed with neither press nor plate,” said Jeremy Tessmer, gallery curator and director. “Instead, the plurality of works in the exhibition represent the artist’s first efforts in charcoal presented in context with three paintings in oil and india ink.”
On Thursday, November 3rd, Natalie Arnoldi and Joseph Goldyne will share a space at Sullivan Goss gallery in Santa Barbara, California. Their complimentary solo exhibitions of paintings and drawings of the natural world promise a contemporary view of the sublime.
NUANCED, tantalizing, messy… reflecting the accretion and assimilation of a lifetime of rich experience, the 16 canvases that make up Beyond Words at Sullivan Goss speak volumes about the fullness of the years Wosene Worke Kosrof has lived. From his birth in 1950 and early years in Ethiopia, to his immigration to the United States in 1978, to his relocation to California in 1991, Kosrof has traveled, savoring experiences, and exploring new worlds as they opened to him.
In her newest body of work, Angela Perko continues to weave mytho-historical themes and iconography together with brilliant color and intricate design.
The artist’s recurring interest in how women are represented is rendered especially vivid in 10-by-10 inch oil paintings showcasing a female fertility figure from a different historical culture. A few of these are from the ancient Mexican village of Tlatilco (1200 to 200 BC), which means “The Place of Hidden Things.” And that’s the title of Ms. Perko’s ninth exhibition on view through Sept. 26 at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery.
Art’s responsibility has always been to interpret experiences during trying times; it’s a worthy vessel for our collective remembrances, as well as our trauma. Could there be a more prescient and urgent display of artistic expression in Santa Barbara than Angela Perko’s current show at Sullivan Goss Gallery, The Place of Hidden Things? I doubt it.
Angela Perko is fascinated by precious objects, and her recent series of paintings focuses on ancient female fertility figures. Perko’s paintings are always packed with quiet symbolism and deep layers of meaning; and while her new works acknowledge that women have been constantly reproduced as objects over time—from Paleolithic venus figurines to plastic Barbie dolls—the females showcased here were revered as powerful fertility symbols.
“Potluck” is the unusual name Leslie Lewis Sigler has chosen for her second solo exhibition that opened Friday at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, in downtown Santa Barbara.
Unusual because it features the contemporary artist’s signature portraits of heirloom silverware instead of casserole dishes overflowing with comfort food.
“Potluck is a celebration of life. The work is rooted in family and connecting to one another,” Ms. Sigler told the News-Press. “This body of work grew out of my longing to gather with friends and family during the dark, isolated days of the pandemic. Historically, my portraits have been singular objects, pictured and posed like an old master’s portrait. When I experimented with pairing the objects together and joining them in groups, the compositions began to symbolize joyful gatherings around crowded tables.
Potluck, paintings by Leslie Lewis Sigler, opens July 1 at Sullivan Goss: “This exhibition will feature the artist’s signature portraits of heirloom silverware—giving personality and identity to otherwise inanimate objects with refined detail. The majority of this body of work deviates from the iconic solo portraits that were so prominently featured in previous exhibitions, and encompasses instead group portraits that speak to gatherings of friends and families.”
As a realist painter, Patricia Chidlaw has long been attracted to reflection in water.
The well-known Santa Barbara artist is known for, among other things, her paintings of urban and urban-adjacent landscapes at twilight and dawn, often incorporating the changes of light reflected in either a puddle, a river or a swimming pool.
Over the course of her decades-long career, she has made paintings of neon lights, street lights and both sun and moonlight reflected in water.
For her current exhibition, “The Pool Show,” at the Sullivan Goss Gallery through July 25, Ms. Chidlaw decided to explicitly showcase the ever-changing reflections that occur in swimming pools at all times of the day.
If ever a landscape were a living, breathing thing, it's under Phoebe Brunner's brush. Plants and flowers; clouds, fog and mist; open plains, mountains and shorelines – all transformed by thick layers of light-filtered paint that seem to pulse with an inner radiance.
How does anyone make serious art in Santa Barbara?
The sun, the ocean, the beautiful people, the fresh produce … it’s a good-time kinda place, according to Nathan Vonk, owner of Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery.
“In a locally notorious essay from 2000, famed critic and teacher Dave Hickey called Santa Barbara, ‘a hellish paradise … where one doesn’t really need art … if one is comfy there.’ His essay is both hilarious and galling and not entirely incorrect. But there are now and always have been very serious artists in this small, seaside hamlet,” said Mr. Vonk.
“Leon Dabo: En France Encore,” a show timed to coincide with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s major Van Gogh-themed exhibition, is on view through March 28 at Sullivan Goss Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St.
“Leon Dabo was a French-born American artist who became well known before the first World War as a tonalist painter,” said Nathan Vonk, owner of the Sullivan Goss Gallery. “As one of the organizers of the 1913 Armory show in New York City, Mr. Dabo played a key role in introducing impressionism, post-impressionism and modernism to an American audience.
“After his time spent in Europe as an intelligence officer during the first World War, his work took a dramatic turn toward post-impressionism with pieces that show the obvious influence of Van Gogh’s work, an aesthetic lineage that only became stronger after the second World War.”
LEON DABO (1864-1960) was a French-born American painter who had an extraordinarily long career, from the early 1890s through 1954. His father, Igance Schott de Dabo was a mural painter and stained-glass artist who emigrated with his family to escape political unrest in France, settling in Detroit. Leon Dabo became a muralist, too, working on ecclesiastical and other public commissions under the direction of John La Farge in New York. In the first years of the 20th century, Dabo gained recognition as a painter, primarily of landscapes in the Tonalist style.
REGULAR SULLIVAN GOSS GALLERY OBSERVERS and art-watchers will know something of the Frenchman-in-New-York artist Leon Dabo. The gallery, having acquired the artist's estate eleven years ago under the aegis of original owner Frank Goss, has presented the quietly majestic art of Dabo (1864-1960) in group shows and a few solo exhibitions with catalogues in tow.
JUST IN TIME FOR A NEW YEAR, a new hope and a harbinger of wished-for continuity, Sullivan Goss kicks off with a main gallery exhibition looking both inward and out. As suggested by its title, Juxtaposed: The Art of Curation in which the very art of curation is central to its end effect. As art presentation dictates, guiding curatorial forces follow a creative collective heart, behind the art on the walls, but this time in a self-conscious way.
The Anapamu Street facade of Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, looks friendly with a dash of imposing. As the city’s premier gallery, its status complements the Santa Barbara Museum of Art across the street. Established artists such as Hank Pitcher, Nicole Strasburg, John Nava, and Angela Perko have been with the gallery for several decades. Individual works on display are priced as high as five or six figures. Its archival holdings stretch into the 19th century, and the gallery has published handsome scholarly monographs on master artists including Ray Strong. Leon Dabo, and Lockwood de Forest. Sullivan Goss looks like a pillar of the art establishment because it is one.
This accumulated prestige makes the story of the gallery’s breakout star of the moment that much more interesting. Inga Guzyte, a 37-year-old immigrant from Lithuania by way of Germany, just sold out her solo show Young Sparrows.
Artist Inga Guzyte painted the works in “Young Sparrows,” her solo exhibition. The term “Young Sparrows” refers to daughters. Among them are Amanda Gorman, Momiji Nishiya, Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai and Millie Bobby Brown.
From performance artists to politicians, from activists to musicians, Inga Guzyte created a large series of portraits of women she admired for her first solo exhibition at Sullivan Goss-An American Gallery in 2019.
For the current exhibition on view through Dec. 27, she has focused on the idea of younger women.
Once a longtime backdrop to a part Coast Village Road shopping history, a Hank Pitcher canvas has been rediscovered, 30 years after it was hidden from the public. Out of sight, out of mind, this Pitcher work was thought lost.
Sullivan Goss is always one of our favorite places during the First Thursday art walk. They have always featured top quality modern art, but even more than in the past they are also featuring some older pieces. Here are a few samples.
Many local residents divide their time between Santa Barbara and their second homes in other cities strewn across the continent. As summer turns to fall, they begin to think about returning to the warmer weather and slower pace of life that Santa Barbara offers.
“California on My Mind,” the current exhibition at Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery, calls them to do just that.
Historic and contemporary paintings, drawings and prints by artists from Southern California highlight the region’s history and mythology.
AS THE ARTS & CULTURE SEASON HEATS UP, galleries and museums are stepping up to add their own flair and excitement to the mix. As one of Santa Barbara’s finest galleries, Sullivan Goss: An American Gallery is leading the way with several new exhibitions by local favorites, including Nathan Huff: Almost Here, and the second solo exhibition by Inga Guzyte: Young Sparrows.