Please note that the UAM will be closed for installation May 12 - 20, 2008. The opening reception will take place Tuesday may 20, 5:00-7:00 PM

UCSB Masters of Fine Arts Exhibition May 21, 2008 to May 30, 2008
May 21 - May 30, 2008
Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 20, 5:00-7:00 PM
University Art Museum, UCSB

Wiley Wallace

Alana Carso

Joe Reihsen

Kirsten Pisto

Danielle Hatch

William Fenn

Anna Knos

 

Alexios Monopolis

The University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara is please to present MFA08, the culminating thesis projects of the Masters of Fine Arts candidates from the Department of Art.  Things aren’t always as they seem in the work of these eight artists: Alana Rose Carso, William Fenn, Danielle Hatch, Anna Knos, Alexios Nicolaos Monopolis, Kirsten M. Pisto, Joe Reihsen, and Wiley Wallace. Employing a variety of media, these artists upend expectations as they question nature and culture, combine painting and sculpture, and defy easy classification. Drawing from nature, Alana Carso creates raucous assemblages of organic materials and craft supplies. Kirsten Pisto simultaneously reference lush landscapes and storybook fauna in her paintings and constructions. In a documentary style film, Alexios Monopolis considers the arguments for a “natural” coastline in Goleta. William Fenn’s photographs reveal their construction as they reference filmic tropes from the 1950s. Wiley Wallace’s paintings recall the casual informality of family snapshots, distorted through the lens of memory. Danielle Hatch’s outsized sculpture offers shelter with a sinister edge. Anna Knos’ interactive environment moves painting strategies into the digital dimension. Conversely, Joseph Reihsen’s painted abstractions suggest digital compositions. 

At UC Santa Barbara, the Department of Art is committed to creative research that investigates the relationship between inquiry and practice.  The two-year graduate program encourages individual development within an interdisciplinary context. The University Art Museum presents the work of these graduate students amid a schedule of internationally known artists, reflecting its mission to deepen the understanding of visual culture from the past as well as the present

Lasting Impressions was organized by the University Art Museum and the Department of Art, UC Santa Barbara. The accompanying publication was made possible through the generous support of Mrs. Julie Anne and Mr. David Reed Broida.

.UCSB Art Studio Undergraduate Exhibition June 11, 2008 to June 14, 2008
June 11-14, 2008
Opening Reception: Wednesday, June 11, 5:00-7:00 PM
University Art Museum, UCSB
This popular annual exhibition of selected works by students in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara will showcase artworks in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography, and video.

A Beautiful Nothing: The Architecture of Edward A. Killingsworth
July 16, 2008 to October 12, 2008

Saturday July 19, 2007, University Art Museum
Lecture on Edward A. Killingsworth
with curators Jennifer M. Volland & Cara Mullio
2:00 - 3:00 pm
Followed by an Opening Reception
3:00 - 5:00 pm

Case Study House #25 for Ed Frank
© J. Paul Getty Trust. Photograph by Julius Shulman.

A Beautiful Nothing: The Architecture of Edward A. Killingsworth  is the first major presentation of the designs of the Southern California architect, Edward Abel Killingsworth (1917-2004), who achieved international prominence during the 1960s with his signature light-weight wooden post-and-lintel residences and commercial buildings. His innovative designs for John Entenza’s Case Study House program, coupled with his prolific output of hotels and resorts for industry notables such as Hilton and Marriot, left indelible marks on the regional and global landscapes. In turn, these timeless and poetic expressions of Killingsworth’s creativity continue to quietly influence and impact future generations of architects.  

This exhibition will feature fourteen of Killingsworth’s most provocative unrealized projects, set amid a photographic timeline which will mark his pivotal built and destroyed works. The featured selections inspired Killingsworth’s philosophical and material ideas. In fact, each project directly relates to a higher profile, realized work. Killingsworth stated, “Every work is a collection and a sorting out of a variety of influences and circumstances that swirl around the process called design.”

Killingsworth’s output will be documented through original drawings, architectural models, photographs by internationally-noted California photographers including Julius Shulman and Marvin Rand, and conceptual sketches drawn from the University Art Museum’s Architecture & Design Collection. Also within the exhibition will be a recreation of the reception area in Killingsworth’s award-winning 1955 Long Beach office incorporating his original custom designed furniture.

In 2004, Killingsworth used the phrase “beautiful nothing” to describe the grace, lightness, and weightless arrangement of his own work. Here, Killingsworth’s words assume dual meaning. Not only do they suggest the ethereal physical qualities of many of his buildings, but also they speak to the scarce remnants of his unrealized works, whose only record exists on paper.

A Beautiful Nothing affords the viewer an opportunity to see the fragile threads that significantly contributed to and provided the framework for, Killingsworth’s spectacular and prolific career. These projects show the versatility and breadth of Killingsworth’s work in terms of typology and material application, granting unprecedented access to one of the most under-acknowledged, yet influential, figures in the history of architecture.

A Beautiful Nothing: The Architecture of Edward A. Killingsworth was organized by Jennifer M. Volland and Cara Mullio for the University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara. Generous support for the exhibition and publication was provided by the Challenge Fund.

Vanishing Los Angeles: The Photography of Mary Bowling
July 16 – October 12, 2008

Mary Bowling (1917-1995)
View of Puyfourcat Building with Electric Streetcar (undated)
University Art Museum, UC Santa Barbara

Photographs Capture the City’s Transformation

Vanishing Los Angeles: The Photography of Mary Bowling features more than 40 color and black-and-white images of the city from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. Lauded in her time, Mary Bowling (1917-1995), a Korean-American artist, received the “Los Angeles Times Woman of the Year Award” in 1957. Today her rarely seen photographs are striking for their critical and candid assessment of the dramatic architectural transformation of Bunker Hill and downtown Los Angeles. Bowling’s images trace the changes in the decaying downtown community from its adobe roots to the high-density urban core it has become. Bowling investigated the changes in Los Angeles through photographs that subtly question the nature of progress and the impact of modernization.

Bowling’s consideration of Bunker Hill and other parts of downtown Los Angeles demonstrate her interest in not only the buildings but also the people who inhabited the place before its demolition. The show addresses five themes in relation to the process of change that occurred at Bunker Hill and more widely in Los Angeles during this time period: passage, reflection, drama, decay, and nostalgia.  Passage explores the impact of time in the vestiges of human activity on Bunker Hill, tracing the movement of people and things in space. Reflection calls attention to Bowling’s work as an act of interpretation; through her photographs, she carefully selected a particular embodiment of Bunker Hill for her audience to contemplate. Drama emphasizes how these photographs are imbued with feeling and how they reflect moods and conflicts. The photographs make visible the disappearance of Bunker Hill by displaying its state of ruin and its destruction, or decay. Finally, the theme of nostalgia evokes a sentimental longing for Los Angeles’s fleeting architectural past, stressing the ephemeral nature of a vanishing community.

Mary Bowling, née Mary Rita Chang, was born in Santa Barbara and raised in El Paso, Texas. She earned a Master of Science degree from the University of Southern California in 1936 and completed graduate work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena before moving to New York to pursue a career in industrial design. While in New York Bowling worked for the noted designer Raymond Loewy (1893-1986) and studied painting with the artist Cameron Booth (1892-1980) at the Art Students’ League. She returned to Los Angeles where she taught industrial design at the Chouinard Art Institute, known today as the California Institute of the Arts. As an artist she worked in a variety of media including but not limited to photography, stained glass and painting; today she is most widely known for her mural work in intarsia.

The exhibited photographs are drawn primarily from the holdings of the University Art Museum’s lauded Architecture & Design Collection. The exhibition was organized by Curatorial Intern Jennifer R. Hammerschmidt, a doctoral candidate in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara.