SANTA BARBARA, CALIF.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art announced the opening of two significant exhibitions, Friends and Lovers (through March 2, 2025) and Accretion: Works by Latin American Women (through April 13, 2025). Both exhibitions delve into themes of identity, resilience, and cultural expression through the diverse work of contemporary artists, offering audiences an immersive journey into the intersections of friendship, family, immigration, and self-discovery.
These two exhibitions, as well as a public opening event co-organized with the Pacific Pride Foundation of Santa Barbara, signal SBMA’s commitment to equity and community engagement. The Museum is also offering title wall and label information for these two exhibitions in the galleries in both English and Spanish as part of its ongoing focus on accessibility and inclusion.
Friends and Lovers
On view in the Museum’s Loeb Family Gallery, Friends and Lovers explores how LGBTQ+ individuals have forged connections, built alternative families, and sought solidarity in their communities amidst societal pressures. The exhibition, which draws on works from SBMA’s collection and loans, features a wide range of artistic mediums that capture the intimacy, challenges, and triumphs of the LGBTQ+ experience. The show includes a variety of mediums and approaches including film, painting, sculpture, collage, and photography.
One of the exhibition’s central works is Joey Terrill’s Still-Life with Triumeq and Wrapped Candies that remind me of Félix González-Torres (2023) (above). Terrill incorporates symbols of his Chicano heritage and his HIV+ activism in this still life, including a serape, an allusion to his Mexican immigrant roots, and Triumeq, an expensive, and too often out-of-reach HIV treatment because of its exorbitant price. The candies affixed to the painting surface reference an artwork by Félix González Torres in which a pile of wrapped candies act as memento for his deceased partner, Ross Laycock, both of whom died of HIV related causes in the 1990s.
Another featured artist, Pui Tiffany Chow (周佩璇), challenges classical depictions of women in her painting Is It Inside, Is It Outside (2020). She recently shared, "The painting is a feminist and queer reinterpretation of the European canon of female nudes.” Chow portrays female nudes by male European artists, including Jacopo Pontormo, Antonio Canova, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and turns them inside out by reinterpreting them from the perspective of women looking at and desiring other women. Chow, an immigrant from Hong Kong now based in Los Angeles, incorporates elements of Chinese painting to highlight negative space as active and significant.
A highlight of the exhibition is Edie Fake’s Suasion (2024), a vividly colored, highly detailed work that blends simplified forms with elements inspired by tarot cards and the Swiss mystic Emma Kunz. In Suasion, a central wheel—possibly a color or Ferris wheel—rotates, while flowers, leaves, and water drops evoke a sense of change. Fake has said, "My art tries to grapple with paradoxes and visualizing ‘impossible’ or ‘contradictory’ structures and states of being, much of which comes from trans experience in a culture shaped by binary assumptions.”
Other artists featured in this exhibition include Alex Foxton, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Chiffon Thomas, Narsiso Martinez, Nell Campbell, Gerald Incandela, T.J. Wilcox, and Félix González-Torres.
Accretion: Works by Latin American Women
In SBMA’s Preston Morton Gallery is Accretion: Works by Latin American Women. Like the pearl that forms from the accretion of materials over time, the works in this exhibition contain the aggregated experiences of the artists—women living and working in the United States but with roots in Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. However, unlike a pearl, their layers— comprised of earth, ceramic tiles, paint, photographs, stories, art history, and the artists’ own lives as material—neither are smooth nor conceal themselves. Weaving a rich tapestry of diverse perspectives, Accretion’s expressions of family bonds, immigration, labor and self-discovery draw attention to the intersected cultures, temporalities and histories that constitute the layers of being.
One standout piece is Patricia Iglesias Peco’s Lavinia Mariposa (2024) (above). In this work, Peco draws inspiration from the 1999 novel Reina Amelia by Marosa di Giorgio (Uruguayan, 1932 – 2004). The painting's title references the novel's mystical, enigmatic figure Lavinia, who is given the opportunity to work as a butterfly in a garden. The artist explains, “Lavinia is ethereal therefore my palette is softer and transparent. On the opposite side, there is the figure of Bromelia, who acts as a sort of oracle for the women in the book. The gestures and colors are much stronger and are a way to create tension.
Ultimately, it is the color that is guiding the shape throughout my work and it is in that visceral way of working that I find a connection with di Giorgio.”
Allegra Pacheco’s Untitled (Vessel with Glyphs) (2024) appears as a long-lost artifact, untouched for centuries. Its handmade form, glazed with copper and organic minerals, mimics the encrustations of seashells and sediment, referencing the passage of time. Carved into the surface are gladiator-like figures, which emulate the drill stances found in instructional manuals on boxing form and combinations. “Whether through fame, reputation, or the creation of enduring objects and legacies, individuals throughout history have sought to leave a mark on the world that outlasts their physical existence,” the artist explains, “Moreover, the flow state experienced in both craftsmanship and the art of fighting can elevate us beyond our humanity, momentarily breaking the bonds of time.”
In Jay Lynn Gomez’s Nightsweeper (2019), a silhouette is thrown into relief by a storefront's brightnessa partial example of chiaroscuro. The sweeper is suggested through swift brushwork similar to that of painters J.M.W. Turner (English, 17751851) and Eugène Delacroix (French, 17981863). The chosen canvashumble cardboardreflects the Chicana/a sensibility rasquachismo, which the artist describes as "making things with what you have." Despite the labor represented, this painting is not about work but about the person behind the workthe individuals we encounter every day, whose output we enjoy but who often are unrecognized. “As a Trans Latina daughter of Mexican immigrants who have now become U.S. citizens," Gomez explains, "the intersectional issues inherent to my work address notions of ephemerality, classist and racial divides, and other social inequalities."
This exhibition also includes works by artists Carlee Fernández, Isabel Barbuzza, Estefania Ajcip, Ilana Savdie, Diana Yesenia Alvarado, Evelyn Quijas Godínez, Deanna Barahona, Jackie Amézquita, Harmonia Rosales, and Clare Rojas.
