SANTA BARBARA CA.- The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is presenting Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms, a compelling convergence of quilts, textiles, paintings, and sculptures.
On view in the Von Romberg and Emmons Galleries from February 22 through August 30, 2026, the exhibition explores “remixing” as a visual and conceptual strategy, blurring the lines between eras, genres, and cultures.
Remixed: Entwined Histories and New Forms features works by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Carla Edwards, Jeffrey Gibson, Tamara Gonzales, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Basil Kincaid, Maia Ruth Lee, Candice Lin, Yassi Mazandi, Adia Millett, Wendy Red Star, Jeffrey Sincich, Shinique Smith, Michael C. Thorpe, and Ben Venom.
Remixing transforms the familiar into something new. In the recording studio, a music producer layers tracks, shifts tempos, and samples old melodies, creating a fresh soundscape with the echoes of the past. Remixed explores this sonic alchemy through visual art that “remixes” both physical objects and immaterial legacies.
The exhibition features a diverse roster of artists who do not simply use materials; they listen to them, speaking with, not for, across time and space. Here, materials are conduits for spirit, memory, and history. Basil Kincaid deconstructs and reassembles lived-in fabrics into an ethereal dreamscape, where pink skies and purple mountains host haloed, spiritual entities.
“In this kind of quilting,” Kincaid explains, “you take elements with memory content from the people you love; put your own energy and love and presence into it; and then your loved ones wrap themselves in it.”
Porfirio Gutiérrez captures nature’s seasonal voice through pomegranates, distilling its temperamental conditions, its weather, the nutrients in the land through color. But, moreover, it is a pigment of layered history. Introduced by Spanish colonizers, pomegranates were adapted by the Zapotec people, transforming the non-native fruit into a traditional material for dye.
Sabrina Gschwandtner sews together film strips featuring Lotte Reiniger’s innovative animated film, Cinderella (1922), revealing the shared histories of cinema, sewing, and the marginalized labor of women in the early film industry.
Just as a musical remix blurs the lines between eras and genres, these visual remixes challenge divisions of media, cultural gaps, hierarchies of art, and time. Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola “paints” with a swarm of stretched, stitched durags —their sheen, tone, and elasticity expressing the line, form, color, and texture of formalist painting.
Conversely, Adia Millet “quilts” with paint, using syncopated, fragmented yet cohesive arrangements of color—an homage to the quilts of Gee’s Bend, an active quilting collective of African American women dating back to the late 19th century.
Jeffrey Gibson weaves together into unexpected cohesion the seemingly disparate: the neon geometry of the techno music scene and indigenous craftsmanship. Inspired by the modern young Powwow dancers who use artificial and fluorescent dyes in their regalia, Gibson counters the historic image of Indigenous stoicism with bold, visual presence.
Like jazz virtuosos improvising upon a classical standard, the artists of Remixed inhabit tradition to radically reimagine it. Through memory-laden materials, they reveal that tradition is neither static nor fixed. It is a living current, pulsing with the insistent collective energy of a bassline—its drift shifted by the remix.
