When the newly renovated Santa Barbara Museum of Art reopens to the public on Sunday, some of the changes will be easy to spot.
There’s a new grand staircase enticing visitors to the second floor. There’s a completely new gallery, which was carved out of wasted space.
Another change is less obvious to the naked eye, but crystal clear if you look for it: a new emphasis.
As the museum celebrates its 80th anniversary, this venerable institution is committing itself to multiculturalism.
wall #1), 1998, featuring flat panel monitors, DVD player, synchronizer and orange gels. (Contributed photo)
“To some degree, we’re reinventing ourselves,” said Larry Feinberg, the museum’s director and CEO. “From the very beginning, we’ve had a very diverse collection. That wasn’t always as clear as it should be.
“So we’re putting pre-Columbian pieces and African pieces as part of the mix, right in the front gallery. Also, as we have added to the collection, we’ve increasingly made it more diverse, adding works by African-American artists, contemporary artists from Asia, and contemporary Latin-American art.
“The museum’s mission is the serve the community — to enrich visitors’ lives and inspire them to be more creative. Through exposure to work from many peoples and cultures, we hope to educate, which breeds understanding and tolerance.”
Museum fans have been forced to cultivate tolerance over the 6-year renovation project, during which only certain galleries have remained open.
About 80 percent of the $50 million cost — nearly all of which has been raised, according to Feinberg — was for what he calls “unglamorous, critical things.”
“We needed a proper loading dock, and a new freight elevator,” he said. “We moved our art storage areas, which had been on a sub-basement level, which could be more vulnerable to flooding, to the ground floor.”
The museum grew in piecemeal fashion over the past eight decades, beginning with the old Post Office and periodically assimilating nearby buildings as it expanded.
Until this project, Feinberg said, no one had really examined the seismic underpinnings of the structure. When that evaluation was finally made, they were an unwelcome surprise.
“Because the P.O. survived the earthquake of 1925, we assumed it was pretty sturdy,” he said. “But we found a lot of structural problems. In addition, we discovered the McCormick wing, finished in 1942, was completely unreinforced masonry. It was a three-story-tall pile of bricks, ready to fall over (in a major earthquake).
“We talked to structural engineers and more or less had to rebuild it.”
The entry gallery, just off the reopened State Street entrance, has undergone the most obvious transformation. The balcony has been closed off, allowing for more space to hang paintings — a development chief curator Eik Kahng has taken full advantage of.
“We brought out a lot of pieces — some of the oldest works in the collection, which haven’t seen the light of day for decades,” Feinberg said.
“They range from 14th-century Italy all the way to the 20th century. There’s a very significant painting by a follower of Caravaggio. We still have the highlights of our Greco-Roman collection, but we’re trying to mix it up and show more diverse works. So there will be some African pieces in here as well.
“Our most important sculpture, the Lansdowne Hermes, is now placed at a height where the original would have been shown in antiquity — about six feet up. He comes from (the Roman emperor) Hadrian’s second-century villa at Tivoli. We needed to reinforce the floor to be able to place him on a heavy pedestal.”
Upstairs, the museum has converted a large attic into its first-ever gallery devoted to contemporary art.
“With that, we gained 2,000 square feet or so of gallery space,” Feinberg noted. “We’ve put more artwork on view than ever before.”
There are also now galleries devoted to photography and new media, respectively. In addition, visitors to the Davidson Gallery, which hosts the works-on-paper collection, will be able to view and curators do their work through large glass windows.
With all these changes, “there’s more of a sense of grandeur, of gravitas” in the renovated museum, Feinberg argues. “The space has been made more dynamic. There’s more light, more air, more sense of special flow.”
And speaking of flow, the renovation included installation of a state-of-the-art ventilation system — an important feature as the pandemic continues.
Feinberg said numerous precautions have been instituted to keep everyone safe: All staff and volunteers have been vaccinated, and all visitors will be required to wear masks. (He notes this is the same policy as the major New York City museums.)
In addition, the number of people allowed in the museum at any one time is limited to 200.
Museum officials are asking those who plan to come to Sunday’s opening — hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free — to register in advance at tickets.sbma.net. Visitors can also just show up, but there is a chance they’ll be asked to wait for a while until the crowd thins out.
The reopening exhibits, all of which are composed of works from the museum’s 25,000-piece collection, will be up through the end of the year, and a bit longer in some cases.
Things will then get rearranged early next year, in anticipation of its first big special exhibition, “Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources,” which will open Feb. 27 and run through May 22.
Tom Jacobs is a local freelance writer. Contact him at news@noozhawk.com.
