UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum will reopen in September with four new exhibitions that explore architecture greats, problematic photographs and specially commissioned works.
All exhibits will open to the public Sept. 12 and remain on view throughout fall quarter, and an opening reception for all will take place Sept. 25 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
The artist-in-residence exhibition will be open for the entire school year.
Walter S. White: Inventions in Midcentury Architecture
UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum is pleased to present the first exhibition to examine the work of an ingenious inventor, builder and architect, Walter S. White (1917-2002).
White’s designs for the Coachella Valley desert cities of Palm Desert, Indio, La Quinta and Palm Springs in the 1940s and ’50s addressed the extreme climate with thrilling, expressionistic forms that took inspiration from the natural landscape, while proposing new, ecologically sensitive and inexpensive construction methods.
White’s inventive roof designs — he received a patent for his all-steel hypar roof and wood roof construction methods — make his desert projects especially distinctive. His roofs swoop and curve to match the forms of the mountains in the distance, while providing protection for their inhabitants.
White believed that good architecture was for everyone. His inventive series of simple, do-it-yourself cottages and cabins were widely published as low cost houses and vacation cabins.
Sears, Roebuck & Company promoted one of White’s cabin models, which could be assembled by the owner with a small, moderately skilled crew of people and outfitted with furnishings from Sears.
Beginning in the 1960s, White designed for the high plateau and mountains of Colorado Springs, where he built private residences for the Kissing Camels Estate, among other projects.
He also established a reputation for his passive solar energy designs. Continuing his innovative designs with nature, White created a solar window wall (for which he received another patent) to both capture the warmth and light of the sun in winter and keep buildings cool in summer.
The exhibit curated by History of Art Professor Volker Welter.
Talking Back: New Acquisitions
An exhibition of recent acquisitions by the AD&A Museum explores the different narratives that works of art and architecture reveal about influences, biography, materials, place and technical advancements. Every new acquisition has a story to tell and talks back to all the other objects and collections in the museum.
Included in this glimpse of our collecting priorities is work by artists, architects, furniture makers and landscape designers, including William R. Current, Amy Cutler, Lockwood de Forest, Jr., James DeLong, Tom Friedman, Jane Hammond, Bernard Judge, Stephen Kanner, Allyn E. Morris, John Nava, Nancy Power and Andy Warhol, among others.
Women are Beautiful
This exhibition considers photographs taken by Garry Winogrand from his suite of prints, “Women are Beautiful,” 1975.
The exhibition will address the problematic nature of the images, which can be viewed as a joyous celebration of women and their changing role in society or as examples of Winogrand’s exploitive male gaze.
Using Winogrand’s own comments as well as historical research regarding contemporaneous societal changes, the exhibition presents a nuanced interpretation of these problematic photographs.
The exhibit is curated by History of Art student, Xochitl Duenas ’15.
Artist-in-Residence: Stephen Westfall
New York-based artist Stephen Westfall is the museum’s 2015 artist-in-residence. Westfall has been commissioned to execute a wall painting in the Museum’s soaring Nachman Gallery.
Westfall’s massive painting will cover all four walls and include a series of multicolored diamonds, clustered together and floating individually.
His composition takes into account the fluctuations between figure and ground; the color palette of signs and painterly influences including, Picasso’s harlequins, Matisse’s dancing figures and Renaissance paintings.
As artist-in-residence at UCSB, Westfall will install his painting Sept. 12–25, 2015 with the assistance of five undergraduate art students.
The installation will be open to the public, allowing visitors to learn more about the work and process directly from the artists.
The completed installation will open Sept. 25 with a reception and remain on view through May 2016.
This exhibition is part of the AD&A Museum’s ongoing “Artist-in-Residence” series which invites artists to make new work in direct relation to the Museum, campus and region and to engage students in production, installation and/or programming.
— Lety Garcia is the outreach coordinator for the Art, Design & Architecture Museum.