Since first opening its doors in 1941, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) has been a platform for contemporary artists.

With artworks dating from 1965 to 2023, SBMA’s newest exhibit, titled “In the Making,” offers an expansive take on an evolving collection and illustrates the impossible task of pinning down the contemporary, which is never still, the museum said.

Cutting across seven decades, “In the Making” mixes artists rarely seen together and reveals their shared preoccupations with optical effects, fantastic otherworldly landscapes, allegory and history to unlock national and ethnic identities, abstract painting’s expressive power, and the aesthetic appeal of mathematical graphs and constructions.

Artworks from 50 years ago that can no longer be called contemporary sit alongside those from the 2020s.

One thread that links artists in this show is a shared interest in optics and optical effects, whether the iridescent luminosity of Gisela Colon’s “Skewed Square “(Phosphorus) (2022), or the eye-twisting moire effect in Eduardo MacIntyre’s painting “Tramas sobre negro” (1965), or Jesús Rafael Soto’s untitled mobile sculpture from 1970.

Garth Weiser’s huge blue painting “Trends and Predictions for the Year” (2012) conjures these same dizzying effects by removing layers of paint.

The exhibit’s landscapes seem to arise out of a careful rendering of parts of the natural world with their beautifully crafted details, but all have an element of reality stretching fiction if not outright fantasy.

For example, Mimi Lauter gives us a lush and dense garden, while Whitney Bedford’s florescent colors seem to be out of a feverish dream.

Assemblage is another thread that binds “In the Making” together.

Daniel Lind-Ramos uses found objects sourced from his Afro-Carribean community in Puerto Rico to build “Figura Emisaria” (2020), a conduit for communication to another realm.

In a work from 1967, Sidney Gordin uses cutout pieces of painted wood to make what feels like an abstract painting that has been pulled into the third dimension.

The questions of national identity and history form yet another topic with which the artists grapple.

In “Agua bendita” (2000) artist Rafael Perea de la Cabada of Mexico uses a Mexican flag and Coca-Cola bottles to satirize the media portrayals of Vicente Fox, the former Mexican president. Vian Sora’s haunting landscape alludes to the deserts and oases of Iraq, where she was born.

Finally, York Chang and Jenny Holzer combine words and images, and both work with the captions, titles, and word tags that are ubiquitous in a media-saturated environment.

Chang takes printed newspapers and partially covers titles and photographs to block viewers’ ability to read them, making them paradoxical and mysterious. Holzer slaps an ominous warning on a anonymous granite bench turning it into a tombstone.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is at 1130 State St. Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, and 5-8 p.m. on 1^st Thursdays.