Happy New Year to one and all! It’s time for our first First Thursday of the new decade, and I’ve got a list of highlights to add to your tour tonight.

Artamo Gallery

Artamo is small and easy to miss, but it is Santa Barbara’s leading gallery for international abstract art. Unlike much of Santa Barbara, I am a huge fan of abstract art. Tonight Artamo has put together a group of small works specifically for those of us that do not have large pocketbooks. This might be a great opportunity for fans of abstract art to pick something up for yourself or a loved one, without having to mortgage  away your unborn children–always a plus!

SBMA

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art has extended one of the best shows that they have had there in a long time. If you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to check out “California Calling”, an exhibit that highlights the innovative, and  in-your-face art that has come out of California over the last sixty years, including iconic works by David Park, Sam Francis, and long-time UCSB professor Howard Warshaw.

Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative

The fledgling Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative will be having its second showing of 2-D and 3-D art at Casa de la Guerra. There will be live art making  and music to accompany the exhibit. Make sure and stop by and learn about the big plans that this collaborative has for the new year.

Casa Magazine

Casa Magazine‘s home base on Canon Perdido Street will host an exhibit by Beth Amine entitled Inner Worlds of Possibility: Alive and Visible. Amine will be exhibiting her handmade shrines and leading shrine-making activities. Casa will also have refreshments and tasty provisions for those of you who forgot to eat before hitting the street.

Contemporary Arts Forum

Finally, as mentioned in my last post, Ted Mills will be performing his second installment of The Amazing Animated Jukebox. The Amazing Animated Jukebox Vol. 2 screens videos from Coldplay, Beck, Radiohead, Menomena, N.A.S.A. featuring Kool Keith and Tom Waits, Death Cab for Cutie, Birdy Nam Nam, Lemon Jelly, Royksopp, Azeem, The New Pornographers, and many more. Don’t miss your fix of the latest wave in animated eye candy ranging from old-school 2-D line drawing to computer graphics and those that negotiate the subtle levels in between.

See you on the street!

It may be a bit chilly tonight, but don’t use this as an excuse to skip out on the opportunity to hit the street in search of great art. Below is my short list of spots that will be hosting the hip haps tonight.

The Granada will be hosting Karaoke Karoling tonight, letting visitors get into the holiday spirit with some seasonal favorites.I can only hope that it takes place on the stage and that it is as hilariously terrible as karaoke can be.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will also be open and is hosting “California Conversations” with Joe Goode and Joan Tanner at 5:30pm in the Mary Craig Auditorium. This is the last in the series of three conversations with artists featured in the wonderful California Calling exhibition. If you haven’t seen this two part exhibit, add it to your “must see” list tonight. It’s only up for a little while longer.

Local artists Erika Carter and Liz Brady have a show at the Frameworks and Caruso-Woods Gallery. Carter is a long time painter and gallery owner who specializes in small folkloric devotional paintings on tin or wood . Brady explores the different compositions of plant life under a microscope and unveils the diversity and beauty of these organic forms through her new  paintings. I love visiting this gallery, if for no other reason than it gives me the opportunity to wander around in the labyrinthine innards of  the El Paseo building.

At Caligreen the wonderful Andi Garcia has put together an intriguing  show of street art called “Concrete to Canvas”. The title says it all as graffiti artists will be putting their talents down on more traditional surfaces. Artists from all over the country will be represented and there will be live art and music created on the spot. Donations of warm coats and sweaters to be collected for Unity Shoppe  Live art piece will be auctioned off with proceeds to benefit Heart2Hand youth art scholarship.

The final spot I’d like to highlight is the Brooks Institute’s Gallery 27, which will have a juried show of student works. The exhibit consists mainly of fine art photography and many of the photographers will be there to discuss their work. This is a great spot to show and see art. It has a much more urban/industrial feel than anywhere else currently in Santa Barbara and while inside you could easily convince yourself you were in a larger, hipper artistic city.

I hope to see large crowds out on the street tonight. As always if you see anything that blows your mind, make sure to share it by posting your comments on the blog.

For those of you who feel that your life is suffering from a distinct lack of  $10 martinis, the solution to your problem can be found at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art tonight. This is the second of the museum’s summer “Nights” celebration, and tonight they’ve extended the event into the wee hours of the early evening and brought in a fancy DJ from LA’s KCRW by the name of Jason Bentley to help you get your groove on.  More exciting still, there will be a performance by modern dance/music group String Theory. But that is not all! Local bamboo design guru Gerard Minakawa and his Bamboo DNA troupe will be providing organic decoration to spruce up the place. Bamboo DNA has brought some jaw-dropping structures to Burning Man and has provided the centerpieces for the last two Coachella Music Festivals, amongst other things.

Bamboo DNA's Waves at Coachella 2008

This will be my first trip to the museum’s Nights celebration, so I don’t know exactly what to expect.  I will be incredibly surprised, however, if there isn’t a general abundance of swankiness to be found – a lot more swankiness than this poor blogger is used to.

For more information about the event or to buy tickets check out the SBMA’s “Nights” web page.

I hope to see you there.

Last Sunday I stopped by the SBMA to check out the new exhibit: Yinka Shonibare, MBE: A Flying Machine for Every Man, Woman and Child, and Other Astonishing Works. The exhibit is the first put together by the museum’s new curator of contemporary art, Julie Joyce. It was a bold choice for her inaugural effort. Shonibare’s work is hardly what one would think of as something that would be instantly adored by Santa Barbara’s artistically conservative museum patrons.  The majority of  Shonibare’s work in this exhibit consists of headless mannequins adorned in Victorian era clothes created from fabrics generally associated with African cultures. The point being that it makes a comment about the idealized Victorian lifestyle in contrast to the destructive and oppressive colonialism that existed concurrently. But regardless of whether you are able to make this connection, the works succeed on a very basic visual level: they are beautiful. The craftsmanship is impeccable, the fabrics are wonderful to look at and the poses of the mannequins genuinely made me laugh.

In an interview with Jan Garden Castro for Sculpture Magazine in 2006, Shonibare commented on his intentional, neatly headless creations, “…a lot of my work challenges the idea of hierarchy or aristocracy in some way.  During the French Revolution, the heads of the aristocrats were chopped off using the guillotine.  Basically it started as a joke, because I take working class fabrics from Africa and dress the aristocracy in those fabrics and then I take their heads off, but there’s no blood or violence.  It’s witty in a knowing sort of way.”

It is a wonderful show, and I was happy to see so many people in the museum to see the exhibit. When I heard about the show, I was quite skeptical about the reaction it would receive. Then a friend of mine who keeps his finger on the pulse of Santa Barbara’s art patrons said something that I found particularly telling: “It passes the Santa Barbara test. It doesn’t look like a four year old could do it.”

Show Ms. Joyce your support and make sure to check out this great show. Then come back here and let us know what you think.