R.I.P Edward Cella Art + Architecture?

After a short month it seems as though First Thursday has come upon us again incredibly quickly. This month brings with it some very unfortunate news: Edward Cella is packing up his gallery and moving it to LA. This will be your last chance to check out what has been one of my personal favorite galleries month after month. The art shown in that gallery was almost always interesting, and intellectual, not to mention beautiful. But it is not simply a sign of our economic times that this gallery cannot stay open in Santa Barbara; it is also evidence that, in general, the people in this town who can afford the art (of which there are many) lack the vision to invest in contemporary art. The reasons for this are many, and I won’t go into them here. But one important and detrimental effect of this conservatism of artistic taste is that it makes it incredibly hard for us to foster our own young and developing artists. And it is not because we have had any shortage of young talent in the passed few years–Tanner Goldbeck, Joe Shea, Scott Belcastro, Yosakay Yamamoto, just to name the few I am most familiar with. Realistically, the sheer size and proximity of LA means that a certain amount of emigration is inevitable. LA currently has what is arguably the most vibrant and important arts scene in this country. It is still, however, a very sad fact that Santa Barbara cannot support a single full-time gallery that would focus on this kind of contemporary art. Instead of exporting all of our talent to LA, we should be taking advantage of just how close we are to this culture by importing work from the LA scene.  I am sure that the resources are here, I am much less sure that those with the resources have the will to make it happen.

I guess the moral to this unexpectedly long rant is that those with the desire to help our local contemporary art scene and to see more new, progressive, or experiential art must take it upon themselves to do what they can. Buy this art when you can. And if you can’t afford to buy the art, then at least go to look at it, talk about it, and get the word out to others.

You can start tonight by heading out for First Thursday. If you haven’t yet been to see the ceramics at CAF, there is some really wonderful work there, especially the work of Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Anna Sew Hoy, and Kristen Morgin. The comic books of unfired clay by Kristen Morgin are nothing less than mind-blowing. While there don’t forget to check out Jennifer Nocon‘s felt installations, which were probably overlooked during the very well attended opening of the ceramics show.  CAF is also hosting a wide variety of very interesting talks this month so check out their schedule.

No matter where you go tonight, come back here to comment on what you saw.

The goal of this blog is create a space for local Santa Barbara artists and art lovers to highlight local art events, discuss the local art environment, and comment on the state of the contemporary art world more generally.  While there are a variety of distinct art communities in Santa Barbara, the focus of this blog will be the less well established artists who may come out of UCSB (particularly the Media Arts and Technology department), The Brooks Institute, and the not to be overlooked SBCC; or they may just be independent artists who call this place home.  I will also be focusing primarily on the visual arts, though performance art will not be off limits.

Scott Belcastro's Link and Gannon

I hope that this blog can become a place for people in Santa Barbara to come to find out what is happening, what should not be missed or what isn’t worth the price of admission.  There always seems to be a few incredibly energetic and motivated people out there that try to organize our underexposed and underground art, but it is still often too easy to miss. My first priority for this blog is to help them get the word out about when and where this art can be found.  Santa Barbara may be a small town but that doesn’t always mean that word of mouth will reach everybody.  By creating a single place on the web for local artists to let others know about their upcoming shows, or shows they think others should see, I hope this might help bring the community together to see what others are doing. When possible I’ll be posting interviews and/or asking local artist to make a post of their own to add another perspective and broaden the discussion.

The demographics of Santa Barbara, from the uber-wealthy art collectors up in the hills to the lowly artists who live in their studios in the Funk Zone, give this small town a relatively large variety of artistic tastes. In this way Santa Barbara is a bit of a microcosm of the art world at large, and because of this we can encounter many of the major issues and problems of the art world without leaving town.  As I stated above, this blog will focus mainly on the young up-and-comers, underground, and underexposed. But that is not to say that I will have nothing to say about the other end of the spectrum, since the two do not operate completely independently.

Finally, I would like this blog to be a place for open discussion about the bigger questions about art that are being struggled with today. Who decides if art is “good”? What role does academic or institutional art forces play in the creation and distribution of art? What does it mean to rebel against these forces? How is new technology being used in creative ways to make cutting-edge art? What does cutting-edge even mean? All of these questions and more will be topics of upcoming blogs, and I invite and hope for you comments to add to the discussion.