Because 1st Thursday falls on New Years Day, Sullivan Goss Gallery in Santa Barbara will be hosting a reception for its three new exhibits, 5-8 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 3. The gallery will be closed New Years Day.
KICKING OFF 2026 WITH AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY AN INNOVATIVE ARTIST WHO WAS AHEAD OF HIS TIME, interested in science and yet deeply rooted in the quest to understand the human spirit, Sullivan Goss will host an opening reception for Oskar Fischinger: A Deeper Look on January 3rd from 5 to 8pm.
In spite of the dark and evil forces busily at work in the world (and the White House), cultural respite and festivity still comes home to roost for the holidays. That friendlier, “lightness of being” brand of spirit has landed in Sullivan Goss, which has been dubbed Santa Barbara’s premier art salon (okay, I said that, a long time ago. But it’s still true). ...
Deeper into the gallery compound, flowers cometh, in varying shades and contexts. Irresistible: Flowers & and Their Admirers, curated by Jeremy Tessmer, celebrates a timeless turf and genre, with contemporary twists attached.
Two exhibits of note have opened at Sullivan Goss: Paintings by Robin Gowen (including “Cloud Haze,” below), and The Fateful Eight, a group show of “heavy-hitting pieces by some of the gallery’s most coveted artists of past and present,” including Alex Rasmussen’s “‘Round Midnight” (further below).
It’s lucky number 13 for Robin Gowen, who is back at Sullivan Goss for her 13th solo show, opening with a reception on Thursday, August 7. Gowen has the distinction of being the first living artist that the gallery began representing more than 25 years ago and, as a note from Sullivan Goss stated, “She continues to wow us with her kaleidoscopic use of color, magnificent vistas, and quiet moments of the natural world.”
That show will be on view through September 22, along with “The Fateful Eight,” featuring work from Oskar Fischinger, Joseph Goldyne, Sidney Gordin, DJ Hall, Wosene Worke Kosrof, R. Kenton Nelson, Hank Pitcher, and Alex Rasmussen.
The legendary gardens of Ganna Walska’s Lotusland get the spotlight when Sullivan Goss Gallery presents a benefit exhibition, the Jardin Des Rêves, or Garden of Dreams, on view from June 27 to July 28. The exhibition features “dreamy” works from 31 local and regional artists inspired by their experiences in the legendary gardens in Montecito.
Some artists follow a purposefully wandering, evolving path, seeking out new expressive avenues as they go. Others find their groove and stick to it, honing and refining a particular, familiar subject or style. Santa Barbara painter Leslie Lewis Sigler belongs to the latter category. Over many years, in many exhibitions locally and beyond, she has become closely identified and respected for her super-realist paintings of silverware — heirlooms given their close-up — with mesmerizing optical effects and dazzling iridescent surfaces.
Words, and fragments thereof, have been sneaking onto local gallery walls of late. Earlier this year, a large and “wordy” exhibition at UCSB’s AD&A Museum filled walls and floors with Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language. One of the pieces in the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA was a Jenny Holzer, for whom texts have been a primary art material. Now, over at Sullivan Goss, here comes another plunge into the phenom of art involving texts, reconfigured meanings, letter-philia, with an aptly tangled, layered, and witty show title, TL;DR: TEXT / ART (Too Long; Didn’t Read / Too Long; Don’t Read).
••• Press release: Sullivan Goss has transformed “its front gallery in downtown Santa Barbara into a historic parlor filled with cherished works by Colin Campbell Cooper (1856-1937), Leon Dabo (1864-1960), and Lockwood De Forest (1850-1932). […]
Since I wrote a cover story about Hank Pitcher in 2017, one of the richest experiences of my life in Santa Barbara has unfolded — perhaps more satisfying than anything I’ve ever experienced during my tenure in our beloved city. I regularly show up to Hank’s studio to admire his work, but primarily to talk about art.
After four years, Sullivan Goss in Santa Barbara is displaying a new solo exhibit for well-known Santa Barbara artist Hank Pitcher, Feb. 28-April 21 at the gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara.
There will be an opening reception, 5-8 p.m. March 6 during 1st Thursday.
Twenty paintings — ranging in size from a suite of 10 small paintings made on the beach from direct observation, to six large studio paintings — will tell the story of the Pitcher’s last 18 months on the beaches of Montecito. But that is only part of the story.
As a preliminary window on the grand 40th annual event, the ceremonial unveiling of plans — and this year’s official poster image — settled into the humbler but fitting venue of the prominent Sullivan Goss Gallery last week, when Executive Director Roger Durling led a gathering of press and other parties through a brief overview of what’s to come. The gallery setting was ideal, as the 2025 poster, a mythologically tinged and pink-hued image by well-established artist Mary Heebner, was doubly unveiled — both the poster form and its original collage piece currently hung on the gallery wall.
Nathan Vonk invites me into his home at the corner of a busy intersection in downtown Santa Barbara. The house was built 100 years ago. A sense of history is felt in its interior as well, with the walls covered with significant works of art that illustrate Vonk’s eight-year tenure as owner of the gallery Sullivan Goss — an art institution at the heart of our city. I see works by his favorite painters who have now become not only artists he represents but also good friends.
The ‘PST Art: Art & Science Collide’ exhibition features Larry Bell, Fred Eversley, Claire Falkenstein, Oskar Fischinger, Man Ray and Robert Irwin, among others. Sections of the show may focus on math and what some may consider dry subjects, but the through-line is on process: how artists make interesting art.
LAST month I wrote about Storm King, the art center in the Hudson Valley in New York dedicated to outdoor sculpture. I loved it. I realized then that I hadn’t profiled a living, breathing, working sculptor, so today I’ll write about Alex Rasmussen, a Santa Barbara sculptor who works in aluminum.
... Rasmussen is a case study in inventive, contemporary sculpture. He sculpts not stone or wood or plaster or wax or bronze or concrete but aluminum, and he knows it well.
Light Landing, a painting by Maria Rendón, whose work is on view through April 22 at Sullivan Goss, in Santa Barbara, California.
© The artist. Courtesy Sullivan Goss, Santa Barbara, California
Santa Barbara, with fewer than 90,000 people, barely makes it into California’s 100 largest cities. But this coastal enclave has an outsize role in the state’s history.
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...[H]ead a couple blocks north on Anacapa Street to Sullivan Goss, a private three-room gallery around the corner from the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, where pieces can cost as much as a home down payment and the collection leans heavily on evocative portrayals of the American West. Catch the current exhibition by the Santa Barbara-based artist Robin Gowen, called “Last Shadow & First Light” (through July 24), of large-format paintings of Central California’s distinctive landscapes.
Montecito dynamic duo Bill and Sandi Nicholson co-hosted a boffo bash at the Sullivan Goss Gallery for a new feature documentary, Helen Believe, which debuted at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.