The 2027 Santa Barbara County High School Architectural Design Competition will be held on Tuesday, March 2nd at Santa Barbara City College and Allan Hancock College. Twelve finalists will compete in a Juried Review on March 6th at Elverhoj Museum in Solvang.
Sunday, November 15, 2026, 1-3 p.m. at the Acheson House Gallery. Featuring an exhibition of drawings from 2026 sketch session at Santa Barbara Riviera Campus.
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Wednesday, October 28, 2026, 5 – 7 p.m., The Carousel House at Chase Palm Park. Attention all AFSB Volunteers & Donors! Please join us for a party in your honor. Complimentary refreshments will be served. Partners, family members and well behaved pets are welcome to attend! Please RSVP to info@afsb.org by October 26th.
Thu Feb 12, 2026
Spring 2026 Lecture Series
Register for this event here. (Suggested donation $20).
Being keenly aware of Santa Barbara’s built environment, especially the unique expression of each structure, is like unraveling a mysterious treasure hunt or jigsaw puzzle. Santa Barbara’s story is in large part told by uncovering the fascinating details of each structure and home that forms the city’s neighborhoods and overall character. Knowing your home’s history can even help attract prospective buyers and make your house stand out.
From reviewing old phonebooks, maps and building permits, to exploring genealogy websites, local historian, Betsy Green, will share “tips and tricks” for becoming your own house detective.
“There’s more and more information available online all the time – it’s a great time to be a home history hunter!” says Betsy.
Audience members are invited to bring questions about their home for Betsy to tackle in real time. Betsy will also share links to websites with useful information.
Betsy J. Green is a writer, local history aficionado, and author of the Great House Detective column for the Santa Barbara Independent.
Spring 2026 Lecture Series
Register for this event here. (Suggested donation $20).
What would Pearl Chase do now?
Please join us for a lively discussion about how balanced housing development was achieved in the 1960s and can inspire ways to move forward today in a Santa Barbara way.
Back in the late 1960s, a 9-story 107-foot, two-tower condominium project along the El Mirasol block was proposed – and approved by Santa Barbara City Council – that would have changed Santa Barbara forever.
Thankfully, Pearl Chase was the leader of the Santa Barbara community activists who organized, raised funds, and successfully sued the City to prevent the outsized proposal.
The positive impact of that grassroots campaign led to a ballot measure that instituted height limits in Santa Barbara, and the site for the proposed towers became Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden, a lush garden with walking paths, benches, gazebo and pond, often referred to as the “crown jewel” of Santa Barbara’s city parks.
That was what Pearl did then to “Save Our City.”
But what would Pearl do now? And how do we follow in her footsteps?
Today, we are faced with similar issues of overdevelopment and can learn from the experience of the past. Recently enacted California housing laws streamline development by limiting local discretion, reducing community input, and enabling taller, denser projects near transit. By limiting local control, these measures are enabling developers to propose out-of-scale projects (in areas not designated for the scale), which is causing great community concern.
Cheri Rae will discuss the 1960s era Save Our City community initiative “to keep Santa Barbara Santa Barbara,” followed by an audience Q&A and refreshments on the patio.
Cheri Rae is an ardent civic activist, award-winning columnist, and author of more than 300 articles and commentaries about Santa Barbara. “Channeling her inner Pearl,” Cheri has led efforts to preserve the city’s Bungalow Haven Neighborhood, historic buildings and trees. She is the author of the biography, “A String of Pearls: Pearl Chase of Santa Barbara.”
Join us on May 1st from 1-3pm at the Santa Barbara Courthouse on 1100 Anacapa Street to draw with local architects and artists, materials provided! We will also be accepting mailed in drawings of the Santa Barbara Courthouse through May 27th, 2022, more information below.
January 7 – March 5, 2022. The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present Attention to Loss, an exhibition of drawing, printmaking, and sculpture by Pecos Pryor. Attention to Loss is Pryor’s debut one person show in Santa Barbara, CA.
Attention to Loss is a response to the question: “What do we do with our hands in grief?” In 2019 Pryor lost a family member to suicide, a family member to drug overdose, and went through a divorce.
Pryor comments: ” The art produced in this time has been physical, contemplative, full of mad and sad tears as well as loving ones. I have created traffic cones built from clay, concrete and fiberglass, and carved from wood, stone and plaster; drawings of single unmade beds; self portraits; woodcuts, etchings and mono prints derived from the imagery of sculptures and shadows; and monotonously colored full sheets of paper, dark space-no answers, but some color. With the inability to change tragedy, art making gives me something to do with my hands.”
“Attention to Loss is about looking at the darkness and demanding something be given back. What that something is, is yet unsayable.”
Pecos Pryor earned his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and currently resides in Carpinteria, CA. He teaches Sculpture and 2D Design for Westmont College and Printmaking at Santa Barbara City College School of Extended Learning. Significant honors include the Francis William Vreeland Award in Art for 2018 and the Wendy Jane Bantam Graduate Exhibition Award. Attention to Loss is Pryor’s debut one person show in Santa Barbara, CA.
Images shown:
After the Memorial: Cone 2020 monoprint on BFK paper.
Untitleable 2021 graphite, conte crayon, metallic crayon, pen, knife marks, fingernail scratches on BFK paper.
Medium Dark Gray: Colored Paper 2021, graphite on BFK paper
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present Local Treasures, an exhibition of artworks by thirty artists who have exhibited at the Architectural Foundation Gallery during the past seven years. The exhibition runs from Saturday, September 18th through November 12th, 2021.
Local Treasures honors the extraordinary quality, diversity, and vitality of the artists whose work has recently graced the walls of the Architectural Foundation Gallery. Initiated during the 1990s, the Gallery exhibited watercolor paintings by local architects of Santa Barbara buildings. Later, the Gallery committee expanded its mission to present exhibitions of contemporary art, architecture, and design. Throughout the pandemic, following all COVID-19 protocols, the Gallery has maintained its schedule of exhibitions with the support of dedicated volunteers.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara has been dedicated to expanding our community’s appreciation of the built environment since 1983. The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 pm and weekdays by appointment.
The exhibition will be installed in a celebratory salon style (works of different sizes and media will hang next to and above each another), creating dynamic groupings on the Gallery’s walls. Two-dimensional work including an abstract print by Tony Askew, a collage by Dug Uyesaka, and plein air paintings by Libby Smith and Nina Ward will be complemented by several reliefs—a surreal box construction by Michael Long and a geometric structure in styrene by Marilyn Helsenrott-Hochhauser. A weaving by Minga Opazo and a screen print by Claudia Borfiga will join photographs by Sara Yerkes, Jeffrey Sippress, Pat McGinnis and Matt Straka, as well as a sewn paper composition by architect Cass Ensberg and a hard-edge, environmental painting by Cynthia Martin. Two husband/wife duos—printmakers Siu and Don Zimmerman and painters Judy and Warner Nienow will also be featured.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present Dancing with Paint, an intriguing exhibition of new paintings by long-time Santa Barbara artist Marlene Struss.
The title, Dancing with Paint, contains multiple references. It conjures the sloshing, swirling, elegant movements of Struss’s painting style, which she describes as biomorphic abstract expressionism with an Asian twist. On another level, Dancing with Paint characterizes Struss’s partnership with her paintings—how the organic, structural images quickly and almost magically emerge as the artist’s hand and the paint respond to each other in bursts of coordinated, exhilarated movements. “To prepare for those special moments of focused inspiration,” says Struss, “I spend much time and deliberation on my choices of harmonious colors, paint viscosity and unusual applicators (including yarn, balloons, plastic forks, acetate, rags, you name it)—but it’s dancing around the studio that really primes me and seems to be an essential part of my painting process.”
Marlene Struss graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1973, where she studied drawing with Howard Warshaw, painting with Irma Cavat, and printmaking with Bruce McCurdy. She subsequently spent many years developing a unique style of abstract collage, for which she was awarded the Independent Artist Award for Assemblage in 2004 from the Santa Barbara Arts Fund. After a brief but significant stint with digital painting, she then turned to acrylic painting on panel to increase spontaneity and decrease limitations, to enliven the work with surface texture, and work more physically. More information and past and present artworks by Struss can be seen at www.marlenestruss.com.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara has been dedicated to expanding our community’s appreciation of the built environment since 1983. The AFSB Gallery is located in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Regular gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 pm and weekdays by appointment.