Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara
AFSB Gallery
Exceptional Art & Design
The Gallery/Conference Room of the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is a dynamic space within a historic setting for curated exhibitions of contemporary art, photography and design. Four solo exhibitions and one group exhibition are presented annually.
Local artists, architects, photographers, and designers are invited to submit work created in a wide range of content, mediums, and styles. Drawings of local landmarks from the Kids Draw Architecture (KDA) program are featured in December.
Our Friday evening Opening Receptions with the artists are open to all. On Saturday afternoons, the Gallery is open for visitors to contemplate exhibitions at their leisure. Throughout the year, we offer Artist Workshops with our featured artists and Art Talks with artists, gallery owners and curators, critics and art historians designed to foster creativity and community dialogue.
Through this lively exhibition and education program, the AFSB Gallery provides a unique forum for emerging and established artists, collectors, and art aficionados from the tri-county area.
For information on how to apply for an exhibition, please read our Mission & Guidelines or contact us.
Exhibition - Sommer Roman: Portals
September 9, 2023 – November 4, 2023
Opening Reception: September 8, 2023
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to present the exhibition, Portals, a solo exhibition of two- and three-dimensional work by Sommer Roman.
Portals is a solo exhibition that brings together various works from three different threads of Sommer Roman’s larger body of work: new textile-based wall sculptures and “Brain Scan” colored pencil drawings are paired with “Cell Portrait” ink drawings. This grouping of work sheds light on themes and forms that appear and reappear in Roman’s work repeatedly: namely, the biological cross-section and the circle.
In bringing these threads of her work together, Roman re-examines and re-envisions them as portals, portals that draw us into places of deep knowing and innate wildness within ourselves. Through evocative color, organic forms, materiality, and the universal circular form these unique, multifarious configurations invite viewers back to the realm of interconnectedness, playfulness, the wild feminine, and the body as potent sites of knowing and knowledge.
Sommer Roman was born and raised in California and has lived in France and on both East and West Coasts of the US. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz (2004) and her MFA from UC Santa Barbara (2014). Roman maintains a multi-disciplinary art practice and exhibits regularly in group and solo exhibitions. She currently lives on the Central Coast of California with her two children and teaches in the Art Departments at Cuesta College and Cal Poly.
Gallery hours are Saturdays 1:00 – 4:00 pm and weekdays by appointment.
Images:
Internal Portal II 8″x8″x3″ Post-consumer clothing, paper clay
Brain Scan A 22″x30″ Colored pencil on paper