Join us on April 14th from 1-3pm at the Old Mission Santa Barbara on 2201 Laguna 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 17, 2024. See additional information below.
January 14 – March 11, 2023
The Architectural Foundation Gallery
Opening Reception with the Artist
Saturday afternoon January 14, 2023 from 1-3 p.m.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition, Veins: Mining Family History Through Copper, a solo exhibition of photography, video, text, and installation art by Mayela Rodriguez.
An opening reception will be held at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara on Saturday afternoon, January 14th from 1-3 p.m.
The exhibition expands upon Rodriguez’s prior explorations of her lineage and her father’s family, whose members are from Cananea, Mexico where the Buenvavista del Cobre mine is located. For this exhibition, she uses the theme of copper as a lens into her own evolving identity.
In 2017, when Rodriguez was an MFA student at the University of Michigan, she wrote to the Buenavista del Cobre mine requesting information about her distant uncle, Aurelio Rodriguez. She had grown up hearing intriguing stories about this uncle who, allegedly, pitched rocks into the mine as a child and later in life became a professional baseball player for the Detroit Tigers. After many months, Rodriguez received a package from the Buenavista del Cobre mine that contained a 13″ x 18″ sheet of copper wrapped in plastic.
Carrying the copper with her, Rodriguez then embarked on an ambitious pilgrimage to sites that she and her family have called home. She explains “I was interested in discovering what it meant to simply exist with my copper. How could our pilgrimage both transform it and me? By developing a relationship with my copper in this way, I realized that the copper was not just a slab of metal excavated from the depths of Mexican earth but a vessel to hold all my concentrated questions, thoughts, and insecurities about my identity as a Mexican American.”
Mayela Rodriguez received her BA from UC Berkeley (2015) and MFA from University of Michigan (2019). She was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California.
The Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara office and gallery are based in the historic Acheson House at the corner of Garden and East Victoria Streets in Santa Barbara. Gallery hours are Saturdays from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. and by appointment.
Images shown:
Copper from the Buenavista del Cobre mine
Artist’s collection of Aurelio Rodriguez professional baseball car
Gather with us for this FREE in person book club event at the historic Acheson House: the perfect venue to share the architecture of life, death, love, art and scandal at the Cecil Hotel.
Happy Reading!
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.
September 18, 2021 Saturday, 1-4
The Architectural Foundation Gallery
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. The public is invited to drop by on the opening day, September 18th from 1-4 (masks and social distancing required).
In the Foundation’s garden, the group Glendessary Jam will be providing music for the event.
September 18 – November 12, 2021
The Architectural Foundation Gallery
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. The public is invited to drop by on the opening day, September 18th from 1-4 (masks and social distancing required); and for the gala Closing Reception with the Artists, Friday, November 12, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
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.
Register at Facebook for this live video event.
Happy Reading!
Register through Eventbrite below to automatically get the ZOOM link for June’s book club meeting.
Happy Reading!
The AFSB Art Gallery at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara is pleased to announce the opening of Impossible Objects, an exhibition of vibrant, abstract silkscreen prints, or serigraphs, by Ed Lister.
Ed Lister, known in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as a skilled scenic artist, created this series of “impossible objects” in the early 1970s while teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art in London. After teaching art for twelve years, Lister moved to California. Starting in the mid-70s he worked for ten years as the lead scenic artist for the Center Theatre Group at the Taper and Ahmanson Theaters in Los Angeles. Subsequently, he painted backdrops and installations as wide as 400 feet for TV, movies, and destination resorts, hotels, and casinos.
More recently Lister was commissioned to paint a 60 feet-wide mural encircling the Bisno Schall Clock Gallery of the Santa Barbara Courthouse that depicts our perception of time and various ways of recording it (http://www.bisnoschallgallery.com). Although he loved working on such a large scale, Lister now paints more modest-sized images concerned with iridescent and reflective seascapes and skies.
Created fifty years ago, these striking, hand-pulled prints play with our contemporary sensibilities and logical brains in their resemblances to imaginative digital images. Of all the printing techniques, Lister most relished executing screened images with areas of pure color put down in a clean and direct manner. In this series, he created improbable, mind-bending objects that cannot exist other than on a flat surface. Intrigued by their bold colors and shapes, our eyes are lured in, then our assumptions of reality are challenged.
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.