Vanessa Thompson Interviewed by Impactmania-Museum Intern, Marirose Meyer

March 15, 2018 by adamuseum

Vanessa Thompson is a young Hispanic female, pursuing her career as a Civil Engineer at ARUP which is a global design and consulting firm. ARUP is known for very famous landmarks throughout the world such as the Sydney Opera House. Vanessa works in a male dominant industry and is one of the youngest to be invited by Los Angeles County Commission for Women (LACCW) to become one of their committee members. LACCW’s mission statement is “…to represent the interest and concerns of women […]

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Schoolhouse and the Bus

March 6, 2018 by adamuseum

Graduate students, Jing Cao and Leticia Cobra Lima, recently wrote an article on Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy’s Schoolhouse and the Bus, an exhibition featured at UC Santa Barbara’s AD&A Museum. Their article was recently published in Art Practical. Here’s an excerpt of their piece:   “The Schoolhouse and the Bus: Mobility, Pedagogy, and Engagement, an exhibition formerly at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and opening February 9 at the Rubin Foundation’s The 8th […]

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Music and Art

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

Music can affect us in so many ways. For example, background music in movies can make a scene touching, poignant, suspenseful, or humorous. Music can also affect how we perceive art. Looking at art is an emotional experience, much like listening to music. When viewing an artwork, each person will feel different things, recall different memories, and pull on different life experiences to “read” a piece.  What if we combined the two emotional instigators, music and art? Maybe they could […]

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Deaccessioning art in a Museum

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

When it comes to a museum’s permanent collection, one may instinctually believe that adding to it is the main goal. Bigger is better… right? If that is so, why are museums around the world working to deaccession their stores? To deaccession an artwork is to permanently remove a piece from a museum. The justification is up to the curator to decide, but reasons can range from the fact that the work may simply no longer fit in the permanent collection […]

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What to do when the museum is closed, AKA look at some of the sculptures found on the UCSB campus

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

The public works of art can be viewed year round. We will be exploring four of the sculptures found in the immediate vicinity of the museum. To the right of the entrance to the museum is a sculpture by Fletcher Benton entitled Folded Circle T and Arc. Benton was originally trained as a painter and worked as a commercial sign painter for a number of years. He made the transition into sculpture after abandoning painting as a medium. This sculpture […]

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Cultural Parallelism Through Art and Traditions

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

Sacred Art in the Age of Contact: Chumash and Latin American Traditions in Santa Barbara reveals a great deal about the cultural practices of the Spanish and Chumash during the mission period. Colonization of the Chumash by the Spanish largely impacted Chumash cultural practices. Colonization also affected many other indigenous cultures. While walking through the exhibit and learning about the practices and sacred objects of the Chumash, I found myself feeling more connected to the exhibit than I had imagined. […]

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Isla Vista: An Architectural Walkthrough

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

Isla Vista is a town that echoes the patterns of its students—sleepy in the morning, stirring in the afternoon, and finally coming to full speed in the later hours of the night only to drift off once more into a dream state again. This tiny, yet booming college town, is undoubtedly the center of many UCSB students’ and community members’ lives. For some it’s home, a place to study, a place to enjoy oneself, or maybe even all three. It […]

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What is Art?

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

What is art really? You can look up the definition online, but that would be absolutely useless because art has hundreds of definitions– it can’t conform to just one. Baffled? Yeah, a lot of people are. The very term “art” itself has become so ambiguous, especially because the spectrum of works considered as art has massively expanded. A Rembrandt painting can lie on the far left, while a “candid” selfie of you can lie on the right. Hey, you never […]

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Socially Engaged Art

February 27, 2018 by adamuseum

Socially engaged art, also referred to as social practice, involves artwork which seeks to encourage social discussion and collaboration. For the socially engaged artist, social interaction is their material. In 1991, Suzanne Lacy, a UCSB graduate and artist, whose work is currently on view at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, coined the term “new genre public art” to describe American public art which went beyond sculpture, involving the artist and a more distinctly emotional relationship. New genre public art […]

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