Some of Santa Barbara’s long-established art spaces can be found in unexpected places, creating the friendliest sort of site-function disconnect. Most of us don’t go to the Santa Barbara Tennis Club to see art (present company excepted), but there in the lobby hangs the long-standing series of shows curated by artist Susan Tibbles.
In a perhaps more dramatic example, the governmental and civic business-as-usual atmosphere of the hulking County Administration Building on Anacapa Street also has long presented art exhibitions on its lobby floor, in an art space named for significant Santa Barbara figure Channing Peake. Degrees of local art history-making are, in fact, embedded in the current Channing Peake Gallery show, Form and Frame: Abstraction, Community and the Language of Art — which even includes a festive piece by Peake, the namesake artist himself.
This selection of art showcases holdings in a collection owned by the proverbial “you and me,” a growing collection owned by the city and fortified by generous gifts from, among others, the considerable collection of the late Santa Barbara–based architect Barry Berkus. Curated by the county’s Tom Pazderka and UCSB MFA graduate Lyra Purugganan, Form and Frame also manages to serve up a cross-sectional view of contemporary artists who have had an imprint on the local scene — and beyond, over the past half-century.