The presumably peaceable and inarguably beauteous burg of Santa Barbara can be admired from multiple vista points around town, not the least of which is the impressive harborside and channel view from the patio of Santa Barbara City College’s Atkinson Gallery.
For the first exhibition of the gallery’s academic year, though, attentions turn decidedly — and thankfully — away from self-congratulatory hometown love and idyllic illusions about a paradisiacal beach town, devoid of closeted skeletons. Instead, the show offers a compacted history and cultural lesson about the stormy evolution and revolutionary aspects of Mayan/Mexican/Chicano/SoCal life going back to life before the European invasion.
Xicana/o/x Time and Space, curated by Dr. Thomas A. Carrasco, is a rough-hewn quasi-guerilla theater affair, with photographs, posters, paintings, and informative pithy texts laid out in telling timeline fashion around the gallery walls, from the Mayan era to today. Implicit in that historical equation and the texture of cultural and fine-art life in the now are more inclusive acceptance of previously seldom-heard perspectives and the deeply embedded heritage of “others.” Cases in point: this current Atkinson show and the upcoming MCASB show by Cameron Patricia Downey, an “anti-disciplinary” artist who gave a lecture at SBCC last week.