SANTA BARBARA — Small gestures are sometimes the most powerful. When the staff and architect were working on plans to renovate and expand the University Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara, they made a small gesture that adds up to a significant difference.
The museum's entrance was moved from the north side of the building to the south side. Before, it opened onto a courtyard of the university's art department. Now, right next door to the always bustling student center and Storke Tower, a campus landmark, the art museum opens onto the campus at large.
The shift, designed by Los Angeles-based architect Brenda Levin, not surprisingly rearranges all the interior spaces of the old University Art Museum, which were quaintly shabby and serviceable at best. But the symbolic turn-around is as important. The galleries remain an adjunct of the art department, from which they grew during the last 40 years, but now they address the world at large. Moving the entrance has moved art from the cloister to the community.
The $2.5-million project, which opened earlier this month, has resulted in six pleasant galleries providing 4,500 square feet of exhibition space--modest but sleek. The inaugural installations give an idea of how these handsome, straightforward rooms will be used.
The entrance leads to a sequence of three galleries in which works from the university's permanent collection are displayed. To the right, three more galleries house temporary exhibitions.
Eclecticism is a watchword for the University Art Museum's collection. A large, juicy 1970 abstraction by Joan Mitchell anchors one wall of the sun-washed courtyard gallery. Its thick, bristling marks of sunflower-colored paint create a loosely floral link to the equally large but utterly dissimilar picture on the adjacent wall: "The Mystic Marriage of St. Rose of Lima," an impressively delirious vision of Catholic transcendence over this earthly veil of tears, painted by the colonial Mexican painter Cristobal de Villaplando in the 1680s.
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The second room houses works on paper, drawn from the largest area of concentration in the university's 7,000-piece collection. The three dozen drawings, prints and photographs range far and wide. Tom Knechtel's exquisite silver-point portrait of a bright-eyed simian, "Joey" (1989), is wittily hung next to Julia Margaret Cameron's brooding photographic portrait of Longfellow, printed a century before. Rembrandt's theatrically atmospheric etching "The Flight Into Egypt" (1654) hangs across the room from Jim Shaw's feverish and disjointed fantasy "Dream Drawing" (1995).
