New Chief Curator James Glisson Makes His Mark at Santa Barbara Museum of Art | Arts & Entertainment

When James Glisson arrived at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art as curator of contemporary art in February 2020, he was faced with a vast, blank canvas.

A $50 million renovation of the museum, begun in 2015, closed several galleries. Then COVID-19 forced the museum to close completely, sporadically. The plan was to reopen in summer 2021.

This “blank canvas” is the new 126-square-metre contemporary art gallery and the new galleries on the first floor dedicated to photography and new media.

The renovated, 2,400-square-foot McCormick Gallery was to be entirely decorated with the latest acquisitions of contemporary art. Although the shows were planned, Glisson had to execute them.

After eight years at the Huntington Art Museum, he joined the team responsible for integrating contemporary art into the esteemed institution founded in the Gilded Age.

He has curated or co-curated 12 exhibitions, including the Huntington’s centennial exhibition, Nineteen Nineteen, and played a key role in /five, a five-year initiative dedicated to new works and programming.

“I was pleased to come to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art because it has an established collection and an excellent reputation for both collecting and exhibiting art,” he said.

“We opened a new gallery featuring key pieces from the museum’s permanent collection to remind people what we have, and we expanded it with a global theme.”

“Going Global: Abstract Art at Mid-Century” explored the reach and forms of abstract art during the Cold War. Artists born in Argentina, Colombia, Germany, France, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States exhibited their work side by side.

Since then, he and the two curators of contemporary art have organized additional exhibitions, several of which feature outstanding new acquisitions and gifts made to the museum during and after the renovation.

Since 2016, over 600 photos have been added to the collection.

Glisson curates two major exhibitions, one of which has its roots in the 18th century^t– and 19^ttwentieth-century French painting and the second covering seven decades of contemporary art.

The opening of the first exhibition, entitled A Legacy of Gifts: The Collection of Lady Leslie and Lord Paul Ridley-Tree, comes just a week after the museum announced that Glisson had been appointed its new chief curator.

He currently directly supervises all curatorial activities, shapes exhibition and acquisition programs, and directs the staff that looks after nearly 26,000 works of art collected in the museum over thousands of years.

He continues to curate contemporary art. For “In the Making: Contemporary Art at SBMA,” he selected works from the museum’s collection to explore the paradox that a work considered groundbreaking in 1965 may not be seen as “contemporary” today.

It refers to a joke by Gertrude Stein that supposedly happened a hundred years ago: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”

“If you admit that a collection can only be ‘in the making’ or always in the process of forming, then there is a way out of Stein’s impasse,” he says. “A museum can be modern, but only if it commits itself to constant growth and change.”

Glisson, who is still a newcomer at the top, talks about the future in general terms.

“The museum is involved in both contemporary art and historical art, doing both at the same time,” he said. “That is the breadth of the museum, its seriousness.”

His broad exhibition program is set to continue, but “we’ll be changing our attitude and energy to engage the audience,” Glisson said. “We might not stick to traditional galleries organized by genre, but instead mix styles and places to put them in dialogue with each other, as we did with ‘Going Global.’”

Honoring Ridley Trees

The entry wall in “A Legacy of Giving” is painted crimson, and the galleries are vanilla. Striking yet elegant, they are very much like Leslie Ridley-Tree, who donated the paintings for the exhibition.

Lord Paul and Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree were leading community philanthropists who supported many local organisations, including the museum.

Over 30 years, their contributions have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Leslie Ridley-Tree served on the museum’s board for 15 years and is a past president.

The 33 French paintings are among more than 50 works donated to the museum after her death at age 98 in 2022. Her husband died in 2005.

“Leslie has dedicated herself to education,” Glisson said. “The exhibition focuses on ways of connecting with another time and place, of teaching. It’s a window into the past. What can it teach us?”

Or you can delve into five thematic clusters, such as the challenges facing 19th-century women artists, centered around portraits of Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. Perceptive wall text provides context.

Artists featured include Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Paul Signac, whose pointillism masterpiece “Herblay – The Riverbank” greets visitors against a bright red wall.