All fourteen, with nothing held back for the front page
The complete roster. This is the dense page; the homepage is the edit of it.
Painters came for the light and stayed for the cheap rent
Colin Campbell Cooper and Thomas Moran both worked on this coast, and the plein-air tradition arrived before any institution did.
Lockwood de Forest brought Indian carving to a Californian street
De Forest imported teak carving from Ahmedabad and built it into houses here, which is why some Santa Barbara interiors look nothing like the outside.
Thirteen seconds in June, and a town that came back different
The June 1925 earthquake flattened much of State Street. What replaced it was decided by a review board rather than by the owners.
A review board made one style effectively compulsory
The Architectural Board of Review set Spanish Colonial Revival as the condition of rebuilding, and the rule outlasted the emergency that produced it.
A county courthouse built as though it were Spain
The Santa Barbara County Courthouse opened in 1929 with a mural room, a tower and a sunken garden. It is a working court and the town's argument in one building.
A town this size is not supposed to sustain one
The Contemporary Arts Forum ran from 1976 to 2013 as a non-collecting exhibition space — a kunsthalle model that usually needs a much bigger city.
The gallery sat inside a shopping centre, and that was the argument
The Forum's Paseo Nuevo home put contemporary work above retail, which made it public in a way a dedicated building would not have been.
The Forum closed and the work carried on under another name
The Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara continues the Forum's programme, holding the same non-collecting position.
Warehouses near the tracks turned into galleries
The Funk Zone's low industrial buildings between the freeway and the beach became studios and tasting rooms within about a decade.
Brooks trained photographers until the market it trained them for closed
The Brooks Institute taught commercial and industrial photography here for decades and shut in 2016, after the industry that hired its graduates had already changed.
A university museum sits above a lagoon
UCSB's Art, Design and Architecture Museum holds architectural drawings alongside its art collection, which makes it unusual for a campus museum.
A small college gallery that punches above the enrolment
Westmont's Ridley-Tree House Museum programmes work that would sit comfortably in a much larger institution.
Chumash painters worked in a cave off a mountain road
The Chumash Painted Cave is a small sandstone chamber of polychrome rock art, reached from a narrow road above the city and gated to protect it.
Ojai kept a potter who outlived the century
Beatrice Wood worked in Ojai until her death at 105, and the lustreware she made there is held in museum collections nationally.