Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is pleased to share works from the exhibition Cave Painting/Painted Cave currently on view online and at The Gallery at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara. The exhibition includes works by Alison Andersson, Porfirio Gutiérrez, Cole M James, Linda Karshan, Deborah Kerner, Muna Malik, Yassi Mazandi, P.Lyn, Tom Pazderka, Cole Sternberg, and Richard Waxberg. Additional works are on loan from the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Collection by Bob Branaman, and Sharon Louden.
Artists have looked to the enigmatic world of cave paintings for centuries, and perhaps even more so during times of fear and doubt. This exhibition explores the inherently human need to make marks, share knowledge and community, and look to the past for answers about our current realities. We are working with the assumption that Modernism owes a huge debt to non-western and indigenous cultures and the works in this exhibition celebrate mark making and gesture through a raw yet highly sophisticated use of material and form. In no way does this attempt to depict, replicate, or pastiche the past, but imagines an aesthetic exploration that draws threads of thought and inspiration through personal vocabularies of marks and signs. This is an attempt to underline art making as multi-generational knowledge of land, flora, fauna, and cosmology that unites us as humans around the world.
In deciding to produce this exhibition the desire was also to draw attention to our own regional connection to the vast global network of cave painting. Alaxuluxen, the Chumash name for the Chumash Painted Cave State Historic Park is situated on the edge of the traditional Barbareño Chumash territory, which ranged from the Pacific coast to the foothills and southern slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains. With a population of over 15,000 before European contact, the Barbareño Chumash were one of the largest and most influential tribes in California. Today’s modern city of Santa Barbara, at the base of the Santa Ynez Mountains, was the capital city of the Barbareño, then called Syukhtun. A 3D digital presentation of the site is now available online thanks to CyArk in partnership with the Santa Ynez Valley Union High School. (www.cyark.org/projects/chumash-painted-cave).
We acknowledge that we are on unceded ancestral lands of the Coastal Band of the Chumash people. In honoring the past, present, and future generations of Chumash people who have stewarded this land for thousands of years, we also acknowledge the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
The Gallery at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara is a hybrid model of public-private partnership between the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation and the Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara. Previously the site of a five year partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara as a satellite exhibition space, this current partnership builds on this artistic legacy while raising critically needed funds for operations for the foundation and direct artist support. Proceeds from the sale of select works are shared between the artists and the foundation. Special thanks to the artists, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Board, the team at Hotel Indigo Santa Barbara, Laurie & Marc Recordon, Grazka Taylor, John Connelly, and TwoFish Digital.
Works are on view online, as well as in person to hotel guests and by appointment. To schedule an appointment please email [email protected], appointments are highly limited at this current time and require following covid safety protocol.
Image: Deborah Kerner, Motif for a Nighttime Journey, 2020