The UC Santa Barbara Art, Design & Architecture Museum opened its doors to audiences for its new much-anticipated exhibits, bringing together the works of Japanese artist Tomiyama Taeko and a collection of text-focused artwork from California-based artists in a fascinating and magical contrast.
The two-part exhibit amalgamates two very different collections into a whirlwind of emotion that was certainly felt in the ever-so-lively museum on its Jan. 18 opening. With a range of visitors, spanning both UCSB faculty and students as well as regular visitors and friends of curators, the museum welcomed a crowd of excited art lovers from around Santa Barbara County. The opening was accompanied by music from DJ Darla Bea and a Mexican cuisine food truck placed just around the corner.
The first exhibit, titled “Tomiyama Taeko: A Tale of Sea Wanderers,” is housed within the first two rooms of the museum and features 28 works of the artist organized as a result of the works being gifted to the museum last year. As a refined and textured collection, this event is the first-ever exhibit of the Hiruko and the Puppeteers series in the U.S., making the Art, Design & Architecture (AD&A) Museum the largest owner of Taeko’s work outside of Asia.
The rooms feature a range of mixed media collages and oil paintings by Taeko from 2008, crafted with incredible detail and depth within each piece. Taeko’s work responds to issues like imperialism, environmental destruction and war responsibility. Working through a feminist and activist lens, her work in this collection is inspired by stories of travellers, as seen in some of the oil paintings and excerpts of literature on the walls of the space.
Curated by AD&A Museum Director Gabriel Ritter and Curatorial Research Fellow Hayate Murayama, “A Tale of Sea Wanderers” wows the viewer with its inventiveness and mesmerizing combinations of different media within the works, making for a museum-going experience that keeps the eye wandering around the room, looking for more and more of Taeko’s brilliance.
Written in one of the descriptions on the walls, the museum acknowledged the importance of this collaboration between the artist and the Santa Barbara-based museum — claiming it “carries special significance, resonating with Santa Barbara’s own environmental struggles, particularly with offshore oil drilling.” The label also highlights the importance of Taeko’s work in the modern times, as it “serves as a powerful reminder that human greed drives both environmental destruction and conflict,” echoing the minds of many in the current climate change crisis.
The second exhibit, titled “Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language,” gathers together the work of 24 artists, all with relationships to California and working with text as their focus of creativity and exploration into the other four rooms of the AD&A Museum.
The collection, curated by UCSB’s own Alex Lukas, an associate professor of print and publication arts, features a range of work — from small comic books and paintings to a huge, wall-sized mural booming in one of the spaces. The exhibition engages the visitor by this specific range, as it brings together a much more contemporary and contrasting collection to focus, inspiring vivid conversation.
“I feel like ‘Public Texts’ is trying to capture, like, the whole vibe of [California], but I think it did a really good job of kind of capturing both aspects of California and art as a whole,” visitor and first-year philosophy and art double major Lynna Doan said. “And featuring different artists and seeing how they grew in art.”

“Radiator” by Kate Laster on display as part of the “Public Texts” exhibit. (Sandra Vovk / Daily Nexus)
In an interview with the Nexus, Lukas spoke about the intention behind “Public Texts,” explaining, “[The collection] is sort of thinking about the political legacies, the social legacies, the things that set California and Californian artists apart from sort of other lineages, activism, graffiti, writing, conceptual art, all these sorts of different paths and webs that come together.”
“Borrowing from institutions of folks who have passed away, working with their estate … others [who] are really emerging, younger artists who we’ve invited to contribute something,” Lukas said, speaking on the range of artists the collection features.
The almost a year-in-the-making exhibit invited some of the featured artists to the opening reception — notably Kate Laster, the creator of the entrance room project “Radiator.” “Radiator” is made up of works that feature text cut out individually from each piece of paper or plastic, creating a string of words across each piece as we follow Laster’s thoughts and worries during the making of it, highlighted by the vibrant spray paint that covers each piece.
“This body of work is all about the personal and the political and how they’re entwined, moving through this time that we’re in,” Laster said. “I felt like this was my opportunity to make work that grappled and spoke out to rage and gratitude that I have in this moment, exploring letter forms and book shapes and language [with] the genocide happening right now in Palestine and bodily autonomy and personal heartache all at once.”
An eye-opening collection, “Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language” expands even further than the AD&A, with some exhibits being commissioned to show temporarily on the University’s campus, which will become unveiled over the course of the show, allowing for the visitors to view an evolving and growing piece of art over the course of the exhibition — a welcome addition to the campus and the College of Letters & Science.
The new exhibit, available with free admission at the AD&A Museum, is a must-see, with its collections being a truly marvelous blend of the traditional and the contemporary, making for an engaging visit. Bringing together the creativity of both the museum and its curators, the winter 2025 season at the museum shines brightly upon its opening, beckoning visitors in to indulge in the mesmerizing artwork.
This appeared in the Jan. 23 print edition of the Daily Nexus.