The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum) at UC Santa Barbara has three new exhibitions for the fall 2025 season. All exhibitions are free to visit and will be on view Sept. 13-Dec. 7, with an opening reception, 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 13.
The lead exhibit, Beyond the Object: Selections from the Permanent Collection, brings together a range of artworks from the AD&A Museum's holdings that engage with our lived environment beyond its constructed reality.
Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper, the display highlights recent acquisitions and gifts primarily from the past five years.
Additionally, the museum joins in the international centennial celebration of the birth of artist Joan Mitchell (1925-92) with a spotlight exhibit of her work in the permanent collection.
The museum will also open Mexican Prints: The Garcia-Correa Collection, which celebrates the gift of 61 Mexican prints from local collectors Gil Garcia and Marti Correa de Garcia to the museum.
Focusing on lithographs, etchings and linocuts from the 1920s to the 1980s, the Garcia-Correa Collection of Mexican Prints highlights the importance of the graphic arts in Mexico.
The mid-century collection of prints thematically focuses on labor, gender and domesticity, all key aspects of campesino culture and its farming community that have informed the lives of the collectors, according to AD&A Museum.
On view are 31 prints that represent a preview of a larger, more comprehensive presentation planned in the years ahead.
Environmental Communications: Big Bang Beat L.A. presents the work of the Venice-based collective Environmental Communications (EC), a group of architects, artists and sociologists who, from the late 1960s through the early '80s, championed an expanded understanding of architecture, one that encompassed not only individual structures, but the totality of the built environment.
"This presentation of EC's materials from the Architecture and Design Collection, following this year's devastating fires, serves not only as a poignant reminder of the city's environmental fragility, but also as a tribute to the extraordinary urban creativity that has fueled its resilience over the past five decades," AD&A Museum said.
The AD&A Museum at UCSB is both a teaching museum, committed to the development of critical thinking and visual literacy in support of the university's goals of education, research and service, and a resource for the wider Santa Barbara Community.
Admission to all exhibits and programs at the AD&A Museum is free, unless otherwise noted. Hours are noon-5 p.m. Wednesday-Sunday.