Description
Every Area Meeting we invite our community to gather and discuss art with a mouth slightly full of a fun snack created by our innovative bakers and cooks.
The main draw is always the open crits. This portion we inherited from the academic world. We select artists from our community to present their physical work for the audience to discuss and give live feedback. The discussion is led by Patrick Melroy. While vigorous, the nights always remain respectful and safe for the artists presenting.
So often art appreciation is disconnected from direct dialogue. We look at art at shows but can’t drill down into the thinking behind the meaning. At openings presenting artists are too impacted with obligation to candidly discuss their art. There is beauty in the story of the making of art and so often the residue, the art itself, tells an abbreviated story of its own making. Area Meeting allows an audience to meet the creator before the work reaches its final form. Before the world has formed a final opinion.
Area Meeting draws artists from across the creative world. Set designers in conversation with figurative painters who pull a ceramicist into a discussion of grant writing while eating a tasty third cookie that they promise will be the last one. Just then the lights flicker, and they find their seats only to sit on the edge as the next artist begins to describe the work on the wall, asking while telling what they were attempting. Then the hands go up and Area Meeting explodes.
Our first Area Meeting presents Alex Lucas, Professor of Print and Publication in the Department of Art at UCSB, giving a place-in-time snapshot of his practice. Alex will show images of work and discuss the intricacies, struggles, and successes of his practice.
Alex Lukas was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Cambridge. With a wide range of influences, Lukas’ practice is focused on the intersections of place and human activity, narrative, and history. His fieldwork, research, and production reframe the incidental and the monumental through intricate publication series, sculptures, drawings, prints, audio collages, and experimental curatorial platforms. Lukas’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Kadist Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art Library, the New York Public Library, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Student Lending Art Collection, and the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Lukas has been awarded residencies at The Bemis Center for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, The Fountainhead, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center’s Arts/Industry program, amongst others. In 2020, Lukas was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for painting and has been named one of the University of California Regents’ 2024/2025 Humanities Faculty Fellows.
Since 2016, he has published Written Names Fanzine, a periodical devoted to examining sites of hyper-local, unsanctioned public inscription, and from 2021 through 2023, organized CA53776V2.gallery, an experimental exhibition platform on the dashboard of a 2007 Ford Ranger. Lukas graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. He is currently a Professor of Print and Publication in the Department of Art at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Patrick Melroy is a professional artist who works out of his studio MISC Workshop on Gutierrez St in downtown Santa Barbara. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from UCSB as well as a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Melroy makes art which most often exists as interactive sculpture and site-specific interactions.
He is an educator and community-based artist organizing and teaching creativity workshops to public and private groups throughout the region. Most recently he designed an Artist in Residency Program for Santa Barbara Unified School District located in Harding University Partnership School on Santa Barbara’s westside. He is also a parent of a Harding 1st Grader. Most Fridays you will find him passing out cookies to parents during drop off.
For more information contact Adrienne De Guevara at adrienne@artscollaborative.org. To reserve your ticket, go to https://www.simpletix.com/e/area-meeting-tickets-200324. Ticket proceeds go toward artist honorariums and snack food.
Date & Time
Tue, Feb 11, 2025 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Venue Details
The Community Arts Workshop, Santa Barbara
631 Garden StreetSanta Barbara, California 93101