In the late architect/art collector Barry A. Berkus’s coffee table opus Architecture/Art/Parallels/Connections, he addresses the mutual influencers in his life devoted to the two A-words. “The more I see,” he writes, “the more questions fuel my desire to learn, to observe, and to create. This process becomes what I call ‘walking with the eye.'”
Berkus’s insightful and curious eye can be seen, in architectural terms, in such local structures as the Galleria (home to baby Target, at La Cumbre and State) and in the dynamic MOXI museum, which Berkus designed but didn’t live to see in concrete form. That eye, as avid collector, is a silent guide in A Bold and Unconventional Collector: Highlights from the Barry Berkus Family Collection, now enlivening the walls and floors of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art.
Berkus collected many well-known artists in his day — such as Rauschenberg, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, which have been auctioned off — as well as “lesser” names deserving wider recognition. This selection features such noted artists as Kiki Smith, Charles Garabedian, Nancy Graves, and Andy Goldsworthy — a photograph documenting a Goldsworthy art-embracing-nature piece in Santa Barbara’s Botanic Gardens, made at Berkus’s invitation.