Getting the Run of the Joint: Joan Tanner at Santa Barbara Museum of Art

Getting the Run of the Joint:
Joan Tanner’s Field Day
at S.B. Museum of Art

Artist Brings Distinctive Work to McCormick Gallery

By Josef Woodard | Photos by Ingrid Bostrom | February 23, 2023

Now 87 and still going strong, artist Joan Tanner had her first Santa Barbara Museum of Art show in 1967. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

Something is blissfully amiss at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Walking into the SBMA at the moment, a wonder-filled and slightly disorienting view greets the visitor. The wall facing the open-feeling Ludington Court area up front, leading us into the museum’s central McCormick Gallery, has been benevolently invaded by what resembles a massive, chaotic bouquet of bulging netting and other common materials. Museological politeness and decorum take a holiday.

Proceeding into the large gallery space, we see that this colorful mass, called “Mire,” is actually connected by a long, umbilicus-like tube to another exuberant structure, folded into and resonating the slash conversing with a teeming garden of fantastical sculptural delights.

It’s official: the McCormick has been Tanner-ized.