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Guests will ascend the iconic tile staircase in the heart of Santa Barbara to the Arts Terrace at Paseo Nuevo, in their most mythical and legendary looks. We will begin The 2025 Art Awards celebration in the Center Stage Theater with a short award ceremony, followed by an al fresco buffet dinner and open bar. Guests will have early access to new limited editions, silent auction, as well as after hours access to the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) and the wildly popular and critically acclaimed community exhibition Arte del Pueblo.
The Art Awards this year honor
Mary Heebner
Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin
Gabriela Ruiz
Manjari Sharma
Diana Thater
Sunday, July 13, 2025, starting at 4:00 pm.
The anonymous artists of the Upper Paleolithic to more recent sculptors from Classical Antiquity have been an ongoing influence and inspiration for Santa Barbara-based Mary Heebner’s multifaceted artistic practice that includes large format collages, and her imprint Simplemente Maria Press. The press unites place-based inspirations and images with studio practice, writing, and papermaking to create hand-crafted books that couple her visual art and her writing in a variety of formats.
Composer Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The culmination of her creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets. It is an instrument for the creation and performance of avant-garde new works and the development of new modes and genres of expression and forms of immersion-based entertainment.
Strongly influenced by growing up in LA’s San Fernando Valley to immigrant parents from Mexico, Gabriela Ruiz’s practice is a reflection of the DIY work ethic she was raised under, the vibrancy of Mexican cultural and artistic traditions, and her exposure to subculture and fantasy at a young age as a means to escape the realities of daily life. Ruiz is a self-taught artist whose practice blends diverse forms of expression and media, including sculpture, video, painting, and apparel design.
Manjari Sharma is an internationally recognized Los Angeles–based visual artist exploring ritual, identity, memory, and mythology. Born and raised in Mumbai, India, she aspires to blend Indigenous knowledge systems with scientific concepts through immersive, lens-based art, using photography, sound, motion, projection, and collage in her storytelling.
Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater has pioneered the use of film, video, light, and sound, continually challenging the boundaries of time-based media and installation art. Her work explores the relationship between the natural and man-made worlds while critically examining the structures of mediated reality. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, animal behavior sciences, mathematics, chess, and sociology, her evocative works directly engage their surroundings, producing an intricate relationship between time and space.
It has been just over two years since MCASB reopened the museum, and we have already made major strides in the reimagining of the institution (and produced 20 exhibitions to date). MCASB is building a museum of the future that is accountable to the communities we serve, our arts workers, and most importantly the artists that are at the heart of everything at MCASB. Join us in raising critical funds to support MCASB operations, exhibitions, and programs!
We welcome everyone at our events, please contact hello@mcasantabarbara.org for your access needs or special requests.
Todos son bienvenidos a nuestros eventos, por favor de ponerse en contacto con hello@mcasantabarbara.org para sus necesidades de acceso o solicitudes especiales.
