Exhibitions

Explore our seven exhibitions with a rich variety of topics, images, and materials that feature items both from our own collections as well as treasures from outside of the Library.

Art of Science

Learning Commons | On display now through Dec 2021

Weeks before the Library closed in response to the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order, a new exhibit "The Creative Edge of Collecting: The 'Nothing' of William Davies King" went on display on the 1st Floor, Mountain Side of the Library. The exhibit, which features ephemera collected by UCSB Theater professor William Davies King, confronts his lifelong practice of collecting things of little or no value. 

In the UC Santa Barbara Library, two exhibits will revisit the spill — one in-depth, the other through art. The first, “Anguish, Anger and Activism: Legacies of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill,” will run Monday, Jan. 28, through Sunday, June 16, in the library’s Special Research Collections (Mountain Side, third floor).

In the silkscreen print “Rio Por No Llorar” (“I Laugh to Keep from Crying”), Carmen Miranda’s famous fruit-laden headdress demands that you look more closely. Bananas with a Chiquita label are encased in barbed wire. A bunch of grapes is surrounded by skulls and crossbones — a pesticide warning. Above them, a Folger’s coffee can bursts open, and flies hover everywhere.

In the late 1800s, a new method of education started taking hold in the U.S. Inspired by early Russian educational techniques and founded in Scandinavia, Sloyd, as the method was known, emphasized manual training, linked closely to European folk art traditions and the emerging Arts and Crafts movement.

The photos are chilling: Giant swathes of devastation in the Brazilian Amazon. Men hip-deep in the brown muck of the gouged and flooded earth. They are the scenes of illegal gold mining in "Garimpeiros: The Wildcat Gold Miners of the Amazon Rainforest," an exhibition in the Ocean Gallery of the UC Santa Barbara Library through Aug. 31.

When Sydney Martin sees a World War I soldier wearing a helmet pop up on her computer screen, she thinks about the UCSB Library.

The photograph, in rotation on her computer, is part of an exhibition, “Helmets of the First World War: Battle, Technology, and Culture,” on display in UCSB Library’s Mountain Gallery through June 30.

It's your last chance to view the exhibition Isla Vista: Building a Community, 1970-2016 in Special Research Collections. The exhibition explores the political, cultural, and social struggles of Isla Vista to become an independent, cohesive community. Since the protests of the 1970s, grassroots activism has improved conditions in the area, but Isla Vista, populated mainly by UCSB students, still faces difficulties and, up until recently, cityhood remained elusive. The exhibition will close on Friday, March 24.