Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara: From a Roaming Forum to MCASB

In 1976 a group of Santa Barbara artists and supporters wanted somewhere to show, and argue about, the art being made now. Their Contemporary Arts Forum roamed between storefronts and cafes, settled on State Street, became the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, closed in 2022 and came back. Antenna Theater’s Etiquette of the Undercaste passed through on the way.

A forum around kitchen tables, 1976 to 1980

The Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, or CAF, was founded as an alternative arts space “in 1976 by artists and art supporters seeking a venue dedicated solely to contemporary art,” according to the museum’s own history page. A 2013 release put it in context: “CAF was among a crop of alternative art spaces nationwide, which addressed a cultural void by presenting contemporary, avant-garde art of living artists.”

At first it had no home. “CAF organized in Steven’s storefront or in Café Vallarta on Haley and occasionally at the Paradise Café,” Richard Ross recalled in his memorial for Betty Klausner. “This was a forum forged in wine, beer, food, and passion.”

In 1980 the critic Josef Woodard sat at “the kitchen table of artist and CAF co-conspirator Richard (Dick) Dunlap” with Joan Tanner and Klausner. Klausner, he wrote, “was the spark plug and dynamo” who led the wandering forum into its first official home.

The Balboa Building and the first Home Show

That home, from 1980, was 1,500 square feet on the ground floor of the Balboa Building, “owned by Bob Klausner, whose wife, Betty, was one of the CAF’s first organizers.” Early shows brought “Craig Kauffman, John Baldessari, Llyn Foulkes, Ed and Nancy Kienholz, Peter Shelton, and Wayne Thiebaud.” Rita Ferri remembered that Betty Klausner “fought hard to have CAF recognized as the premier contemporary art space between L.A. and San Francisco.”

In 1988 Klausner took the forum into private houses. The first Home Show, “Originally conceived and organized by Klausner in 1988,” moved exhibitions “into the temporary site-specific domestic locales.” Two more followed.

Year	Era	Artists named
1988	Betty Klausner	Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Lisa Hein, David Ireland, Jim Isermann, Joseph Kosuth, Erika Rothenberg
1996	Nancy Doll	Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Haha, Ann Hamilton and others
2011	Miki Garcia	Piero Golia, Evan Holloway, Bettina Hubby and others

Upstairs at Paseo Nuevo

Around 1990 the forum moved into 3,500 square feet “upstairs at the Paseo,” the new Paseo Nuevo shopping center. The space was no accident: “one of the city’s conditions for approving the mall at the time was that it include a black box theater (Center Stage Theater currently fills that role) and visual arts venue,” the Santa Barbara Independent later reported.

Performance was part of the program. The museum names past performers “Ann Edge, Liza Lou, John Malpede, Rachel Rosenthal, and Carolee Schneemann,” and Woodard recalled “CAF’s earlier adventures with new and experimental music, by Carl Stone, Phil Niblock, Paul Dresher, and Scott Johnson.” Nancy Doll led the forum in the mid-1990s.

Experimental companies of the time moved along a circuit of alternative spaces and campuses. By her own CV, Laura Farabough took her swimming-pool play Surface Tension to UC San Diego and the University of Washington, as told in the story of Nightfire Theatre and Laura Farabough.

A walk-through about homelessness, 1991

Antenna Theater’s chronology lists “1991: Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA” for Etiquette of the Undercaste, the Walkman walk-through about homelessness that visitors entered through a morgue drawer, and Chris Hardman’s CV gives the same year. In 1992 the New York Times wrote that “It has been displayed at the SOMAR Gallery in San Francisco, the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Marin Headlands in Sausalito.”

The forum’s archive at UC Santa Barbara is said to hold a folder on the show dated 1990, but that entry is unverified, and no Santa Barbara review has been found. The run sat between SOMAR in San Francisco, the show’s first home, and the Smithsonian’s Experimental Gallery the next year. It reached the UCLA Wight Art Gallery in 1995, and every stop is in the Antenna chronology of productions.

Miki Garcia and a new name

“Starting in 2005, the directorial reins were handed to the dynamic and enterprising Miki Garcia, whose nearly 13-year run at the helm was the longest of the organization’s history,” Woodard wrote. From 2011 to 2018 the forum also ran a satellite space at the Hotel Indigo on lower State Street.

The trustees chose a new name in 2012 and announced it in June 2013, when “the Board of Trustees unanimously resolved to change the name” to the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. “Operating as a kunsthalle, MCA Santa Barbara is a non-collecting, non-profit museum,” the release explained. The American Alliance of Museums accredited it in 2016.

Closing and coming back

Then the money ran out. The Dream Home Raffle had been “the museum’s main source of income for many years, generating $1.1 million in 2017 alone,” but it was cancelled in 2018, and losses reached “more than $1.2m in 2019 and $1.7m in 2020.” In July 2022 the board announced the museum would close on August 28, saying “we have been unable to reach the fundraising goals necessary to maintain operations.”

“There is a hole in the center of Santa Barbara’s cultural identity,” Josef Woodard wrote in his requiem for the museum in the Santa Barbara Independent. The hole did not last. Volunteers and a revamped board reopened the museum at Paseo Nuevo on January 22, 2023, and in July 2026 Noozhawk reported that it had “hosted more than 20 exhibitions” in the three years since, as it marked fifty years.

Contemporary Arts Forum Santa Barbara: fifty years in dates

Year	What happened	Source
1976	Artists and supporters found the forum, a roaming space	MCASB
1980	First home: 1,500 square feet in the Balboa Building	Santa Barbara Independent
1988	The first Home Show, in private houses	MCASB; Independent
1990	Move to 3,500 square feet upstairs at Paseo Nuevo	MCASB
1991	Antenna Theater’s Etiquette of the Undercaste	Antenna chronology; New York Times
2005	Miki Garcia becomes director	Independent
2012-2013	Renamed Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara	MCASB; Independent
2022	Closes on August 28 after years of losses	Independent; The Art Newspaper
2023	Reopens on January 22 with volunteers and a new board	KCLU
2026	Fiftieth anniversary	Noozhawk

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