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Please help save a life at the blood drive at Harley's Simi Bowl on April 13.
You can save up to 3 lives!!
To make an appointment, please go to donors.vitalant.org and enter the blood drive code: K8994 or call 877-25-Vital.
Questions, contact Sherie at sdevillers@vitalant.org

A singer/songwriter currently splitting his time between Los Angeles, CA and Nashville, TN, Jeffrey has had his songs recorded by artists like Matchbox Twenty, Eli Young Band, Rascal Flatts, Tim McGraw, Jon Pardi, and many others. As an artist himself, he has amassed over 70 million streams and has toured the world.

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum (AD&A Museum) at UC Santa Barbara is pleased to announce three new exhibitions for the fall 2025 season.

The lead exhibition, Beyond the Object: Selections from the Permanent Collection, brings together a range of artworks from the AD&A Museum’s holdings that engage with our lived environment beyond its constructed reality. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper, this exhibition highlights recent acquisitions and gifts primarily from the past five years, demonstrating the Museum’s commitment to expanding its modern and contemporary art collection. Additionally, the Museum joins in the international centennial celebration of the birth of artist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) with a spotlight exhibition of her work in the permanent collection.

The AD&A Museum will also open the exhibition, Mexican Prints: The Garcia-Correa Collection, which celebrates the gift of sixty-one Mexican prints from local collectors Gil Garcia and Marti Correa de Garcia to the Museum. Focusing on lithographs, etchings, and linocuts from the 1920s to the 1980s, the Garcia-Correa Collection of Mexican Prints highlights the importance of the graphic arts in Mexico. This mid-century collection of prints thematically focuses on labor, gender, and domesticity, all key aspects of campesino culture and its farming community that have informed the lives of the collectors. On view are a selection of thirty-one prints that represent a preview of a larger, more comprehensive presentation planned in the years ahead.

Additionally, Environmental Communications: Big Bang Beat L.A. presents the work of the Venice-based collective Environmental Communications (EC), a group of architects, artists, and sociologists who, from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, championed an expanded understanding of architecture—one that encompassed not only individual structures, but the totality of the built environment. This presentation of EC’s materials from the Architecture and Design Collection, following this year’s devastating fires, serves not only as a poignant reminder of the city’s environmental fragility, but also as a tribute to the extraordinary urban creativity that has fueled its resilience over the past five decades.

Organized by the AD&A Museum at UC Santa Barbara, all exhibitions will be on view from September 13 to December 7, 2025. The opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 13 at 5:30pm.

Continuing its book launch series and to kick off the international month-long challenge of “Plastic Free July,” the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum (SBMM) is pleased to host a book signing and reading for Makana is a Gift, a new children’s book, written by local award-winning author Janet Lucy and illustrated by Mexican watercolor artist Alexis Cantu. This special community event on Saturday, July 1, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. will take place on the museum’s patio. It will also include a brief discussion about the story, and a family art activity. Cost is free, but space is limited. Registration is required by emailing reservations@sbmm.org or online at: https://sbmm.org/santa-barbara-event/makana-is-a-gift/


About the Book
Makana is a Gift is the story of a little green sea turtle’s quest for identity and purpose, and an all-too-common life-threatening encounter with a plastic bag he mistakes for a jellyfish. Vibrant, life-like watercolor illustrations by Alexis Cantu introduce children to the undersea world and its diverse inhabitants. Through the story, children will learn about the biological beginnings of a sea turtle’s life as well as their ancient legacy, significance, and symbolism as well as the importance of ecological protection. The book also includes a “Discussion and Activities Guide” that explores the story’s themes as well as ways to eliminate plastic consumption. A “Resources” section lists ocean and sea turtle protection organizations worldwide plus more books on the topic for children and adults. Recommended for children ages 4 – 8, the book will inspire people of all ages and is available in both English and bilingual (Spanish-English) versions.


About the Author
Janet Lucy, M.A., is an award-winning writer and poet, who has authored and co-authored numerous books. She is the author of three award-winning children’s books in English and Spanish--The Three Sunflowers/Los Tres Girasoles, Mermaid Dreams/Sueños de Sirena, and Makana is a Gift/Makana es un Regalo. In addition, she is the co-author of Moon Mother, Moon Daughter – Myths and Rituals that Celebrate a Girl’s Coming of Age and the new Moon Circles Facilitator’s Guide and the By the Light of the Moon companion journal. Her most recent publication is the Ukranian-English version of The Three Sunflowers

There’s no destination in daydreaming. It doesn’t have to result in anything other than you had a moment of reprieve. You had a moment of just being in a place that can hold you.
— Austen Smith, Imagination Doulas

The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art is pleased to present Outlandish, an NEA Our Town grant-funded exhibition by multidisciplinary artist April Banks. Including film, mixed media, ritual, and sculpture, Outlandish imagines a respite of mystery for those who most need it. This exhibition returns to and proceeds from ancient knowledge and harmony with nature, world-building an alternate narrative toward a freer existence.

For this exhibition Banks creates a place called Yemaluna, combining the name of Yemaya, the ocean deity in African Diasporic spiritual practices, and lunar, referencing the moon. Banks imagines Yemaluna as a cloud island, where everyone migrates every leap year on February 29. Clouds allude to the conjunction between the ethereal and nature, holding immense amounts of water yet dispersed with the wind, they are universal, drifting, wandering, and borderless. Like clouds,Yemaluna evokes imagination, daydreaming, and wonder. It is a metaphor for a geography of freedom.

Outlandish visualizes this network of exit routes including Apothecar(r)y (Bodies of Water), a staircase adorned with small bottles filled with water from SLO County, capped with rocks foraged from Montaña de Oro. These vessels are whispered with intention to safeguard against drought, thirst, and greed. The stairs depart to It’s Important to Me that We Know We Are Free, a meditative video work depicting Sojourner’s Proof, a Yemaluna archetype, swinging freely. Artifacts from Yemaluna adorn the walls of the gallery along with clay-pulled prints that reference Tidewalker, the sculpture installed on the Museum’s adjacent lawn. These objects of both labor and leisure conjure reciprocity and passage into new possibilities and geographies.


April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social engagement, and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal, and Ethiopia. Her work is in the collection of the Getty Museum and other private collections. April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999.

Are you a watcher? Do you sit at your booth, knowing exactly what’s up with the patrons at the other tables? Better than TV! He’s about to propose. She wants a divorce. Those two are on their first date. Those other two are re-kindling an old romance. That one’s getting fired. Just once, wouldn’t you like to know if you’re right? Now, you can. Set against the backdrop of your most favorite Indian restaurant,
immerse yourself in the world of "Heera," where the flavors of India and the spice of life come together in an unforgettable evening of theatre.

Admission includes post-show wine and dessert reception with the cast.

Crafted and performed through the ShortBurst Theatre® process by Theatre R.A.W. members Simge Alak, Victoria Bemis, Marty Cohen, Caitlin Crowley, Tori Doms, Bob Hucul, Linda Kohn, Emily Morgan, Emma Rosignol, Warren Sata, Theda Weston and Playhouse Associate Director of Adult Education Berkeley Sanjay. Written by Evelyn Rudie, directed by Playhouse Co-Artistic Director Chris DeCarlo.

ShortBurst Theatre® is a collaboration in which professional artists, tyro performers and members of the community at large pool their resources, their time, and their concerns, to create theatre that is relevant on a personal, local and global level, and do it all in a very short span of time, hence the name.

Over the past 36 years, ShortBurst Theatre® has created 50+ collaborative productions locally, nationally and with companies from 11 countries, many that have later become main stage and touring productions, fostering cultural exchange and understanding and making a tangible difference across the city and around the world. “The performances and collaborations are excellent and very educative. Their work is brilliant!” Fusami Sugimine, Director Global Project, International Human Network, Japan.

Santa Monica Playhouse programs are supported in part by generous grants from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Santa Monica and the Santa Monica Arts Commission, We Are Santa Monica and Playhouse PALS.

Host Melissa Block asks what the top Summer song of 2005 will be. Several reviewers offer their picks for the season's most popular country, hip hop and alternative rock songs, from The Killers, Sugarland and Rihanna.

A doping scandal has rocked the Tour de France before the cyclists have begun peddling. Favorites Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso are among a list of cyclists who have been banned from the competition, which starts Saturday. Ullrich won the race in 1997.

For the first time in college football history, 12 teams are set to take part in a playoff at the top level of the sport. It means they'll face more competition than ever before for the title.

"Aside from the fact that this volume is widely considered the definitive work on the cuisine of this region, it also happens to be a book full of recipes perfect for this time of year," writes Heidi Swanson in her roundup of seasonal cookbooks.