Alan Salazar, Ventureño Chumash descendent, traditional plank tomol builder

This oral history was created in conjunction with the exhibition, "Sacred Art in the Age of Contact: Chumash and Latin American Traditions in Santa Barbara" on view in 2017 at the Santa Barbara Historical Museum.

The exhibition brings together a diverse body of objects from Santa Barbara area collections dating from the first decades following the Chumash’s first contact with the Spanish, c. 1769-1824.

Together, these materials offer a fuller picture of the relationship between art and spirituality in both Chumash and Spanish traditions, and demonstrate the sustained deployment of Chumash visual systems by native artists in early colonial visual culture. Highlighting themes of sacred geography, language, materiality and resistance, Sacred Art investigates the mutually transformative interaction between these traditions, which have immediate implications on the ways in which the cultural dynamics of Santa Barbara County are understood today.

The exhibition is presented at two venues, the Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Historical Museum and is part of the collaborative exhibition, Pacific Standard Time.

The interviews were conducted by the co-curators, Diva Zumaya and Margaret Bell, Adjunct Assistant Curators and Doctoral Candidates, History of Art and Architecture, UC Santa Barbara.

This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.