County and City Art Collections
The Office of Arts and Culture manages both the County’s and the City of Santa Barbara’s art collections preserving and showcasing works of both historical and cultural significance, reflecting the region’s identity and creative legacy.
Explore featured collections below to learn more about the artists and artworks.
Anne and Walon Green Collection:
Works by Channing Peake
In 2012, collectors Anne and Walon Green gifted ten works by Channing Peake to the County of Santa Barbara, significantly expanding the collection of the flagship gallery’s namesake. Born in Colorado and raised in California, Peake was a classically trained artist who studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, the Santa Barbara School of Arts, and the Art Students League of New York.
Peake’s distinguished career included studying muralism under Diego Rivera and collaborating with Rico Lebrun on high-profile projects, including a WPA mural for Pennsylvania Station. A global traveler, he maintained friendships with icons such as Pablo Picasso and Rufino Tamayo. Despite his international reach, Peake remained rooted in Santa Barbara until his death in 1989. His aesthetic is defined by powerful, abstracted forms and a bold palette of blacks, reds, and blues.
Barry Berkus and Family Art Collection
Noted Santa Barbara architect, philanthropist, and art collector Barry Berkus generously donated a 69-work collection representing more than 60 artists, highlighting the evolution of the Santa Barbara contemporary art scene over three decades – the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. The gift includes paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, mixed media works, prints, collages, ceramics, and digital media art that he and his wife, Gail, acquired from local and regional artists beginning in the 1970s. A portion of the collection is exhibited to the public every other year with the goal of making art familiar and accessible to the Santa Barbara County community.
Colin Campbell Cooper Collection
The Colin Campbell Cooper collection comprises 11 works owned by the City of Santa Barbara, donated by his grand-niece Sherril Henderson. Cooper (1856–1937), a leading American Impressionist, lived in Santa Barbara from 1921 until his death. The collection includes eight oil paintings and three gouache works. Long thought lost, the paintings were rediscovered in the 1970s by County Arts Commissioner Paul Mills in the basement of Santa Barbara City Hall. The County funded their restoration and first exhibited them in 1981 at the Channing Peake Gallery.
Though Cooper built his reputation on East Coast cityscapes, especially New York skyscrapers, Santa Barbara claims him as a significant local artist. The collection reflects both his iconic urban scenes and his later California Impressionist style. Several works were featured in major exhibitions, including the traveling show Colin Campbell Cooper: An American Impressionist in Context (2006–2007) and later loans to the Santa Barbara Historical Museum. The collection is jointly managed by the City and County.
Michael and Nancy Gifford Collection
In 2018, Michael and Nancy Gifford donated almost 300 pieces by local artists, highlighting the talent and diversity of artists living and practicing in Santa Barbara County. Drawing on a wide range of media, art ranges from paintings and photographs to mixed media, assemblage works, and three-dimensional sculptures.
Michael and Nancy Gifford resided in Montecito for over a decade and developed an extensive collection of contemporary works by Santa Barbara artists. Michael Gifford is the retired CEO of the Rank Organization and served as a leader of the international film industry for many years. A renowned collector, artist, and curator, Nancy Gifford’s large-scale piece, LAMENT, is on permanent view at the Santa Barbara Central Library.
Ray Strong Collection
Generously donated by the Barbara H. Strong and Family Trust and Robert and Karen Sinsheimer, the Ray Strong Collection celebrates the work of one of Southern California’s most prominent landscape painters. Born in Corvallis, Oregon, Ray Strong’s passion for painting brought him to San Francisco to attend the California School of Fine Arts. During the Depression he painted murals for the WPA. His painting “Golden Gate Bridge” was chosen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to hang in the White House. In 1953, Strong served as the President of the Marin Society of Arts. Strong moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1960 where he co-founded the Oak Group, an environmentally conscious plein air painting collective opposed to the encroachment of the oil industry into the local landscape. Several of his paintings are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Oakland Museum of California.
Roland Peterson Collection
Roland Petersen is a distinguished Danish-born American painter and printmaker whose career has profoundly shaped the trajectory of West Coast modernism. Born in 1926, he moved to the United States and completed his formative studies at UC Berkeley under Chiura Obata before refining his craft with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. This education allowed him to master the “push-pull” theory of color and space, which became a hallmark of his style.
A pivotal milestone occurred in the late 1950s when Petersen joined the faculty at UC Davis. There, he was instrumental in building a world-class art department, recruiting iconic figures like Wayne Thiebaud and Manuel Neri. During this era, he emerged as a leader of the “Bridge Generation” within the Bay Area Figurative Movement. He is most celebrated for his “Picnic series,” a decades-long exploration of sunlight and geometric landscapes. His contributions have been recognized with prestigious Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and his work remains a staple in major collections, including the Whitney Museum and MoMA.