The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is a sixty-thousand-square-foot art museum located at Santa Barbara, California. The museum formally opened its doors to the public on June 5, 1941. The museum building used to be the Santa Barbara Post Office, but David Adler, an architect from Chicago, stepped in and made changes. The architect constructed the museum?s galleries, with Ludington Court as the most popular due to the dramatic sense it invokes in visitors.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art houses twenty-seven thousand art pieces. These works of art measure roughly five thousand years of pure human creativity. The museum?s collection ranges from classic to modern. One of its most notable pieces is by David Alfaro Siqueiros, The Portrait of Mexico Today, 1932, the sole intact mural in the United States. Another famous antiquity in the museum is the Lansdowne Hermes, a marble monument fashioned from the Hadrianic period in Rome.

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art also features art pieces from Asian, European, and American origin. The museum has more than twenty-three thousand works on paper, such as prints, photographs, drawings, and Asian scroll printings. It also has an extensive photography collection, such as The Breeze by American Anne Brigman.

The art museum, aside from its exhibition galleries, has a fifty-thousand-book library, an auditorium capable of seating 154 people, a children?s gallery, caf?, and a museum store. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art also has the Ridley-Tree Education center, an off-site complex located at McCormik House.