The word “wildling” can apply to a variety of wild plants or undomesticated animals. But its use in pop culture is often streamlined, as it almost always refers to a fictional clan created by George R.R. Martin.
“Over the years, we’ve had a lot of fans of Game of Thrones come in—‘Is this the Game of Thrones museum?’” local museum director Stacey Otte-Demangate said, recalling some confused visitors of the venue formerly known as the Wildling Museum of Art and Nature in Solvang.
“We’re like, ‘No, we’re not, but we’re really cool,’” Otte-Demangate said with a laugh.
Game of Thrones enthusiasts weren’t the only ones occasionally bewildered by the Wildling Museum’s title though, Otte-Demangate said while discussing the venue’s recent revamp and rebranding to the California Art Nature Museum (Cal-NAM). The venue was officially renamed in January.
“We needed a name that was more understandable by the general public,” said Otte-Demangate, whose role as the museum’s executive director wasn’t changed by the transition. “It needed to be a name that no one had a question about what they were going to experience here.”
Rachel Metz took on the role of assistant director at Cal-NAM one month before the museum’s renaming but was already familiar with the former Wildling Museum’s programming.
“When I started on here and knew that we were making this change, I really liked that it would become more intuitive. I think there’s a lot of value in just right away saying who you are and what you do,” Metz said. “People can feel like you’re accessible and feel like they know what they’re walking into.”
“The overall mission is really just the same,” Otte-Demangate said, referring to the venue’s aim to reflect the need for conservation of wilderness and open spaces through art, one of the museum’s goals while it was known as the Wildling and today as Cal-NAM.
On March 2, Cal-NAM premiered its latest group exhibition themed around an environmental cause. The Birds and the Bees and More: Pollinators, a showcase of various media from multiple artists, will remain on display through Sept. 2 in the museum’s first-floor gallery—recently renamed the Wildling Gallery in honor of the original museum’s legacy.
Some pieces in the show are on loan from the museum’s collaborators, while others were created specifically for the exhibit. Minnesota-based artist Susan McDonnell painted a handful of compositions for the show, including one that highlights a lesser known but vital pollinator in various ecosystems.
“I suggested a bat, because one of the things I wanted to make clear in the show was that it’s not just about honeybees,” said Otte-Demangate, who was thrilled that McDonnell chose a pallid bat as one of her subjects.
Other pieces in the show include uniquely augmented honeycomb artworks by Ava Roth, monarch butterfly photographs by Elizabeth Weber, and floral paintings by Cynthia James.
A Santa Barbara local, James is a self-described lifelong plant person, “from the time I was a child and built fantasy safari camps in our garden.” She read Brenda Starr comics, specifically a storyline where the fictional reporter was “in search of the black orchid in order to heal her fiancée Basil St. John’s blindness,” James told the Sun.
James became passionate about painting pollinators shortly after seeing an interview with Elliot Page about the actor’s work on the documentary Vanishing of the Bees.
Many of James’ works portray “flowers and bees in a struggle to survive,” the artist explained.
Some of James’ pieces in the Cal-NAM exhibit, for example, are illustrations of subtly mutated plants with slightly menacing features, in reference to the harming effects of pesticides and GMOs, and bees “often fighting to survive or searching for a limited supply of pollen.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood’s favorite Starr is Ringo. Send comments to [email protected].
