Bonnie Ora Sherk's Life Frames since 1970 Lands in Santa Barbara

Bonnie Ora Sherk (1945–2021) once ate a meal in a cage beside the big cats of the San Francisco Zoo's Lion House. The University of California, Santa Barbara's Museum of Art, Design, and Architecture now stages that act and four decades of her work in the retrospective Life Frames since 1970.

The exhibition gathers drawings, posters, photographs and moving images documenting Sherk's interventions — performances to interactive engagements, as the museum frames them. It is, by one account, well-designed if modest, and much of it is documentary in character.

Who was Bonnie Ora Sherk?

Sherk spent forty years as an artist, landscape designer and educator challenging the assumptions underpinning city life. As asphalt and concrete covered dirt, and highways and overpasses became the infrastructure for commuting and food delivery, she kept asking whether people had to live this way. Her projects consistently proposed new models of social relations.

She began as a cultural trickster, in the mold of conceptually based artists from the late 1950s onward, acting as both observer and observed — and, at times, proactive spoiler — in everyday business. She studied with Fluxus (a 1960s avant-garde movement mixing art and everyday actions) artists Robert Watts and Mel Henderson, then applied a post-Dadaist performance sensibility to visionary yet practical rethinking of human priorities. The goal: mindful encounters with other living creatures.

What can visitors actually see?

Because so much of the show is documentation, the aesthetics run somewhat limited, with occasional visual pleasures. Two bodies of work anchor the presentation:

• Sitting Still (1970) — Sherk placed herself in ordinary chairs amid daily urban life, in mundane outdoor San Francisco locations. The exhibition presents the series through projections of large-scale Kodachrome photographs.
• Public Lunch (1971) — a black-and-white film transferred to video shows Sherk caged in the Lion House next to big cats in a neighboring lockup. Visitors gawked while cats and artist alike paced, napped and were fed.

The comparison is instructive: where Sitting Still inserts a still human into flowing street life, Public Lunch makes the artist one animal among caged others, with the zoo audience cast as spectators at a feeding.

Why does this retrospective matter now?

Sherk's career — spanning performance, landscape design and education — models an art practice aimed less at objects than at new social arrangements. The Santa Barbara show documents rather than restages that ambition. Its modest format may be the honest one; you can't rebuild a Lion House in a museum, and a photograph of a woman dining beside lions carries its own argument about who, exactly, we keep in cages.