County Arts Office Earns the Highest Possible State Ranking in California Arts Council Partnership Program
The County of Santa Barbara announced Monday that its Office of Arts and Culture took the top ranking in the California Arts Council's 2026 State Local Partnership program, capping five years among the state's leading local arts agencies.
The Santa Barbara County Office of Arts and Culture has earned the highest possible ranking in the California Arts Council's 2026 State Local Partnership program, the County announced on Monday, Oct. 19.
The ranking extends a run at the top of the state table. Over the past five years, the County says, Santa Barbara County has consistently placed among California's top local arts agencies, tying with Sonoma County for the highest average over that span.
The office works as the local governmental umbrella for arts and culture projects and programs across Santa Barbara County, according to its published scope of work. It is a longstanding partnership between the County of Santa Barbara and the City of Santa Barbara, and the two governments have shared resources and staff for almost 40 years to support arts and culture institutions, practitioners, programs and projects.
As the region's arts and cultural development agency, the office serves as a State-Local Partner of the California Arts Council, a collaboration that its scope of work describes as covering funding, information exchange, cooperative activities and leadership. In that role it administers four grant programs: Arts Making Impact, Community Arts, Events & Festivals, and Organizational Development.
The California Arts Council's own profile of the office lists the wider portfolio the ranking reflects. The office manages more than four annual grant programs for artists, nonprofits and cultural initiatives, produces temporary and permanent public art installations, manages the City and County public art collections, and curates three public gallery spaces with rotating exhibitions. It also staffs three publicly appointed advisory bodies, including the County Arts Commission, and runs artist recognition programs that include the Poet Laureate and Individual Artist Fellowships.
The office's scope of work names the galleries it curates with the public arts advisory bodies: the Channing Peake Gallery, the Santa Barbara City Hall Gallery and the Joseph A. Centeno Betteravia Gallery. Its public poetry work includes the Santa Barbara City Poet Laureate, the County Youth Poet Laureate and Poetry Out Loud.
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