MISSION
Mission Statement
Santa Monica Art Museum (SMAM) celebrates the creative process of artists and invites visitors to engage with them and their work.
SMAM is not only a traditional art museum but rather an “artist museum,” providing space, technology, and resources for artists to express, conceptualize, and prototype their work. The museum embraces the cultural blur and the many aspects of the classic institutional model while using these forms and expectations to expand its potential and form a new art ecosystem that better serves artists, collectors, and creative partnerships.
SMAM’s commitment to creating a new art ecosystem means financially supporting its artists and programming through ticketed events and available artworks while building a new collector market that establishes emerging artists alongside their mid-career and blue-chip contemporaries and elevates them in the contemporary art market.
Creating something new involves risks and experimentation. SMAM learns these virtues from its artists and views the role of the art museum as a creative practice, constantly evolving and pushing the boundaries of expectations.
Museum as a Creative Practice
In addition to physical exhibitions, SMAM is inviting the art community and visitors to on-site artist workshops, a digital art program that includes presentations of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and virtual and augmented reality experiences, discussion panels about the art world’s most prescient topics, events, and much more.
With planned, revolving events and educational programming that responds to advancements in technology, the needs of artists, and the desires of audiences, SMAM embraces the role of the museum as a “creative practice,” a muse-like place of inspiration for artists, collectors, and enthusiasts alike.
Museum Founder & Director
A new vision for how an art museum can better serve artists and the art ecosystem.
After discovering and collecting artist Gretchen Andrew’s work, museum founder and director Christoph Rahofer invited her to create the Santa Monica Art Museum and welcome new artists and creative partnerships. Located on the Third Street Promenade, SMAM is at the crossroads of traditional presentations of art and immersive experiences made possible by advancements in new media and technology.
SMAM first opened its doors to artists and visitors in December 2022 and then debuted its inaugural exhibition in February 2023, during Frieze Los Angeles.
Now, SMAM continues to create innovative partnerships and develop programming that highlights artists, lifestyle and conversations that push the boundaries beyond what is possible for a traditional art museum.