Many of us travel thousands of miles to visit the cave paintings of southern France and northern Spain, and yet remain com­pletely ignorant of the great wealth of prehistoric art to be found here in North America. Surprisingly enough one of the least known aspects of this art are the prehistoric and proto-historic rock drawings and paintings. Slowly though, an increased interest is being shown for this art, not only by archae­ologists, ethnologists and art historians, but by collectors and the pubIic at large. This exhibition of 25 reproduc­tions of prehistoric Chumash Indian cave paintings opens up a whole new area of art. Since 1960 the Santa Bar­bara artist and illustrator, Campbell Grant, has been engaged in a long-term project to record these ancient paint­ings. His approach to the. material combines the intuitive grasp of the art­ist, with the preciseness and thorough­ness of the professional anthropologist. The glimpse which he provides into these rock drawings reveals an art highly. conventionalized and abstract, an art to which we today are well prepared to respond.

––David Gebhard