SANTA CRUZ, CA.- The Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History opened Accidentally Wes Anderson: Adventures in Santa Cruz, an exhibition on view at the MAH from January 24–May 18, 2025. The show takes guests on a visual journey to the most beautiful, idiosyncratic locations around the globe—including Santa Cruz County—all seemingly plucked from the whimsical world of visionary filmmaker Wes Anderson.
From impossibly grand hotels and chateaus to idyllic lighthouses, cable cars, and train carriages, AWA explores the filmmaker’s distinct aesthetic, whether a perfectly symmetrical landscape or a European city brimming with technicolor structures. The MAH exhibition, which includes a selection of community-sourced images of quirky places and locales in Central Coast California, is also presented as homage to the centennial celebration of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk’s Giant Dipper roller coaster, an Anderson-esque vintage wooden coaster that debuted in 1924.
Born off the back of a viral online phenomenon and community of the same name, AWA celebrates the undeniable visual vernacular of one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Each of the locations highlighted in the exhibition boasts the recognizable singular aesthetic that is oh-so typical of film master Wes Anderson. Bright, vivid, and often slightly jarring to reality, AWA collects the world’s most Anderson-like sites in all their faded grandeur and pop-pastel colors, telling the story behind each stranger-than-fiction location. Authorized by Anderson himself, the exhibition and its companion books celebrate much of the weird and wonderful architecture that exists in our unique world, paying tribute to travel, photography, community, and adventure…