At the Santa Barbara Bowl, an amphitheater tucked into 17 woodsy acres north of the city’s downtown district, there are two ways for concertgoers to get up to the stage itself. The more direct path, a paved road, wends its way from the front entry gates to the right of the venue. A second route cuts through the middle of the property, offering a slower climb up to the stage and its wide views of the Pacific Ocean. Those who don’t mind the few extra minutes can take this scenic way — the venue’s outdoor lobby, of sorts — and bask in a wooded glen overflowing with native plants.
Underneath these leafy bushes and tree canopies, an unusual sight then materializes: a prominent bronze sculpture depicting the right hand of the late Jerry Garcia, the frontman of the Grateful Dead.
Cast in bronze and weighing 75 pounds, the foot-and-a-half-long sculpture both memorializes the guitar legend and anchors the naturalistic space itself, officially dubbed the Jerry Garcia Glen. While the Bowl isn’t open to visitors on non-show days, the sculpture does draw in Deadheads attending shows there to pay tribute to Garcia’s famous guitar-picking hand, which includes an accurate depiction of Garcia’s middle finger, which he lost most of in a wood-chopping accident as a child.
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The Jerry Garcia Glen at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
The Jerry Garcia hand sculpture at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
The Jerry Garcia hand sculpture at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
Garcia’s outsized presence at the Santa Barbara Bowl suggests that the late musician frequented the historic venue, with those shows becoming entwined in the Dead’s legendary lore. But Garcia barely spent time here. He only played the Bowl once, in October 1974, in a solo showing without the Dead.
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Local Deadhead Scott Brittingham, who commissioned the sculpture as part of his family foundation’s gift to the Bowl, says that Garcia — and the Grateful Dead — weren’t known to have especially strong ties to Santa Barbara, either.
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“There is no real Santa Barbara story that I’ve ever heard of,” he tells SFGATE. “They obviously had to drive back up the coast to get to San Francisco and go through Santa Barbara,” he adds. “But I wish I had a story where they like to go to Super-Rica or to some cool spot,” referencing the beloved taqueria that counted among Julia Child’s favorite places.
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The Dead played the Ventura County Fairgrounds down the way from 1982 to 1987, and some of its members’ groups, like Phil Lesh and Friends and Bob Weir, performed at the Bowl numerous times. Yet that’s about as close as a relationship that Garcia himself had with performing in Santa Barbara. Meaning much of the sculpture’s existence comes down to one man’s fascination with Garcia: Brittingham himself.
Back in the ’90s, the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation took over the venue’s lease from the county, which owns the property on which the amphitheater stands. The deal was contingent on the foundation renovating and restoring the facility — a former Works Progress Administration venue built in the 1930s that had fallen into disrepair over the decades — to make it financially viable, says Rick Boller, the CEO of the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation.
The Santa Barbara Bowl is seen in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
The Santa Barbara Bowl is seen in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
Fans wait for Earth, Wind & Fire tickets at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
To do so, the foundation put together a plan that broke down the renovations into discrete pieces. When Brittingham learned that the Bowl’s wooded glen had the potential for a naming rights gift, he jumped at the chance to memorialize his favorite musician. “The fact that [Garcia] played there at least once was all I needed to know,” Brittingham says.
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Brittingham had a vision for what he wanted: A sculpture of Garcia’s hand, with most of his missing middle finger. The accident led Garcia to develop a distinctive playing technique. In a 1978 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Garcia said that he held his guitar pick in his right hand more like a pencil — what he called “the scalpel technique” — using his thumb and index finger for the movement. “It’s his gift that his hand was like that,” Brittingham says.
Around 2008, Brittingham reached out to several sculptors, asking them to give him an idea for a “larger than life” bronze sculpture of Garcia’s hand. After several artists came back with sketches and drawings, one stood out to Brittingham: The figurative sculptor Tom White.
“He essentially had done the most research and came up with the most lifelike one,” Brittingham recalls. “He’s figured out exactly the way Jerry’s stub middle finger bent over from all the years.”
The Jerry Garcia hand sculpture at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
To create this realistic piece, White found an X-ray of Garcia’s hand that showed exactly the way his fingers looked. That included a view of the familiar curve of his middle finger, he tells SFGATE. It took White about four months to create the sculpture, first building it out of clay, then delivering it to the foundry, where it transformed into a bronze sculpture.
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Before dedicating the piece in 2010, Brittingham reached out to Garcia’s daughters for insights on what to put on the plaque next to the sculpture. “We want you to put on the plaque — because it’s true, because it was Jerry, our dad — he was a Cosmic Explorer,” Brittingham says they told him. Aptly, a plaque underneath the giant hand reads: “Musician, cosmic explorer, painter.”
The Jerry Garcia hand sculpture plaque at the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Feb. 27, 2026.
Jessie Alcheh/SFGATE
Despite its loose ties to Garcia, the sculpture’s unusual presence has made the Bowl a more recent site for Deadheads to meditate on the late musician. “There’s a lot of classic rock guys and gals that are out there that have played that venue,” Brittingham says of the Bowl. “But for me, it was going to be Jerry or nothing.”
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