GOINGS ON SANTA BARBARA : Modernist L.A. : Twenty pioneer artists who worked from 1920-1956 are exhibited at Museum of Modern Art.

You were probably sitting there, twiddling your thumbs, thinking about nothing in particular, when some questions popped into your head: “Were there any modernist artists in Los Angeles? And if so, what impact did they have on the entire American art world and on the formation of Los Angeles as a city?’

Well, you can stop twiddling. The answer to those questions arrived at the Santa Barbara Museum of Modern Art last Saturday in the form of a traveling exhibit titled “Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920-1956.”

The exhibit, organized by the museum in 1990, has already made four stops in California. It features the work of 20 pioneer artists including Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Henrietta Shore, June Wayne, Helen Lundberg, Agnes Pelton and Frederick Hammersley.

“Turning the Tide” will run through Oct. 27. The museum is located at 1130 State St. Hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 963-4364.

More art: The Teresa McNeil MacLean exhibit opens today at the Valley Arts Gallery in Los Olivos. MacLean, a teacher of poetry, folk songs and illustration in the Santa Ynez Valley schools, uses water colors and bright Prismacolor pencils to paint and draw landscapes. The exhibit will run through Oct. 5, with an artist’s reception on Saturday. The gallery is located at 2375-B Alamo Pintado Ave. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day except Wednesday. (It is closed on Wednesdays.) For more information, call 688-3650.

There will be plenty of activity in and around the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History in coming days.

On Friday night, Christine Mather will lecture about a book she wrote called “Native America: Arts, Traditions and Celebrations.” Mather visited 12 states and Canada to retrace the history of the American Indians and to research their contemporary artifacts and customs. The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m. General admission is $3. For more information call 682-4711.

Then on Saturday and Sunday, the museum’s Gladwin Planetarium will kick off a September show called “Saturn--Ten Years After.” The program will be a look back at NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 flights around the planet. In a multimedia presentation, planetarium lecturer Ernest Underhay will show the spacecraft as they approached Saturn, went between its rings and traveled past its moons. There will be two shows each day, at 1:30 and 4 p.m. The show will continue each weekend in September. For more information, call 682-3224. The museum and planetarium are located at 2559 Puesta del Sol Road.

Here’s one that might be a lot of fun . . . to watch, from a lawn chair, iced tea in hand.

Saturday will mark the 10th annual Santa Barbara County Triathlon, a combination one-mile swim, 32-mile bike ride and 10-mile run, beginning at 7 a.m. (Participants are supposed to report to the starting area around 6 a.m.). The race will begin on Cliff Drive, just past La Mesa Park, and finish near Gobernador Canyon Road around the Casitas Pass. If all of this actually sounds fun to you, entries are still being accepted. Call 687-7401. Entry fee is $50 for individuals, with proceeds to benefit the American Cancer Society.

Psychics and astrologists and clairvoyants and Tarot card readers and even an intuitive masseuse--they’ll all be at the Santa Barbara home of psychic Fred Fasset Sunday for a Psychic Fair. The various metaphysicists will give free lectures in their areas of expertise. Actual psychic readings, however, will cost $25 for 15 minutes and $45 for 30 minutes.

Fasset said psychic fairs were common in Santa Barbara up until about five years ago, when they faded out. This is his second annual event as he tries to revive interest in the fairs. “There aren’t that many good (psychic) readers in Santa Barbara now,” he said. “Seven and a half years ago there were so many psychics in the Santa Barbara area you could scrape them off the street.”

Fasset’s address is 209 Pebble Hill Drive. The fair will run from noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 682-1936.