Slug: 090831_ar_pmca
Edits: AER kz
Notes:
Summary:
Headline: A You See Exhibition
Layercake: Two-year UC Davis faculty art exhibition nears a close in Pasadena
By JUSTIN T. HO
Aggie Arts Editor
In a school surrounded by farmland and dominated by the sciences, the arts department can sometimes seem tucked away behind the everyday scene. But in a 1960s UC Davis, where the art department was even more hidden than today, five faculty members worked on what would become signature and influential Northern California art.
You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Faculty, a traveling art exhibition showcasing the work of these five former and current UC Davis artists, is on display at the Pasadena Museum of California Art until September 20.
The Pasadena exhibition opened in Pasadena on May 31, but the exhibition itself began in October 2007 at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at UC Davis. You See was created to showcase the work of five UC Davis faculty – Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William Wiley, Roy De Forest and Manuel Neri – who each taught and worked at UC Davis in the early 1960s.
“We’ve had other shows that studied the art faculty as a whole in those years, but even so this show is a new project,” said Jeffrey Ruda, professor and director of art history, in an e-mail interview. “It focuses on the artists who had the biggest impact off campus, and it shows them more thoroughly than you could in a general survey of the department.“
The UC Regents, on behalf of the Nelson Gallery, received a $60,000 grant in 2006 from the National Endowment of the Arts in order to fund the exhibition. The grant, titled “American Masterpieces: Visual Arts Touring,” intended to bring the Nelson Gallery’s permanent storage out into the open.
“Ninety percent of museum collections are in storage – that’s one of the secrets of the museum world,” said Renny Pritikin, director of the Nelson Gallery. “This grant was designed to help smaller museums, like ours, to get our collection masterpieces out on the road.“
And it did – after two months at the Nelson Gallery, the exhibition moved to other California venues throughout 2008 and 2009 including the Hearst Art Gallery at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, the California Bakersfield Museum of Art and the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery at the University of Nevada. The Pasadena Museum of California Art is the exhibition’s final stop – far from Davis but still loyal to its California roots.
“[The Nelson Gallery] sent us a proposal to see if we wanted to take it, knowing that our mission is California art and artists,” said Shirlae Cheng-Lifshin, exhibition manager for the Pasadena Museum of California Art. “We reviewed the proposal, we liked the artists in the show and we thought it was a compelling show, so we agreed to take it in.“
Cheng-Lifshin, who gave a tour of the exhibition earlier in the year, said the exhibit was successfully received.
“We’re really excited about the show, and we’re happy with the response,” Cheng-Lifshin said.
The five artists were each brought together by Richard Nelson himself, the first chair of the UC Davis art department. Though the artists worked and taught within the university, Nelson kept them in isolation from other affairs within the UC system, such as committee memberships within the school bureaucracy.
“The only reason [the artists] were able to do it was because Nelson, who founded the art department, was really a good recruiter,” Pritikin said. “[Nelson] promised these guys total freedom – salaries and a budget that they couldn’t get elsewhere.“
“Often when a department is built by an individual rather than by committee it has a better chance of embodying a single, forceful vision or direction,” said Blake Stimson, professor of art history at UC Davis, in an e-mail interview. “Nelson and the department were fortunate enough to be in a position to develop such a vision and Nelson clearly had a strong enough sense of what he would like to accomplish.“
But while the exhibition highlights the artists‘ common bond as UC Davis faculty, the artists draw together as 1960s and 1970s Californians with radically unique and separate forms of expression. Arneson, whose all-too-familiar “Eggheads” sculptures lurk throughout the UC Davis campus, is often characterized by the regional category “California Funk.” Stimson said this is characterized by “attention to craft, like the ‘go-to-hell attitude‘ of the Funk sensibility … [which] stood as a California counterpoint to the ‘deskilling‘ or de-emphasis of artistic craft.“
Arneson’s sculpture “The Palace at 9 a.m.,” a glazed, ceramic Davis-style home, sits at the supreme center of the Pasadena exhibition. Neri’s crudely crafted nude sculptures stand throughout the room with a darker feeling that contrasts with the livelier, more colorful surrounding work.
Other works, such as Wiley’s textual-centric prints, take a much more obscure approach to iconoclasm and social criticism. Thiebaud comes across as the father of the exhibition, with plain, simple realism that truly distinguishes his work from that of the other artists.
“They were all very original in their approaches to subject matter, but also they were brilliant, virtuoso technicians in traditional media,” Ruda said.
And funky or not, it all mixes together. Their freedom at UC Davis was likely their strongest bond, and if anything, the artists had a lot of fun with it.
You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Faculty is on display in the Pasadena Museum of California Art, located at 490 East Union Street in Pasadena, CA. For more information, visit pmcaonline.org.
JUSTIN T. HO can be reached at arts@theaggie.org. XXX
