Latest News
Vallejo Times-Herald: Works from Thiebaud’s personal art collection come home to UCD
April 2, 2024: It is the visual gift that will keep on giving for years, decades and centuries to come.
Art works by internationally known 20th-century luminaries Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Giorgio Morandi, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso are newly part of the fine arts collection at the University of California, Davis.
Squarecylinder: Bloody Testaments to Female Resilience
Feb. 25, 2024: We see a lot in the news these days about Iran, none of it good. From proxy wars to domestic political repression to clandestine nuclear weapons programs, it’s a succession of bleak images. Shiva Ahmadi, an Iranian émigré, doesn’t alter that composite picture, but she offers something of a counternarrative, reminding us of the myriad ways beauty and terror can collide and intermingle.
UC Davis College of Letters & Science: Working Out the Personal and Political in Paint with Shiva Ahmadi
Jan. 17, 2024: Shiva Ahmadi’s art encompasses and expresses her personal and political concerns, anxieties, fears and joys. But her art is not polemical nor pedantic, nor so personal that it cannot connect with others.
CapRadio: Smokey Bear — and Californians’ relationship with fire — gets an update in UC Davis art exhibition
Jan. 19, 2024: If you’re driving on Interstate 80 between Sacramento and Davis, you might spot a billboard displaying an animal wildfire mascot. But it isn’t Smokey Bear.
It’s Burnie the Bobcat, with a new slogan: Only you can decide our fiery future.
Squarecylinder: Deborah Butterfield @ Manetti Shrem: Peerless sculptor takes a star turn at her alma mater
Jan. 7, 2024: For half a century, Deborah Butterfield, 74, has explored equine anatomy in ways never before seen. Whether made of branches, mud, sticks, scrap metal, rebar, driftwood, barbed wire or cast bronze, her sculptures speak as vividly of life as they do of death. Shot-through yet seemingly solid, these apparitional forms reveal an uncommon kinship with her subjects, one that, when yoked to a mastery of materials, yields a beguiling contradiction: abstract sculptures that look as convincing as any of the horses you might see grazing on the artist’s properties in Montana and Hawaii.
San Francisco Chronicle: 18 visual art events to put on your calendar in 2024
Dec. 27: This first mid-career solo West Coast museum exhibition of paintings by UC Davis Professor of Art Shiva Ahmadi focuses on the female figure and her exploration of alterative world where women have agency beyond the conventional aesthetic and moral binaries.
Squarecylinder: Best 0f 2023
Dec. 10: Mike Henderson @ Manetti Shrem and Haines. For decades, the East Bay artist’s work has centered on luxuriant, richly hued abstract paintings. These two exhibitions enlarged our view by showing him to be not only one of the hardest-hitting protest artists and experimental filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s but also a remarkable collagist whose creations hinted at Afro-Futurism.
Nob Hill Gazette: The Manetti Shrem Museum Honors Deborah Butterfield and Clint Reilly with the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion
Nov. 27: The biggest night of the year for the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art took place on October 21, with an autumnal gala to celebrate the museum’s relationships with both artists and art champions, relationships that enable the museum to bring world-class exhibitions to — and beyond — the UC Davis community.
Vacaville Reporter / Vallejo Times-Herald: Activist printmaker Montoya’s works in two major NorCal museum shows
Sept. 26: Malaquias Montoya, a longtime Elmira resident known as a founder of the Bay Area social serigraphy movement of the 1960s, has never had two shows at major museums at the same time, he said.
That will change, however, with “Malaquias Montoya and the Legacies of a Printed Resistance,” which opens Sunday and continues to May 6 at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UCD and, beginning Oct. 6 and through June 30, “Por el Pueblo: The Legacy and Influence of Malaquias Montoya” in the Great Hall of the Oakland Museum of California.
Sactown Magazine: Horses of a Different Color
September 2023: When is a horse not a horse? When it’s a bronze abstract by acclaimed sculptor and UC Davis alum Deborah Butterfield, whose work the Manetti Shrem Museum is celebrating this fall with a larger-than-life retrospective.
San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area art in fall 2023: Rich offerings in visual art
Sept. 6, 2023: It’s a homecoming for contemporary sculptor Deborah Butterfield (well-known for her found material equine sculptures) as the UC Davis graduate gets her first exhibition following her Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center at the university’s Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Next Avenue: Mike Henderson: Before and After the Fire
July 11, 2023: When Mike Henderson showed up at art school in 1965, the only one he found that would accept a Black man, he felt like he had come home. After getting his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), he taught for more than 40 years at the University of California, Davis.
Artforum: Warhol Foundation Awards Grants Totaling $4 Million
July 6, 2023: The Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis Professor and Department Chair of Asian American Studies Susette Min and Amy Sadao are among the 49 recipients of the Warhol Foundation's spring 2023 grants.
Spectrum News 1: Mike Henderson's provocative art exhibition sheds light on racial injustice sheds light on racial injustice
July 4, 2023: It’s ironic to think acclaimed painter Mike Henderson loved teaching his craft at UC Davis for over 30 years, after he himself despised his schooling in his native Missouri, and dropped out because of racial remarks from a teacher.
San Francisco Chronicle: Fire destroyed 20 years of Mike Henderson's work. But it also turned his art in a new direction
July 2, 2023: Mike Henderson believes in moving forward. Throughout his 50-plus years creating art, he’s been driven by what he calls “the great question: Why am I here?”
Artforum: Mike Henderson / Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum
June 1, 2023: A number of the deeply political and at times terrifying images that appear in this early-career retrospective, “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire: 1965–1985,” were painted by the now seventy-nine-year-old artist while he was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. Some of these works are extraordinary in their combination of panoramic scale, creative ambition, and relentless brutality.
The Brooklyn Rail: Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965–1985
March 2023: The horrific killing of Tyre Nichols is a reminder that, for Black Americans without badges, the nation has always been on fire. This reality is viscerally present in the early figurative works of painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson.
Frieze: Mike Henderson’s Heated ‘Protest Paintings’ Re-Emerge From the Flames
Feb. 24: The artist discusses his shift from figurative painting to abstraction and the studio fire that consumed his artworks depicting the violence and social justice of 1960s-era California.
ARTnews: An Odyssey of Fire: Nearly Destroyed in a Blaze, Mike Henderson’s Long-Lost Paintings About the Rage of the ’70s Reemerge
Feb. 13: In 1985 Mike Henderson’s studio caught on fire. All the paintings he made during the 1960s and ’70s, into which Henderson poured the fear and angst of the era, were destroyed—or so it seemed.
Read the PDF version.
The Guardian: 'I could have died': how an artist rebuilt his career after a studio fire
Feb. 2: Artist Mike Henderson knows the purging, clarifying effects of conflagration. In 1985 a blaze ripped through his home studio, damaging much of his work from the previous two decades. But that moment of destruction was also one of creation.
Read the PDF version.
Forbes: Mike Henderson's American Odyssey On View At University of California, Davis
Jan. 31: "... Love it or Leave it, I Will Love it if You Leave it from 1976 could just as easily have been painted last month in response to those believing anything other than blind devotion to America’s history of racism, inequality and abuse of land and people be met with banishment."
Read the PDF version.
Sacramento Bee: His works feared lost, pioneering painter Mike Henderson’s art rises in new UC Davis show
Jan. 30: His works were destroyed in a studio fire. Many more paintings were long believed lost until their improbable discovery just two years ago. The story of vanguard Black artist and UC Davis professor emeritus Mike Henderson’s surviving works would be compelling on its own. But “Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985,” opening publicly on Monday at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art on the University of California, Davis, campus — Henderson’s first U.S. solo exhibit in 20 years and five years in the making — takes that story further.
Squarecylinder: The Dialectical Journey of Mike Henderson
February: Two overlapping exhibitions — a 20-year survey at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art (co-curated by Sampada Aranke and Dan Nadel) and another at Haines Gallery — expand our view, revealing sides of (Mike) Henderson little known beyond the cognoscenti. Who knew, for example, that in the mid-1960s, Henderson created gut-wrenching works of political protest followed by films that probed the legacy of colonialism, slavery, white supremacy and Black identity?
Sactown: “By Any Means Necessary, I Will Keep Being an Artist.”
January/February issue: Painter. Bluesman. Filmmaker. Educator. After retiring in 2012 from UC Davis, where he was an art professor for 43 years—and on the eve of a solo show at the Manetti Shrem Museum—Mike Henderson reflects on shining shoes as a young man in Missouri, seeing his soul in Van Gogh's Potato Eaters, believing he had lost decades' worth of paintings in a fire, and securing his place in one of the greatest university art departments ever assembled.
Widewalls: The Manetti Shrem Museum to Present Mike Henderson’s First U.S. Solo Museum Exhibition in 20 Years
Jan. 9: Mike Henderson is probably one of the most distinguished figures in the generation of Afro-American artists who emerged in the 1970s. Well known as a musician, filmmaker, and influential lecturer at the UC Davis art faculty, throughout the decades, the artist has produced a body of work that has articulated constant demand for social justice with an emphasis on the Black experience.
San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area visual arts scene stacked with new shows, anniversary celebrations for 2023
Dec. 28: The acclaimed East Bay artist is being celebrated at both the Haines Gallery and Manetti Shrem Museum this January. The painter, blues musician and filmmaker was initially known for more figurative protest works before moving into abstraction later in his career.
Alta Journal: Mike Henderson's Personal Renaissance
Dec. 22: Now late in his career, the Bay Area artist is seeing his paintings praised as much for their craft and creativity as for their social critique and cultural representations.
Squarecylinder: Best of 2022
Dec. 14: No exhibition of Black artists in recent memory has so effectively probed the interlinked themes of race, gender, identity and historical invisibility. Culled from the collection of Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi and weighted in favor of painting, it featured a mix of rising stars and established figures strategically juxtaposed to signal a passing of the art-historical torch. The result was a succession of epiphanies that begged for a sequel.
KQED: The Best Art I Saw in 2022
Dec. 7: Most Illusionistic 2D Works: Hollowell’s paintings and drawings are tricksters; digital images do them no justice. The paintings are eye-poppingly three dimensional, while the drawings, rendered in soft pastels and ringed with the artist’s notes to herself, look just as substantial under the museum lights.
Vanity Fair: Inside Antwaun Sargent’s Hyperspeed Art-World Ascent
Nov. 21: The Gagosian staffer has crashed contemporary art’s most guarded gates, elevating dozens of Black artists along the way. In the process he’s become the most buzzed-about curator-gallerist on the scene, whether the establishment likes it or not.
Juxtapoz: Loie Hollowell: Tick Tock Belly Clock @ Manetti Shrem
Nov. 14: “It starts with trying… to make these sexual graphic cartoony sketches in my notebook, then abstracting that and making it more geometric, more abstract,” Loie Hollowell told Juxtapoz a few years ago.
Nob Hill Gazette: Manetti Shrem Museum Honors Artist Mike Henderson
Nov. 8: There was no singing the blues at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum on October 22 when Mike Henderson, a pioneering African American artist, was heralded at the museum’s gala with its highest honor: the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion.
Davis Enterprise: Rebuilding community at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
Sept. 18: In 2012, Rachel Teagle, founding director of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, came to UC Davis to create an art museum from the ground up. Founded with a $10 million donation from philanthropists Shrem and Manetti Shrem, along with other significant donations, the museum opened four years later.
UC Davis Arts Blog: Get Your Art Spark at the Museum's Carol and Gerry Parker Art Studio
Sept. 6: Looking for a quick art break or an afternoon-long exploration to spark your creativity? Swing by the Carol and Gerry Parker Art Studio in the Manetti Shrem Museum on weekend afternoons for Art Spark, a hands-on art program where you can experiment with all sorts of techniques and mediums.
San Francisco Chronicle: Fall abundance makes for an exciting visual art season
August 24: California-born artist Loie Hollowell will be the subject of her first U.S. museum exhibition at the UC Davis museum.
Squarecylinder: Black and Proud: Masterpieces from the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art
Aug. 22, 2022: In a scramble to award long-overdue recognition to Black artists, galleries and museums over the past few years have at times appeared to be tripping over their shoelaces in an attempt to correct historical wrongs. The upside for Black artists is that doors once closed have now been thrown wide-open, ushering in what feels like a renaissance, akin to what we saw in the 1960s when the British Invasion prompted an upsurge of interest in Black music, showing white Americans, many for the first time, their own cultural heritage.
In the art world, powerful evidence of a similar trend comes not from exhibitions organized by big museums but from individuals like Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, collectors, whose family treasures are now on tour in an exhibition called Young Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists. ... This core sampling represents a quest for understanding on the part of Bernard Lumpkin, one half of the couple to whom these works belong and whose queries about his mixed-race parentage and queerness, he says, motivated him to begin collecting.
Bay City News: 'Young, Gifted and Black' traveling exhibition lands at the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis
Aug. 10: The exhibition’s West Coast debut also allows Northern Californians to see a largely East Coast-based group of artists in a venue closer to home. “Anytime we can bring more of these artists that aren’t based here and expand everyone’s notion of being able to see what’s happening in the art world and see different kinds of art, I think that’s really important,” Kantor said.
Sacramento News & Review: Young Gifted and Black exhibition at U.C. Davis reassess narratives around an American experience
Aug. 2: Passing through the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, there is a seemingly empty moving box sitting on a four-wheeled dolly. Surrounding it are paintings and sculptures placed against broad, white walls. The box is taped open and, inside, awaits a pink sheet taped to its lid that warns teasingly, “caution, art below.”
The Sacramento Observer: UC Davis Exhibit Showcases Black Art
Aug. 2: West Coast meets East Coast as a new exhibit brings the work of “gifted” Black artists to new audiences this week. ... The OBSERVER spoke with Kenyatta Hinkle about being included in the exhibit, her work and her place in the current art movement.
The Vacaville Reporter: Manetti Shrem Museum: At UCD, an expansive art show casts an eye on ‘blackness’
July 29: Featuring works by some 50 artists, the show — a traveling exhibit making the rounds primarily at college and university galleries — brings together mostly the coming generation of contemporary artists who are not only addressing the traditional art canon but also finding ways to cast an eye on the history and meaning of “blackness” in their work.
Capital Public Radio's Insight: Young, Gifted and Black
July 27: The contemporary art world has largely been viewed through a white male lens. However, in recent years, a social reckoning in representation has shifted the art world’s focus to feature and uplift a new generation of Black gifted artists. A powerful exhibition that has been touring exclusively on the East Coast will make its West Coast debut at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art in Davis.
Sactown Magazine: True Colors
July 2022: To herald the July 28 opening—and West Coast debut—of Young, Gifted and Black at UC Davis’ Manetti Shrem Museum, the lobby has been glowing with a poignant message since March: I Belong Here, a neon work by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan.
Surface Magazine: 'Young, Gifted and Black'
Co-curated by artists and writers Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff, this traveling exhibition highlights the impact of Black artists over the past 25 years.
San Francisco Chronicle: 9 Bay Area art exhibits you can't miss this summer
June 19: ‘Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art’ : This traveling exhibition celebrates more than 50 artists of African descent who are exploring identity, politics and art history in their practices. Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Eric N. Mack, Troy Michie and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones are among those whose work from the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art will be on display.
Dateline: Artists Honored as Graduate Exhibition Opens
June 7: UC Davis’ arts and humanities students were celebrated by their peers, professors, friends and families at the June 2 opening of the annual multidisciplinary showcase at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
Hyperallergic: UC Davis Humanities Graduate Show Shines Light on Art, Music, Political Science, and More
June 3, 2022: University of California, Davis, College of Letters and Science graduate students are sharing their work with the public this month as the multidisciplinary Arts & Humanities 2022 Graduate Exhibition returns to the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art following two years of virtual exhibitions.
Good Day Sacramento: Going, Going, Gong!
April 29, 2022: The beloved Gong artwork is moving to a new public home after eight years on the UC Davis campus as a long-term loan. Julissa got to ring it one more time.
The California Aggie: Manetti Shrem Museum of Art receives recognition as one of the best museum buildings of the past 100 years
April 14, 2022: UC Davis' very own Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art was recently named one of the 25 best museum buildings of the past 100 years by ARTnews. ... Both intended as a place to view art and as a place for community to come and unleash its creative side, the museum was created with purpose in mind from its conception.
Squarecylinder: The Art of Resistance @ Manetti Shrem Museum
March 3, 2022: Visiting From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest from the Kramlich Collection on the day Putin began his full-scale attack on Ukraine made the show, already timely, feel even more so. Curated by Susie Kantor and designed by UC Davis design undergrads overseen by Professor of Design Brett Snyder, the exhibition includes six video installations, each by a different artist, dealing with acts of government-sanctioned repression and/or resistance to it in various national or historical contexts.
Capital Public Radio's Insight: UC Davis Museum Receives Architectural Recognition
March 2, 2022: Hear Founding Director Rachel Teagle and Manetti Shrem Museum lead architect Florian Idenburg of SO - IL on Cap Radio's Insight program discussing the Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years honor from ARTnews.
ARTnews: The 25 Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years
Jan. 24, 2022: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at University of California, Davis: This sun-filled museum was designed by the up-and-coming New York firm SO-IL, spearheaded by Dutch architect and Harvard professor Florian Idenburg and also responsible for the newly opened Amant Foundation in Brooklyn. The building’s main focal point is an undulating canopy comprising grids of stretched aluminum beams that cascades over the roof and also shades some outdoor spaces. The firm sees this design as “open and permeable,” and says the canopy’s pattern was inspired by the fields of agriculture that surround the northern California campus.
UC Davis Dateline: Wayne Thiebaud's Death Brings Outpouring of Tributes to UC Davis Artist
Jan. 11, 2022: The death of University of California, Davis, Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud on Dec. 25 brought an outpouring of memories and tributes, critical acclaim for the artist’s remarkable life and career, and news of a significant gift to UC Davis.
Capital Public Radio's Insight, Remembering Wayne Thiebaud & Joan Didion
Jan. 3, 2021: With guest Rachel Teagle
San Francisco Examiner: For Wayne Thiebaud, happiness was a solid morning of painting in his Sacramento studio
Dec. 28, 2021, by Jeremy Stone: Wayne Thiebaud was not Gary Cooper or Cary Grant — but in 1961, he strode through Manhattan and into my parents’ life as if he were. His arrival from Sacramento at the gallery of my father, Allan Stone, was one of dramatic caution. Wayne had the quiet elegance of a film star who had delivered the goods and would be leaving soon, after a visit to the Frick and Whitney museums.
His interest was to look at art, think about drawing, and work on paintings. He was not much for small talk. He was sure no one would be interested in his work. His lack of hubris and pomposity was always remarkable for an artist of his caliber.
The Sacramento Bee: 'A great gift to the world': California, art community pay tribute to Wayne Thiebaud
Dec. 27, 2021: At University of California, Davis, Thiebaud’s teaching home for more than 40 years, and where his multi-generational impact extends from its galleries’ walls to the legion of artists he taught, mentored and influenced over the decades, the loss was profound.
New York Magazine: Wayne Thiebaud, 1920-2021
Dec. 27, 2021: Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of cakes, bathers, landscapes, paint cans, pastries, and cityscapes represent a luscious American sublime.
Calling him a “California painter,” as many do, would be like calling Albert Pinkham Ryder a “New York painter.” Thiebaud’s work is universal. His hallucinatory surfaces, uncanny perceptual intelligence, thick buildups of rich color, hard light, luminosity, tonal control, and Hopperesque remove create eye-worms that make you meld with the paintings, participate in how they were made.
Artnet.com: The American Painter Wayne Thiebaud, Who Transformed Cakes Into Symbols of Joy and Longing, Has Died at 101
December 27, 2021: An exhibition this spring at the university’s Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art demonstrated the breadth of his influence as an educator, featuring work by Andrea Bowers, Bruce Nauman, Robert Colescott, Alex Israel, and Jonas Wood, among others.
UC Davis statement on the passing of Wayne Thiebaud
Dec. 26, 2021: The communities of the University of California, Davis, are deeply saddened by the passing of artist and Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud on Dec. 25 at the age of 101. He taught at and served UC Davis for more than 40 years. His brilliance, talent, warmth and generosity leave a legacy that will live on and enrich our campus and the world for generations to come. Read the full statement, with tributes from Chancellor Gary S. May, Founding Director Rachel Teagle and Department of Art and Art History Co-Chair Annabeth Rosen about Thiebaud's importance to the UC Davis community, by clicking the link above. Read the museum's Facebook post here.
Honoring Wayne Thiebaud
Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud spoke with Manetti Shrem Museum Founding Director Rachel Teagle shortly before his 101st birthday, which was celebrated at the museum's November 13 gala.
New York Times: Wayne Thiebaud, Playful Painter of the Everyday, Dies at 101
Wayne Thiebaud, the California-based painter whose lush, dreamy landscapes and luminous pictures of hot dogs, deli counters, marching band majorettes and other charmed relics of midcentury Americana were complex meditations on life and painting, and represented one of the most affecting and individual variations on 20th-century Pop Art, died on Saturday at his home in Sacramento. He was 101.
San Francisco Chronicle: Celebrating Wayne Thiebaud’s influence as artist turns 101 at Manetti Shrem Museum
Oct. 30, 2021: [Thiebaud's] larger reach in the world of painting is the subject of an exhibition at UC Davis’ Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, titled “Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation,” on view through Nov. 12 — closing just three days before he turns 101. The Sacramento artist, who still paints every day, will be honored along with the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, which will receive the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion at the museum’s annual gala the weekend of Thiebaud’s birthday.
San Francisco Chronicle: Manuel Neri, groundbreaking sculptor and member of famed art faculty at UC Davis, dies at 91
Oct. 21, 2021: When the Bay Area Figurative art movement radicalized painting in the 1950s, a quiet art student named Manuel Neri sought to push it even further. Instead of putting the human form on canvas, he sculpted it in plaster — life-sized, head to toe and painted.
It was a technique that started a new approach to sculpture and elevated Neri, the son of Mexican immigrants who entered art school on the G.I. Bill, to a level nearing that of his instructors at the California School of Fine Arts, the eminent artists Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff.
Capital Public Radio, Insight: A UC Davis Wayne Thiebaud-inspired exhibit
Oct. 4, 2021: Susie Kantor, exhibit curator at Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and former student Vonn Cummings Sumner discuss the new Wayne Thiebaud exhibit celebrating the legacy of the 100-year-old UC Davis professor emeritus by highlighting contemporary artists inspired by Thiebaud — including a selection of his former students.
SFGate: Explore the evolving influence of Wayne Thiebaud in new Manetti Shrem Museum exhibition
Sept. 13, 2021: Manetti Shrem Museum Founding Director Rachel Teagle discusses its unique evolution, the forms influence can take, and what makes this exhibition so relevant to the current moment. Read more...
Squarecylinder: Beyond funk
Sept. 9, 2021: Three exhibitions promise to expand our understanding of [Adeliza] McHugh’s contributions. The first, New Flavors: Collected at the Candy Store/Selections from the Manetti Shrem Museum – developed in conjunction with two similarly themed exhibitions opening at the Crocker Art Museum January 30 and at Sac State March 14 — offers a refreshing and stimulating snapshot of the gallery’s legacy.” Read more...
Square Cylinder: The Emancipatory Formalism of Arnold J. Kemp
July 4, 2021: Ask Arnold Joseph Kemp to define Blackness, and he might respond, as it he did in an interview conducted earlier this year, by reciting a poem he wrote called Fire and Ice. It contains what I’m guessing are more than one hundred stanzas. Each begins with the words “It is black,” and proceeds with an A-through-Z litany of rejoinders that includes references to books, films, corporate brands, nature, food, sex, clothing, mundane objects, overworked cliches and much else. This free-associative marathon lasts about eight minutes, and by the end of it, you feel as if the artist has compiled a comprehensive guide to all things Black: one that affirms race but also refuses to be constrained by it. Read more...
Sactown Magazine: A Lasting Impression
June 1, 2021: The atmospheric pitter-patter of the rain pelting Ann Harrold Taylor’s Berkeley art studio summons a flood of wistful memories, specifically of the day she met legendary Sacramento painter Wayne Thiebaud. The occasion for this look-back is an upcoming exhibit at UC Davis’ Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. A spin on the traditional retrospective, Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation celebrates the UCD professor emeritus’s recent 100th birthday through the works of 19 contemporaries, and former students and teaching assistants who have been forever imprinted—in ways big and small, on the canvas and off—by his art and practice. Read more...
Art Patrons Create New Exhibitions Endowment at Manetti Shrem Museum
June 1, 2021: The art scene at the University of California, Davis, just got even better.
In their first major commitment to UC Davis, philanthropists Kellie and Jeff Hepper ’79 have pledged $1 million to create the Hepper Family Exhibition Fund, an endowed gift to support the core exhibition work of the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art.
This is the largest gift made to the museum by an alumnus, and it will help create public exhibitions and exhibition-related programming for all to enjoy at the Manetti Shrem Museum. Read more...
Good Day Sacramento
June 1, 2021: The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at the University of California, Davis, will reopen to the public with advance timed tickets beginning June 3, 2021. The museum looks forward to welcoming visitors back in accordance with COVID-19 campus protocols prioritizing health and safety. Watch video.
The Backdrop Podcast: Rachel Teagle on the Reopening the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
May, 2021: UC Davis’s fine arts museum is reopening to the public after being closed for more than a year because of the pandemic. The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is reopening on June 3rd, following campus COVID-19 protocols.
In this episode of The Backdrop, the museum’s founding director, Rachel Teagle, discusses the institution's new exhibitions, how the museum has been weathering the pandemic and how the yearlong closure helped the staff focus on issues of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Artforum: PASSAGES - William T. Wiley (1937–2021)
May 10, 2021: To grasp the enormousness of Wiley as an artist is to never really grasp it—the kind of ca. 1960 pop-Zen paradox Wiley enjoyed. So let’s run through his life: grows up in Richland, Washington, his father having poured concrete for the Manhattan Project; has a high-school art teacher who makes the Yakama Nation a part of his students’ lives; in 1958, enters California School of Fine Art already understanding the terrible power of human ingenuity, the import of nonwhite traditions, the captivity and destruction of same, and has a particular penchant for wordplay from a childhood of ravenously consuming the great American commercial-art landscape. He graduates in 1962 with a master’s degree, moves to Marin County, and teaches at the University of California, Davis. Read more...
The New York Times: William T. Wiley, ‘Funk Artist’ Who Spurned Convention, Dies at 83
May 5, 2021: William T. Wiley, the influential artist and educator who helped found the funk art movement and establish the San Francisco Bay Area art scene as an unfiltered alternative to what he saw as the flagrant commercialism of New York, died on April 25 in a hospital in Greenbrae, Calif. He was 83. Read more...
Nob Hill Gazette: The Interview: Mike Henderson Has More to Do
May 1, 2021: Mike Henderson is soft spoken, kind hearted and wickedly talented. His work has been exhibited at some of the most prestigious museums in the world: the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; London’s Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to name a few.
Growing up in the 1950s in Marshall, Missouri, Henderson couldn’t imagine this kind of success in his wildest dreams. As he tells it, he grew up dirt poor and severely dyslexic, feeling like he never fit in. Read more...
Nob Hill Gazette: Life After Benezra
May 1, 2021: The Gazette recently checked in with artists, academics, curators and critics from various corners of the art world, posing the question: With Neal Benezra’s imminent departure from SFMOMA after 19 years at the helm, what should the museum be looking for in its next leader? Read more...
San Francisco Chronicle: William T. Wiley, multifaceted artist and educator integral to Bay Area art scene, dies at 83
April 28, 2021: William T. Wiley — a founder of the Bay Area Funk art movement who expanded into every medium and style of creation from watercolor to printmaking to giant sculptures in a career that lasted from 1960 until just a few months ago — died Sunday, April 25, at Marin General Hospital. Read more...
Square Cylinder: Irving Marcus (1929-2021)
March 14, 2021: Irving Marcus, an artist and educator, died in Sacramento on March 2. He was 91. His death, from complications of a heart attack and pneumonia, was announced by Sam Parker, his Los Angeles dealer. A key figure in the Sacramento art community, Marcus fostered highly influential exchanges between Chicago, San Francisco, Davis and his hometown. Read more...
Nob Hill Gazette: The Academic Artist: At 100, Wayne Thiebaud is Still Making Art, Teaching — and Influencing
March 2, 2021: Before the art world’s hoopla last fall honoring the 100th birthday (November 15) of painter Wayne Thiebaud, the lionized artist was doing what he’s done every day for the last 70-plus years: wielding a paintbrush in his studio in midtown Sacramento. Read more...
Square Cylinder: Best of 2020
Dec. 31, 2020: Stephen Kaltenbach @ Manetti Shrem: This meticulously researched and beautifully presented exhibition gathered representative samples from the essential phases of Kaltenbach’s career: the minimalist ceramic sculptures and architectural blueprints he made as a student, the Time Capsules that were the show’s centerpiece, his infamous series of Artforum ads, the documents detailing ephemeral and unrealized efforts and large-scale paintings and works on paper that point to the artist’s life-long obsession with mortality. Read more ...
Sacramento Bee: Wayne Thiebaud turns 100 today: Sacramento celebrates its best-known artist
November 2020: The influences on Wayne Thiebaud, the legendary Sacramento artist who marks his 100th birthday Sunday, are vast: there’s Willem DeKooning’s abstract expressionism, Richard Diebenkorn’s figurative works as well as commercial and comic art.
But don’t forget the Sacramento region where Thiebaud made his home and his name in the art world. Read more...
UC Davis: Young, Gifted and Black — The Book and the Art — Subject of Talk
November 2020: Art Collector Bernard Lumpkin explained why he took on the role as a patron and collector of Black art in a virtual event hosted last month by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis. Read more...
Sacramento Bee: Arts roundup - Crocker hosts Thiebaud exhibits, Shrem talks race, B Street goes live
October 2020: Claudia Rankine will speak about her book, “Just Us: An American Conversation,” in a virtual event through the Manetti Shrem Museum on Nov. 4. Rankine’s new book looks at white privilege, liberal politics and more. Read more...
UC Davis Talk: Addressing the Power of Untold Stories Through Photography
October 2020: In a remote event hosted recently by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and other sponsors, Frazier — whose work features voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American narrative — told her audience about the New York Photo League, who through their art, exposed the struggles of the American working class. She issued a call for action, too. Read more...
Sactown Magazine: The Sweet Life
October 2020: On the eve of his 100th birthday, Wayne Thiebaud—the Sacramento painter best known for his evocative portrayals of desserts that look good enough to eat— talks about the new pieces he’s working on (yes, he’s still wielding a brush—and a tennis racket!), his favorite kind of pie, and why, despite his status as one of America’s most important living artists, he still sees himself as “just an old art teacher.” Read more...
San Francisco Chronicle: Getting to know Wayne Thiebaud as the painter turns 100
October 2020: On Nov. 15, 2020, the exalted Sacramento still life and landscape painter Wayne Thiebaud will turn 100. His centennial is being celebrated with major exhibitions at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. A third show is scheduled to open in January in the art museum at UC Davis. Read more...