Past Exhibitions
Arts & Humanities 2025 Graduate Exhibition
UC Davis graduate students from a range of arts and humanities disciplines explore new ways of seeing and understanding the past, present and future in this annual multidisciplinary showcase. The exhibition gives students hands-on experience in installing and exhibiting their work in a museum setting.
Organized by the Manetti Shrem Museum in collaboration with Art and Design faculty and the graduate students of the College of Letters and Science.
On view June 5–22, 2025
Learn more about this year's graduate participants
Through Their Eyes: Selections from the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection
This exhibition brings together painting, photography, sculpture and video by some of the most prominent artists working today, as well as rising new voices. Spanning 45 years of art making, Through Their Eyes spotlights the world as experienced by 30 fiercely original and groundbreaking women artists – and is the first presentation of the renowned collection in the United States.
Featured Artists
Giulia Andreani, Vanessa Beecroft, Berlinde De Bruyckere, June Crespo, Ana Elisa Egreja, Jana Euler, Isa Genzken, Nan Goldin, Mona Hatoum, Barbara Kruger, Zoe Leonard, Sherrie Levine, Sarah Lucas, Jumana Manna, Wangari Mathenge, Danielle Mckinney, Tracey Moffatt, Jill Mulleady, Shirin Neshat, Katja Novitskova, Paulina Olowska, Catherine Opie, Christina Quarles, Cindy Sherman, Anj Smith, Rosemarie Trockel, Andra Ursuta, Hellen van Meene, Ambera Wellmann and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Curated by Susie Kantor, associate curator and exhibition department head
On view January 26–June 22, 2025
Ruby Neri: Taking the Deep Dive
Ruby Neri: Taking the Deep Dive is the first solo museum exhibition of the artist’s work. An established voice in contemporary ceramics, Neri sculpts brightly colored personal motifs and uninhibited female nudes — playing with familiar forms and monumental scale to challenge our expectations.
Curated by Ginny Duncan, curatorial assistant
On view January 26–May 5, 2025
Light into Density:
Abstract Encounters 1920s–1960s
From the Collection of Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem
Start with dedicated art lovers and philanthropists Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem. Add 15 works from their collection by world-renowned artists — including Salvador Dalí, Vassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Francis Bacon. Top off with 32 UC Davis undergraduate and graduate students studying studio art, art history and design. Result: A unique exhibition entirely curated and designed by students. The profound and exhilarating works in the exhibition, most on public view for the first time in decades, invite visitors to encounter the deeply personal nature of abstraction and to create their own interpretations.
Curated by students in the Fall 2023 Exhibition Practicum course led by Assistant Professor Alexandra Sofroniew and designed by students in the Winter 2024 Exhibition Design course led by Professor Timothy McNeil and Associate Professor Brett Snyder.
On view September 19, 2024–May 5, 2025
Phillip Byrne, Beatriz Cortez, Kang Seung Lee, Candice Lin: Entangled Writing
Entangled Writing features four California artists working in sculpture and installation: Phillip Byrne (M.F.A. ’22), Associate Professor of Art Beatriz Cortez, Kang Seung Lee and Candice Lin. Each artist will present a new installation specially commissioned for this exhibition — the largest group of works the Manetti Shrem Museum has commissioned at one time. All four artists focus on underrecognized histories and those in the margins while simultaneously envisioning new, speculative futures.
Curated by Susie Kantor, associate curator and exhibition department head
On view August 8–December 29, 2024
Read 'Entangled Writing' Exhibit Elicits New Ways of Thinking About Communication: Letters & Science magazine
Read the news release
Ritual Clay: Cathy Lu, Paz G, Maryam Yousif
Ritual Clay brings together recent ceramic work by Cathy Lu, Paz G and Maryam Yousif. These contemporary Bay Area artists are united by their shared interest in clay as a link to the past and as a conduit of cultural knowledge. They channel ancient archetypes and spiritual mythologies as a way to reckon with inherited histories. For each of them, there is power in clay’s iconographic as well as ritualistic past that opens a path for exploration of their own origin stories.
Curated by Ginny Duncan, curatorial assistant
On view September 19–December 29, 2024
Arts & Humanities 2024 Graduate Exhibition
UC Davis graduate students from a range of arts and humanities disciplines explore new ways of seeing and understanding the past, present and future in this annual multidisciplinary showcase. Work from 25 UC Davis graduate students in anthropology, art history, art studio, comparative literature, creative writing, design, English, and Spanish and Portuguese is represented. The exhibition gives students hands-on experience in installing and exhibiting their work in a museum setting.
Organized by the Manetti Shrem Museum in collaboration with Art and Design faculty and the graduate students of the College of Letters and Science.
On view June 6–24, 2024
Opening: 5:30–9 p.m. Thursday, June 6
Learn more about this year's participants and award winners.
Deborah Butterfield: P.S. These are not horses
Now Extended!
For more than 50 years, Deborah Butterfield (’71, M.F.A. ’73) has explored the horse — both its form and presence. And yet, Deborah Butterfield: P.S. These are not horses encourages viewers to understand her sculpture as more than representations of the equine world. Taken from the closing line of a poem by Butterfield’s mentor, William T. Wiley, the title emphasizes the sculptor’s commitment to abstraction and her profound investment in material experimentation. The artist’s first solo museum exhibition in California since 1996, P.S. These are not horses surveys Butterfield’s career from her most recent wildfire sculptures to rare early works including ceramics made while studying at UC Davis.
Curated by Rachel Teagle, founding director
On view October 1, 2023–June 30, 2024
Shiva Ahmadi: Strands of Resilience
UC Davis Professor of Art Shiva Ahmadi uses painting as a form of storytelling, combining luminous colors and mystical beings with violent imagery to draw attention to global issues of migration, war and brutality against marginalized peoples. Focusing on the female figure, this exhibition of all new paintings — Ahmadi’s first midcareer solo museum exhibition on the West Coast — continues her exploration of alternate worlds where women have agency beyond the binary of the beautiful victim or ugly villain. Through her experimentation with the medium of watercolor, Ahmadi probes what lies hidden beneath the surface of the stories we are told, from ancient myths and childhood memories to the current news cycle.
Curated by Susie Kantor, exhibition department head and associate curator
On view January 28–May 6, 2024
- Read a profile of Shiva Ahmadi
- Read a review of Strands of Resilience
Malaquias Montoya and the Legacies of a Printed Resistance
Activist artist and UC Davis Professor Emeritus Malaquias Montoya embraced political printmaking to advocate for social justice. From his leading position in the social serigraphy movement of the mid-1960s to his tenure at UC Davis from 1989-2008, Montoya has had a multigenerational career as a master printer. His role as a print educator resulted in artistic collaborations and partnerships with featured artists Sandra Fernández, Juan Fuentes, Ester Hernandez, Juan de Dios Mora, Ramiro Rodriguez, Royal Chicano Air Force, Xabi Soto Beleche, Alicia María Siu Bernal and Elyse Doyle-Martinez.
Curated by Claudia Zapata, guest curator
On view October 1, 2023–May 6, 2024
Undercover
Ayanah Moor
Ayanah Moor deploys abstraction as a way to rethink our inherited modes of communication and interpretation of visual art. Her method of “social abstraction” reconsiders how abstraction — a practice miscategorized as one that transcends identity — might be precisely the form for centering identity. In Undercover, the viewer is invited to consider how these recent paintings offer a platform for meaningful questions around race, gender, sexuality and the visual.
Curated by Sampada Aranke (Ph.D. ’13), guest curator
On view October 1, 2023–January 14, 2024
Arts & Humanities 2023 Graduate Exhibition
UC Davis graduate students from a range of arts and humanities disciplines explore new ways of seeing and understanding the past, present and future in this annual multidisciplinary showcase. The exhibition gives students hands-on experience in installing and exhibiting their work in a museum setting.
Organized by the Manetti Shrem Museum in collaboration with Art and Design faculty and the graduate students of the College of Letters and Science.
On view June 8–25, 2023
Featuring work by:
Hafsa Akter • Valeria Araiza • Jordan Benton • Justine Di Fiore • Allison Fulton • Simone Gage • Cristina Gomez • Alberto Hamonet • Grace Hayes • Zehra Ilhan • Hunter Kiley • Xuying Liu • Nilou Maleki • Justin Marsh • Will Maxen • Avital Meshi • Maurice Moore • Sam Rathbun • Jake Rose • Quinessa Stibbins • Alejandra Ruiz Suárez • Eric Taggart • Hannah Thompson • Srđan Tunić • Pachia Lucy Vang • Luka Vergoz • Ofelia Viloche • Marcy Wacker • Sienna Weldon • Rova Cigdem Yilmaz
Press release and video: UC Davis Arts and Humanities Graduate Students’ Wide-Ranging Work Takes Center Stage With Annual Exhibition
Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965–1985
UC Davis Professor Emeritus Mike Henderson’s first solo U.S. museum exhibition in 20 years brings to light the pioneering artist’s rarely seen contributions to the history of contemporary painting and filmmaking, radical Black politics, and the story of California art. The exhibition integrates paintings and films by Henderson that offer new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afro-futurism and surrealism. Challenging the protocols and propriety of art-making in the 20th century, these works depict scenes of anti-Black violence as well as utopian visions and questions of self-making.
Curated by Sampada Aranke (Ph.D. ’13) and Dan Nadel
On view January 30–July 15, 2023 (extended)
Read coverage in the Guardian, ARTnews, Forbes and more on our Latest News page.
Loie Hollowell: Tick Tock Belly Clock
Known primarily for paintings and drawings that map the body through both figuration and abstraction, New York-based artist Loie Hollowell draws from her own life experiences in her work. The first exhibition to focus on her soft pastel drawings, Tick Tock Belly Clock asserts the primacy of drawing within her overall practice as key to making her paintings, while also celebrating them in their own right. The exhibition features all new works made in 2020-21, and speaks directly to the pandemic moment. Hollowell, a rising star in the art world, grew up in Woodland, California, and is the daughter of longtime UC Davis Professor Emeritus David Hollowell.
Curated by Susie Kantor, Manetti Shrem Museum associate curator and exhibition department head
On view September 25, 2022–May 8, 2023
Roy De Forest: Habitats for Travelers
Selections from the Manetti Shrem Museum
First-generation art faculty member and UC Davis Professor Emeritus Roy De Forest (1930-2007) is beloved for his colorful narrative figurative paintings, drawings and prints. Printmaking offered De Forest a means to explore his visual vocabulary — to experiment with the colors, textures and mark-making unique to the medium. Featuring a recent gift of prints from the artist’s estate, Habitats for Travelers explores De Forest’s dedication to the medium over three decades.
Curated by Jenelle Porter, independent curator
On view September 25, 2022–May 8, 2023
Young, Gifted and Black
The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art
Young, Gifted and Black champions an emerging generation of artists of African descent who are exploring identity, politics and art history as they engage with the work of their predecessors across a variety of media. Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Tomashi Jackson, Eric N. Mack, Troy Michie, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones are among the nearly 50 artists featured in this traveling exhibition drawn from the renowned private collection of Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi. I belong here, a neon sculpture by Tavares Strachan, is also on loan from the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Collection and is installed in the Manetti Shrem Museum’s lobby through March 2023.
Curated by Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff
Manetti Shrem Museum presentation organized by Susie Kantor, associate curator and exhibition department head
On view July 28–December 19, 2022
View a virtual conversation with Bernard Lumpkin, curators Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff and Susie Kantor about the book that accompanies the Young, Gifted and Black exhibition.
Visit the Young, Gifted and Black collection website, and read curator Matt Wycoff's essay.
UC Davis graduate students from a range of arts and humanities disciplines explore new ways of seeing and understanding the past, present and future in this annual exhibition. Back on site after two years of virtual exhibitions, this multidisciplinary showcase gives students hands-on experience in installing and exhibiting their work in a museum setting.
Organized by the Manetti Shrem Museum in collaboration with Art and Design faculty and the graduate students of the College of Letters and Science.
Learn more on our dedicated webpage
On view June 2–19, 2022
From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest in the Kramlich Collection
Protest can take varied forms, from active demonstrations to bearing witness to lost histories. From Moment to Movement presents a large-scale exhibition of six video and film installations. Drawn from the renowned Kramlich Collection, the exhibition spans 30 years of new media work, bringing together an international, intergenerational group of contemporary artists — Shiva Ahmadi (UC Davis professor of art), Dara Birnbaum, Kota Ezawa, Theaster Gates, Nalini Malani and Mikhael Subotzky — and exploring ideas of resistance, the role of media in shaping our understanding of events, and the power and politics of viewing.
Curator: Susie Kantor
On view Jan. 27–June 19, 2022
Mary Heilmann: Squaring Davis
Decades before she would become one of North America’s greatest living painters, Mary Heilmann started studying with William T. Wiley at UC Davis and found a place whose unique life-as-art ethos meshed with her spirit and inspired her to keep creating art despite her doubts. This exhibition features Heilmann’s Northern California oeuvre of rarely seen ceramics from the mid-1960s, sculptures and a group of “Davis Square” paintings created in 1977.
Curator: Dan Nadel
On view Jan. 27–May 8, 2022
William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line
From 1962 to 1969, while teaching at the University of California, Davis, William T. Wiley developed a complex methodology and compound symbol language to explore philosophical, environmental and psychological questions across all available media. The results are startling, often beautiful and always engaging. All on the Line will have a special focus on Wiley and his former student Bruce Nauman’s 1965-66 Slant Step project: It will gather for the first time many of the Slant Step objects made by both artists, which epitomized Wiley’s outlook on art and jump-started conceptual art in Northern California. The exhibition derives from five years of curatorial research and a close collaboration with the artist.
Curator: Dan Nadel
On view Jan. 27–May 8, 2022
Andrea Bowers: Education Should Be Free (UC Davis)
Andrea Bowers’ practice centers art and activism, bringing visibility to social movements and the labor inherent to creating change. Her neon installation Education Should Be Free in the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Lobby welcomes visitors and the UC Davis community into a timely dialogue about education and access. Preceding the installation, and during the course of the 21/22 academic year, faculty and students are responding to the work in a series of on-site and online projects. Visit their projects and join the conversation.
On view April 23, 2021–March 20, 2022
Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation
The profound influence of Wayne Thiebaud on a new generation of artists is front and center in this celebration of the longtime UC Davis art professor’s centennial. Nineteen contemporary artists who have been inspired by Thiebaud as a fellow painter, including a selection of his former students, are highlighted. Explore how Thiebaud forecast the future of painting through his personal journey to find meaning and reinvention in the medium’s history, in ways that are both current and timeless.
Curators: Rachel Teagle and Susie Kantor
An exhibition featuring
Andrea Bowers, Julie Bozzi (’74, M.F.A. ’76), Christopher Brown (M.F.A. ’76), Robert Colescott, Gene Cooper, Richard Crozier (M.F.A. ’74), April Glory Funcke (’87, M.F.A. ’89), Fredric Hope, Alex Israel, Grace Munakata (’80, M.F.A. ’85), Bruce Nauman (M.A. ’66 ), Jason Stopa, Vonn Cummings Sumner (’98, M.F.A. ’00), Ann Harrold Taylor (M.F.A. ’85), Michael Tompkins (’81, M.F.A. ’83), Clay Vorhes, Patricia Wall (’72), Jonas Wood and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
On view June 3–November 12, 2021
Working Proof: Wayne Thiebaud as Printmaker
Wayne Thiebaud, Gumball Machine, 1971/2003. Linocut with watercolor hand additions, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Gift of Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud. © 2020 Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Although Wayne Thiebaud is better known as a painter, he has also been a prolific printmaker, working in print for most of his career and producing over 200 designs. Drawn from the university’s Fine Arts Collection, this exhibition features numerous printing “proofs,” many worked by hand, that were created as part of the printmaking process. Shown adjacent to Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation, these works underscore the importance of printmaking in Thiebaud’s artistic practice, as well as his dedication to donating works to the university that can function as teaching tools.
Curator: Quintana Heathman
On view June 3–November 12, 2021
Arnold Joseph Kemp:
I would survive. I could survive. I should survive.
The exhibition’s title, taken from a snapshot of a note in the artist’s studio, references interdisciplinary artist Arnold J. Kemp’s unflinching commitment to a politics embedded within a language of abstraction. His work asks us to consider the sensorial gestures that form the self and a people, the personal and the political, the historical and the present. Kemp stages encounters that invite the viewer into the artist’s aesthetic considerations of himself and the world that makes him. It is within this space that we are able to join him in considering how we are made and how we make ourselves.
Guest Curator: Sampada Aranke (Ph.D. ’13)
On view June 3–November 12, 2021
New Flavors: Collected at the Candy Store | Selections from the Manetti Shrem Museum
Led by aspiring confectioner turned gallerist Adeliza McHugh, the intimate Candy Store Gallery (1962–92) in Folsom, California, fostered an emerging community of artists in the Sacramento region, becoming a beloved space for artists and collectors alike. Inspired by McHugh’s fierce support of her artists, New Flavors: Collected at the Candy Store celebrates and champions the lesser-told stories of the gallery. Featured artists include Luis Cruz Azaceta, Luis Jimenez, George Longfish, Joan Moment, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Maija Peeples-Bright, Pam Scrutton, Sandra Shannonhouse, Ann Leda Shapiro and Glenn Takai. This exhibit is the third to feature the university’s Fine Arts Collection, and was developed in conjunction with a related exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum.
Curators: Jenna Blair and Susie Kantor
On view July 1–October 24, 2021
Visit the Virtual Exhibition
UC Davis graduate students in Art History, Art Studio, Creative Writing, Design, English, French and Italian, Music, Native American Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese present their work. You’ll connect with new ways of seeing and understanding the past and future in this multidisciplinary virtual exhibition.
On view June 10–September 6, 2021
Gesture: The Human Figure After Abstraction | Selections from the Manetti Shrem Museum
Gesture: The Human Figure After Abstraction presents the transformational work of the first-generation artists of the UC Davis art department at a pivotal moment in art history. As part of what came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Davis artists including Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson and Ruth Horsting looked to abstract art while nurturing a distinctive identity for modernism. Eschewing the dominant philosophy of “pure painting” practiced in New York City, they were eager to express their personal encounters and close observations of the world they inhabited. Their varied art practices—sculpture, painting and drawing—share a singular characteristic: a commitment to innovation and creative freedom that informed the ever-expanding notion of modern art.
Guest Curator: Carolyn Kastner
January 26, 2020–January 2021
Stephen Kaltenbach: The Beginning and The End
During the late 1960s, after graduating from UC Davis (BA, 1966; MA, 1967) and moving to New York, Stephen Kaltenbach established a reputation in the emerging international field of Conceptual art. But in 1970, just as he was achieving career success, Kaltenbach abruptly withdrew to California’s Central Valley, appearing to abandon Conceptual work in favor of the more traditional mediums of painting and sculpture. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of his “dropout,” this exhibition considers Kaltenbach’s engagement with time as a principal theme across his remarkably diverse career, which encompasses bronze time capsules, advertisements placed anonymously in Artforum magazine in 1968-69, and the monumental photorealist painting Portrait of My Father (1972-79)
Guest Curators: Constance Lewallen and Ted Mann
January 26, 2020–January 2021
The Manetti Shrem Museum presents NEW ERA, an installation by Doug Aitken
Los Angeles-based artist Doug Aitken has earned international acclaim with his groundbreaking work that redefines how we experience art. The Manetti Shrem Museum presents NEW ERA, an installation by Doug Aitken explores the technological ambivalence of contemporary culture, raising questions about the challenges of our immediate access to communication and networks. Drawing on a history of experimental music and cinema as well as a kinship with the protest movements of the late 1960s, Aitken’s immersive installation of moving images and sound creates a “liquid environment” that transforms viewers into collaborators.
Curator and Founding Director: Rachel Teagle
September 26, 2019–June 14, 2020
Virtual Arts & Humanities 2020 Graduate Exhibition
Experience new ways of seeing and understanding the past and future in this multidisciplinary virtual exhibition from UC Davis graduate students in the disciplines of art studio, design, art history, music, Native American studies, cultural studies and creative writing. Listen to the opening webinar for remarks from faculty and university leadership as well as the presentation of the Keister & Allen Art Purchase Prize and the Savageau Award in the Department of Design.
May 28–June 28, 2020 (extended)
Kathy Butterly | ColorForm
We are pleased to present Kathy Butterly’s first retrospective exhibition, Kathy Butterly | ColorForm. A graduate of UC Davis (MFA 1990), Butterly’s art has strong historical roots in the work of California sculptors such as Viola Frey and Ken Price, as well as her mentor here at Davis, Robert Arneson. Charting the evolution of Butterly’s career through over 70 works of art spanning 1989 to the present, the exhibition especially highlights the last ten years of her work and features sculpture specially made for this occasion. Butterly is distinguished by her personal and emotionally-accessible sensibility and her ceramic language of line, form, and color. A full-color hardcover catalog featuring new essays by leading critics will accompany the exhibition.
Guest Curator: Dan Nadel
July 14–December 29, 2019
Landscape Without Boundaries: Selections from the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
The artists in and around Davis represent a singularly vital mix of approaches to the idea of the landscape in art. Encouraged by the land in which they lived and worked, our artists used the idea of landscape variously as a way to map psychology, the basis of surrealist images, or the raw material for a freshly invented world. How painting, sculpture, and drawing addressed and reflected the Northern California landscape in the years after World War II is revealed through significant works by artists including Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Gladys Nilsson, Martin Ramirez, and Wayne Thiebaud.
Artists represented in the exhibition:
William Allan, Jeremy Anderson, Ruth Armer, Robert Arneson, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Deborah Butterfield, Bruce Conner, Roy De Forest, Mike Henderson, Robert Hudson, Ralph Johnson, Ynez Johnston, Judith Linhares, Lee Mullican, Maurine (Fay) Morse Nelson, Gladys Nilsson, Maija Peeples-Bright, Roland Petersen, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Martín Ramírez, Don Reich, Tom Rippon, Peter Saul, Cornelia Schulz, Charles Seliger, Albert Smith, Wayne Thiebaud, Carlos Villa, Mary Warner, William T. Wiley, Franklin Williams, Joseph E. Yoakum
Guest Curator: Dan Nadel
July 14–December 15, 2019
Arts & Humanities 2019 Graduate Exhibition
UC Davis graduate students in Art History, Art Studio, Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, Design, English, Music, and Theatre and Dance present their work. You’ll connect with new ways of seeing and understanding the past and future in this multi-disciplinary exhibition.
May 29–June 16, 2019
Xicanx Futurity
Xicanx Futurity focuses on the work of six Xicana artists: Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Felicia Montes, Gina Aparicio, Gilda Posada, Margaret ‘Quica’ Alarcón, and Melanie Cervantes. These artists engage in an intergenerational dialogue that centers Indigenous forms of communal and hemispheric ceremony, rooted in sacred relations. Collectively, their respective artistic practices inform an emerging conceptual and aesthetic decolonial social practice within Chicana/o/x Art.
Guest Curators: Carlos Jackson, Associate Professor & Chair, Chicana/o Studies, UC Davis María Esther Fernández, Chief Curator, Triton Museum
of Art, Susy Zepeda, Assistant Professor Chicana/o Studies, UC Davis
January 29 - May 5, 2019
Zachary Leener: Three Sculptures
Zachary Leener (b. 1981) is a Los Angeles based artist whose work embraces metaphorical and spiritual ideas of world building and creation. The sculptures in this ‘Pop Up’ exhibition invite viewers to imagine the world that birthed these shapes, patterns, and forms, and the idea-space from which these configurations might have emerged.
January 29–May 5, 2019
Bruce Nauman: Blue and Yellow Corridor
Coinciding with the opening of Bruce Nauman’s (MFA ’66, UC Davis) retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, this exhibition features the first realization of a participatory environment Nauman conceived in 1970. The work is a narrow passageway that wraps around an existing room, combining colored fluorescent light and closed-circuit video to manipulate the viewer’s perceptual experience. An adjacent gallery includes artworks that situate the corridor within the artist’s career. Guest Curator: Ted Mann
September 27, 2018–April 14, 2019
Irving Marcus: Romance & Disaster, A Retrospective
The UC Davis legacy includes a series of coexisting developments explored by artists in northern California at the end of the Twentieth Century. This extended community has been critically undervalued relative to movements coming out of New York and southern California. Irving Marcus: Romance & Disaster, A Retrospective is the first museum retrospective of this important, and yet overlooked, artist. The exhibition surveys more than 45 years of work; featured are his vibrant and intensely personal paintings exhibited alongside works on paper. Curator: Rachel Teagle, Founding Director
September 27 - December 30, 2018
Andrea Chung: You broke the ocean in half to be here
Andrea Chung’s practice finds unexpected intersections between materials, processes, and places. Chung creates installations that offer critical insight into legacies of colonialism and migration. This presentation—Chung’s first traveling museum exhibition—highlights her inventive use of collage, printmaking, and photography in an installation that examines the predatory, non-native lionfish that has proliferated recently in the Caribbean Sea, destroying the local ecosystem. With their cyan-blue color, the prints conjure a fantastic underwater world, but they also present a potent allegory of colonization.
Traveling exhibition from Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
June 30–September 2, 2018
Susan Swartz: Breaking Away, 2006-2018
Over the past decade Susan Swartz has developed a painterly style that results in lush surfaces sculpted from the subtle accretion of color. This exhibit surveys recent work demonstrating a newfound synthesis and complexity in her approach to abstracting the natural landscape. Swartz’s first exhibition in California, Breaking Away, 2006–2018 follows a series of solo exhibitions in major European art museums.
Curator: Rachel Teagle, Founding Director
June 30–September 2, 2018
2018 Arts and Humanities Graduate Exhibition
A unique interdisciplinary exhibition showcasing the work and research of graduate students across disciplines at UC Davis. For more information on the opening celebration, download the brochure (pdf).
May 30–June 17, 2018
Welcome?
Curated by Susette Min, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, this exhibition explores the competing meanings of hospitality and the different ways it can be seen as a form of welcome or hostility, driven by necessity and greed, fear and desires and subject to conventional demands of etiquette and the law. Featured artists include Andrea Bowers, Claire Fontaine, Simon Leung, Daniel Martinez, Dan Perjovschi, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Larissa Sansour, and Jin-me Yoon.
Co-sponsored by the Mellon Initiative in Comparative Border Studies at UC Davis and the Manetti Shrem Museum.
February 1-June 17, 2018
Wayne Thiebaud | 1958-1968
At an extraordinary historical moment, Wayne Thiebaud proposed a radical new take on painting, and he did so with a slice of pie. This exhibition invites viewers to trace Thiebaud’s emergence as a mature artist with a singular style. The first exhibition to explore this formative period, Wayne Thiebaud | 1958–1968 brings together more than 60 early paintings gathered from private collections and museums throughout the United States.
January 16-May 13, 2018
Tacita Dean | Day for Night
In 2009 British artist Tacita Dean worked in Giorgio Morandi’s studio in Bologna, where the idiosyncratic painter lived and worked for more than 50 years. She produced several bodies of work as hommage to the painter. In Day for Night (2009), Dean filmed the boxes, pots, containers of different shapes, artificial flowers, tins, pans, and bottles that Morandi painted repeatedly in his still lifes.
January 16-May 13, 2018
Dimensions of Black
Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in collaboration with the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art, Dimensions of Black traces the legacy of UC San Diego's MFA program by drawing from the museums' permanent collections. With over 30 artworks from the 1960s to today, the exhibition traverses crucial interests and perspectives that have shaped the art of our time. Artists include: Edgar Arceneaux, Jean Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, McArthur Binion, Michael Ray Charles, Ed Clark, Robert Colescott, James Crosby, Damon Davis, Charles Gaines, Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, Mark Steven Greenfield, David Hammons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Thomas Allen Harris, Mildred Howard, Richard Hunt, Oliver Lee Jackson, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Kori Newkirk, Kerry James Marshall, Martin Puryear, Marlon T. Riggs, Dread Scott, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Tavares Strachan, Henry Taylor, Horace Washington, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, Jack Whitten, Jessica Wimbley, Joseph E. Yoakum.
September 17-December 28, 2017
John Cage | 33 1/3
In Cage's groundbreaking participatory composition, 33 1/3—which he debuted at UC Davis in 1969—the public is invited to play albums on turn-tables in the exhibition gallery. Celebrate the improvisatory spirit that helped change the course of experimental music and art during the second half of the twentieth century.
September 17-December 28, 2017
from this point forward
A unique interdisciplinary graduate exhibition that showcases the work and research of students across disciplines at UC Davis, including Art Studio, Design, Creative Writing, Art History, Dramatic Arts, History, and Music. Read more.
May 27-June 30, 2017
Sadie Barnette | Dear 1968,...
In her first solo museum exhibition, Oakland-born artist Sadie Barnette maps identity construction and personal mythology through the FBI file amassed during her father's years as a Black Panther. Read more.
April 14-June 30, 2017
Marc Johnson | YúYú
YúYú, a 2014 film by Franco-Beninese architect, visual artist, and filmmaker Marc Johnson, tells the story of a Chinese beekeeper who performs a rite of spring ceremony. Read more.
April 14-June 30, 2017
Recent Gifts
This exhibition highlights a selection of gifts made to the Manetti Shrem Museum since 2012. Building upon the nearly 60-year history of the Fine Arts Collection, these works signal the latest chapter in the university’s radical and vibrant art community. Read more.
April 14-June 30, 2017
Out Our Way
Major exhibition examining the legacy of UC Davis' Department of Art and the work of first-generation art faculty. Read more.
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017
Hoof & Foot: A Field Study
Site-specific commission by Bay Area artist Chris Sollars. Read more.
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017
A Pot for a Latch
Participatory sculptural installation by Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil. Read more.
November 13, 2016–March 19, 2017
SO - IL / Museum as Process
“SO-IL: The Museum as Process” consists of artifacts that illustrate and interpret the process of creating the museum. Created in collaboration with artists and designers they take the form of photography, graphics and installation. The collaboration was with Luisa Lambri and Richard The / TheGreenEyl.Museum as Process. Read more.
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017