Past Exhibitions
Backstory: Digitizing the Museum Collection
January 21–May 2, 2026
A working digitization laboratory and open storage featuring hundreds of works from the Fine Arts Collection, Backstory: Digitizing the Museum Collection is developed and presented in conjunction with UC Davis students in the fall 2025 Exhibition Practicum course led by Assistant Professor Alexandra Sofroniew. By bringing “back of house” activity to the front, this project is a window into the museum’s 10th anniversary digitization initiative. Visitors are invited to glimpse key practices related to collections management including how artworks are researched, documented and photographed, and to visit our staging area where rotating artworks are brought from storage to the digitization laboratory.
Exhibition developed by Randy Roberts, deputy director, and Jez Flores-Garcia, associate curator for collection digitization
Installation image: © Muzi Li Rowe
“OJO” Julio César Morales
Julio César Morales — artist, curator and a former museum director — grew up along the U.S.–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. After nearly a decade in Arizona creating work about the border, “OJO” marks his California homecoming and return to full-time studio practice through a mid-career survey bridging past and future to reflect on the present. This theme of history and what lies ahead is central to both the exhibition and Morales’ neon sign welcoming visitors to the Manetti Shrem Museum.
Curated by Rachel Teagle, founding director
August 7–November 29, 2025
"OJO" Digital Companion: Deepen your engagment
Complementary exhibition: Gallery Wendi Norris in San Francisco presents Julio César Morales: My America, September 19–November 1, 2025.
Image: Julio César Morales, tomorrow is for those who can hear it coming, 2025. Neon, acrylic panels, plywood. Photo: Hung Q. Pham Photography.
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
The lungs of our planet — oceans, forests and the atmosphere — are under threat, invaded by carbon emissions, plastics and man-made pollutants. The act of breathing was rendered even more perilous by the COVID-19 pandemic and police brutality. Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice considers the connections between social and environmental injustice through the lens of contemporary art. This groundbreaking exhibition brings together works focused on climate change by artists, scientists and activists whose practices encompass photography, multimedia, large-scale sculptures, painting and more.
Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and guest curated by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake with Jennifer Buonocore-Nedrelow, Pacific Standard Time Fellow.
August 7–November 29, 2025
Read the article "Breathe In, Breathe Out: Reflections on Environmental Catastrophe" in the Letters & Science magazine
Image: Yoshitomo Nara, School Strike for Climate, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 47 1/4 × 43 5/16 in. (120 × 110 cm). Photo: Keizo Kioku; image courtesy of the artist, Yoshitomo Nara Foundation. Homepage installation image by © Muzi Li Rowe.
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.
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
January 26–June 22, 2025
Image: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Not ugly enough), 1997. Silkscreen on vinyl, 107¼ x 107¼ in. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
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
January 26–May 5, 2025
Image: Ruby Neri, Taking the Deep Dive, 2024. Ceramic with glaze, 81 x 74 x 13 in. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery.
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.
September 19, 2024–May 5, 2025
Image: Salvador Dalí, Les désirs inassouvis (Unsatisfied Desires), 1928, oil, sand, and seashells on board; 30 x 24 1/2 in. (76.2 x 62.23 cm). The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Fractional gift to the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem. © 2024 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. Photograph: Ben Blackwell.
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
August 8–December 29, 2024
Read "Entangled Writing' Exhibit Elicits New Ways of Thinking About Communication" in Letters & Science magazine
Image: Installation view of 'Entangled Writing'. Photo: © Muzi Rowe
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
September 19–December 29, 2024
Image: Cathy Lu, Nuwa (Rainbow), 2023. Porcelain with PVD (physical vapor deposition), 48 x 36 x 26 in. © Cathy Lu. Photo: John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
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.
June 6–24, 2024
Learn more about this year's participants and award winners.
Deborah Butterfield: P.S. These are not horses
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
October 1, 2023–June 30, 2024
View Deborah Butterfield's artist talk on YouTube
Image: Deborah Butterfield, Isbelle, 2001. Cast bronze with patina, 89 x 108 x 40 in. © 2023 Deborah Butterfield / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Walla Walla Foundry.
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
January 28–May 6, 2024
Read a review of Strands of Resilience in SquareCylinder
Image: Shiva Ahmadi, Unbound, 2023. Watercolor and silkscreen print on paper, 40 x 60 in. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery. © Shiva Ahmadi.
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
October 1, 2023–May 6, 2024
Image: Malaquias Montoya, Yo Soy Chicano, 2013. Screenprint on paper, 26 1/8 x 20 in. Courtesy of Malaquias Montoya and Lezlie Salkowitz-Montoya. © Malaquias Montoya. Photo: Muzi Rowe.
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
October 1, 2023–January 14, 2024
Image: Ayanah Moor, Keep, Keep on, 2022, Acrylic and latex on wood panel, 48 x 60 in. Photo: Robert Chase Heishman. © Ayanah Moor.
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.
June 8–25, 2023
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
January 30–July 15, 2023 (extended)
Image: Mike Henderson, Trust, 1981. Acrylic on canvas, 63 × 59 in. Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. Museum purchase, Gina and John Wasson Acquisition Fund. © Mike Henderson. Courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery.
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, associate curator and exhibition department head
September 25, 2022–May 8, 2023
Image: Loie Hollowell, Belly, breast..., August 23, 2021. Soft pastel on paper, 25.5 x 22 in. © Loie Hollowell. Courtesy of Pace Gallery. Photo: Melissa Goodwin.
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
September 25, 2022–May 8, 2023
Image: Roy De Forest, Untitled, 1978. Lithograph on paper, 22 x 30 in. Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. © 2022 Estate of Roy De Forest / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
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
July 28–December 19, 2022
Watch a virtual conversation with Bernard Lumpkin, curators Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff and Susie Kantor.
Read curator Matt Wycoff's essay on the Young, Gifted and Black collection website.
Image: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Blue Dancer, 2017. Oil on canvas. 68 x 54 in. © Tunji Adeniyi-Jones.
Arts & Humanities 2022 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 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.
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.
Curated by Susie Kantor, associate curator and exhibition department head
January 27–June 19, 2022
Image: Kota Ezawa, National Anthem, 2018. Video projection with sound (1:38 min.). Collection of Pamela and Richard Kramlich. © Kota Ezawa. Photo courtesy of the Kramlich Collection.
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
Jan. 27–May 8, 2022
Image: Mary Heilmann, Davis Sliding Square, 1977. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 x 2 3/4 in. © Mary Heilmann. Image courtesy of the artist, 303 Gallery and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Dan Bradica.
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 focuses 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
January 27–May 8, 2022
Image: Artist unknown, The Slant Step, 20th century. Wood, linoleum, rubber, and nails, 18 7/8 × 15 × 11 in. (47.9 x 38.1 x 27.9 cm). The Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Gift of the New York Society for the Preservation of the Slant Step. Photo: Cleber Bonato.
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 2021-22 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.
April 23, 2021–March 20, 2022
Image: Andrea Bowers, Education Should Be Free (UC Davis), 2021. Neon, steel, aluminum channel letters and automotive paint. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: John Wilson White
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.
Curatored by Rachel Teagle, Founding Director, and Susie Kantor, associate curator
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
June 3–November 12, 2021
Image: Robert Colescott, Artistry and Reality (Happy Birthday), 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 18 in. (40.6 x 45.7 cm).Courtesy of the Erle and Pinkie Flad Collection. © 2020 The Robert H. Colescott Separate Property Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Cleber Bonato.
Working Proof: Wayne Thiebaud as Printmaker
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
June 3–November 12, 2021
Image caption: 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.
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)
June 3–November 12, 2021
Image: Arnold Joseph Kemp, POSSIBLE BIBLIOGRAPHY, 2015-20. 52 black and white archival inkjet prints Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag; unique closed edition, 6.83 x 10 in. each. Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. © Arnold Joseph Kemp. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland.
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
July 1–October 24, 2021
Image: Luis Cruz Azaceta, City Lamp, 1979. Acrylic on canvas, 66 1/8 x 66 1/8” (canvas); 66 5/8 x 67” (wood frame). Gift of Norman O. and Lois J. Jones
Virtual Arts & Humanities 2021 Graduate 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.
June 10–September 6, 2021
Watch the Virtual Opening Celebration on YouTube
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 commitment to innovation and creative freedom that informed the ever-expanding notion of modern art.
Guest Curator: Carolyn Kastner
January 26, 2020–January 2021
Image: Manuel Neri, Untitled Figure Study No. 21, 1958. Tempera and charcoal on paper, 25 ¾ x 23 ⅝ in. Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. Gift of Paul LeBaron Thiebaud in memory of Price Amerson. © The Manuel Neri Trust.
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
Image: Stephen Kaltenbach, Personal Appearance Manipulation, 1970. Photocollage, 14 x 16 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
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 by Rachel Teagle, Founding Director
September 26, 2019–June 14, 2020
Image: Installation view: Doug Aitken: New Era at 303 Gallery, New York, 2018. © Doug Aitken, courtesy 303 Gallery, New York; Victoria Miro Gallery, London; Galerie Presenhuber, Zurich; Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: John Berens.
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 (M.F.A. 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
Image: Kathy Butterly, Color Hoard-r, 2013. Clay, glaze, 5 x 3.75 x 3 inches (12.7 x 9.5 x 7.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist.
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
Image: Roy De Forest, The Problem of James R., 1968. Latex on canvas, 64 x 64 inches (162.6 x 162.6 cm). Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Gift of James C. Israel Family. © 2019 Estate of Roy De Forest / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo: Cleber Bonato.
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 multidisciplinary 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
Image: Installation view of Xicanx Futurity exhibition. Photo by Drew Altizer.
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
Image: Zachary Leener, Three Sculptures installation view at the Manetti Shrem Museum.
Bruce Nauman: Blue and Yellow Corridor
Coinciding with the opening of Bruce Nauman’s (M.F.A. ’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
Image: Bruce Nauman, Blue and Yellow Corridor, 1970-71/2018, fluorescent light, two video cameras, two video monitors, and painted wallboard. Courtesy of the Artist and Sperone Westwater, New York. Installation view, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Photo: Cleber Bonato. © 2018 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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 20th 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,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
Image: Irving Marcus, Call for Bids, 1973, oil on canvas, 51 x 79 in. Collection of the artist.
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
Image: Andrea Chung, Filthy water cannot be washed, 2016-2017, Cyanotypes and watercolor, 88 x 240 in, (223.5 x 609.6 cm). Collection Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum purchase with funds provided by The Robert L. and Dorothy M. Shapiro Acquisition Endowment and proceeds from Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Art Auction 2016, 2018.7. Courtesy of the artist.
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
Image: Susan Swartz, detail: Nature Revisited 44, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 42x84 in. Private collection. Photo credit: Susan Swartz Studios
2018 Arts and Humanities Graduate Exhibition
A unique interdisciplinary exhibition showcasing the work and research of graduate students across disciplines at UC Davis.
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
Image: Dan Perjovschi, Welcome, 2015. Drawing, variable dimensions.
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.
Curated by Rachel Teagle, Founding Director
January 16–May 13, 2018
Image: Cover image for the Wayne Thiebaud | 1958–1968 catalogue.
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
Image: Frame from Tacita Dean, Day for Night, 2009; 16mm color film, silent, 10min.; Collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase; © Tacita Dean
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 M.F.A. program by drawing from the museums' permanent collections. With more than 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
Image: Horace Washington, Untitled (Mask), 1988. Cast concrete with wire, 15 x 12 x 4 ¾ in. Fine Arts Collection, The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis. Gift of Thomasin Grim and Michael S. Bell, in Memory of Joseph A. Baird, Jr. Photo: Douglas Sandberg
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 20h century.
September 17–December 28, 2017
Image: John Cage, 33 1/3, 1969. Installation view at daadgalerie Berlin, 1988-89. Courtesy of DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Photo: Werner Zellien, © Archiv Broken Music
Arts & Humanities 2017 Graduate Exhibition: from this point forward
Expanding on the tradition of the Art Studio department’s annual show, this exhibition highlights the dynamic nature of UC Davis’ graduate programs in the arts and humanities. Twenty-eight graduate students from seven departments including Art History, Art Studio, Creative Writing, Design, History, Music, and Theatre and Dance, are featured in this unique multidisciplinary exhibition. Each student’s work is presented within its own academic context, and takes a place in dialogue across disciplines.
May 27–June 30, 2017
Sadie Barnette | Dear 1968,...
In Dear 1968,… artist Sadie Barnette mines personal and political histories using family photographs, recent drawings, and selections from the 500-page file that the FBI amassed after her father joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. The artist’s first solo museum show, this immersive reimagining of the family album demonstrates that Barnette’s family story is not theirs alone. Examining the fraught relationship between the personal and the political, the everyday and the otherworldly, the past and the present, she reveals that the injustices of 1968 have not yet been relegated to the pages of history, but live on in new forms today.
Sadie Barnette earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from CalArts and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem; the California African American Museum, LA; the Oakland Museum of California; and Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Curator: Sampada Aranke
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. Its protagonist is the Chinese beekeeper, Shé Zuŏ Bīn, performing a rite of spring to recover the environmental balance of the Yangtze Valley. Standing on a rock over the course of two hours, Shé Zuŏ Bīn enters a trance with nature by summoning millions of bees from forty hives to cover his body, which is temporarily transformed into a living sculpture. Johnson (b. 1986, Vitry-sur-Seine, France; lives and works in Paris) creates projects that collapse time and space by tapping into the spiritual power of ancient knowledge and the communicative capacities of current media technologies.
Presented in collaboration with the Kramlich Collection
April 14–June 30, 2017
Recent Gifts
This exhibition, exploring questions of legacy and community, features a selection of gifts to the Manetti Shrem Museum since 2012. Highlights include a major gift of drawings by Manuel Neri along with important gifts from Robert Arneson and Sandra Shannonhouse, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jock Reynolds, among others. Recent Gifts celebrates the museum’s rich collection and provides insights into the university’s radical and vibrant art community.
April 14-June 30, 2017
Out Our Way
Drawn from the collections of major museums and private collections nationwide, as well as UC Davis’ permanent collection, Out Our Way presents 240 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints which are characteristic of the instinctive embrace of the vernacular and the desire to ingeniously transform the stuff of daily life. This inaugural exhibition explores the development of the revolutionary UC Davis Department of Art, founded in 1958. The exhibition revives the “spirit of defiant provincialism” which, in merely 10 years, propelled the department to be recognized as one of the most courageous and wildly inventive communities of artists working in the world.
Founding Chair Richard L. Nelson built his department as a “team of rivals,” intentionally bringing together artists with differing opinions about aesthetics and teaching philosophy, while all shared an exceptional grasp of the properties of their materials. In this creative community, relentless experimentation prevailed. This first generation comprises individuals both internationally recognized and recently rediscovered. Out Our Way reassembles lost histories and sheds new light on some of UC Davis’ most cherished lore.
“Nearly 60 years ago, Richard L. Nelson, the founding chair of the UC Davis art department, allowed — no, even encouraged — the artist teachers he hired to challenge and push one another,” said co-curator Rachel Teagle. “These artists were incredibly different from each other, artistically and philosophically. Today, some are internationally recognized, others recently rediscovered. But each was an essential ingredient to the intellectual cross-pollination that nurtured this creative community.”
Represented in Out Our Way are the 12 artists Nelson hired during his tenure (1952-70): Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Roland Petersen, Manuel Neri, Ralph Johnson, Ruth Horsting, Daniel Shapiro, Tio Giambruni, Jane Garritson and John Baxter. A signature work by each artist in Out Our Way provides a starting point to explore the pivotal moment the artist experienced at UC Davis. A prime example of how profound change can well up quickly within an artist is Cup of Coffee (1961) by Thiebaud. Already present are hallmarks of his mature style — the use of shadow and color coming together in the outline of objects — and the kind of formal investigation that consistently set him apart from the Pop artists.
Other exhibition highlights include Petersen’s Picnic series, (ca. 1965); Arneson’s Herinal (no date), representative of his important body of toilets and urinals made from 1962 to 1964; seminal works like Neri’s Ceramic Loop IV (ca. 1961-65), a ceramic sculpture featured in the UC Berkeley Art Museum’s Funk exhibition (1967); and brash experiments that strike one today as prescient. Period photographs, printed materials and film clips provide context for these works of art, created in an art world very different from the networked one of today.
Out Our Way proposes that the tight community formed by these artists in the 1960s was a generator of creativity. Underlining this premise is the surprising number of featured artworks that were exchanged among artists.
Curated by Rachel Teagle, Founding Director, and Jessica Hough, guest curator
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017
Read Peter Plagens' 2016 essay "Of Serendipity and a Secret Sauce"
Hoof & Foot: A Field Study
Bay Area artist Chris Sollars has created a large-scale video installation highlighting the symbiotic relationship of learning between animals and students on the campus of UC Davis, a university rooted in agriculture and home to the world’s foremost school of veterinary medicine.
For the commission, the artist uses the hoof and the foot as a grounding point and creates imagery generated by conversations with UC Davis faculty members and students. Sollars known for creating mixed-media installations that reclaim, recapture and disrupt public spaces through interventions and performances. He reached out to UC Davis students, asking them about topics such as the body, socialization and stress, and confronting conflict. These conversations have formed the basis of the artist’s imagery and the parallels he draws between how students and animals on campus react to stress.
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017
A Pot for a Latch
This participatory sculptural installation is inspired by the outdoor market booths of the artist’s hometown, Mexico City, as well as Indigenous gifting economies and modernist art and design. IOn designated days during the run of A Pot for a Latch, members of the public will be invited to exchange their objects for others on display. The installation highlights the dialogue between vernacular and fine art aesthetics, and references an alternative economy that circumvents transactional commerce. Its title references the Native American gift-giving feasts of the Northwest coast.
Camil often transforms urban and industrial objects into handmade ones, suggesting the failing aspects of modernist culture and critiquing the appearance of decay often associated with the urban landscape in Mexico City. Pia Camil: A Pot for a Latch was originally produced by and exhibited at the New Museum, New York.
Guest curator: Betti-Sue Hertz
November 13, 2016–March 19, 2017
SO–IL / Museum as Process
After a design competition in 2013, SO–IL was chosen along with associate architects Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and contractor Whiting-Turner to design the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. In the exhibition, SO–IL takes viewers through the inspiration and interpretation phase, the design process and the creation of a museum that was designed for its environment, region and space.
The name SO-IL, which stands for Solid Objectives Idenburg Liu, reflects the firm’s aim to distill concepts and ideas into simple built forms. The canopy arcs as high as 34 feet on the freeway side and dips as low as 12 feet at the front. The Grand Canopy cover comprises 910 triangular, honed aluminum infill beams, fit into an intricate pattern that evokes the patchwork texture and topology of the Central Valley. Just 40 slender, white steel columns support these 15,200 linear feet of beams, as well as 4,765 linear feet of steel.
Within the fluid interior, a glass lobby leads to a central courtyard, which opens to the sky, and to three distinct pavilions offering differing spatial qualities that accommodate exhibitions, art making, classrooms and operations.
November 13, 2016–March 26, 2017