Visitors talking in the museum lobby while a program goes on in the background with an audience and artists talking.

Fall 2024 Programs

All programs are in person at the museum unless otherwise noted.

Download our Fall 2024 Program brochure:
fall-24-program-brochure-web-FINAL.pdf

The California Studio Lecture

Artist Clarissa Tossin holding a ceramic sculpture in front of her face from a film still.
Still from Clarissa Tossin’s Mojo’q che b’ixan ri ixkanulab’ / Antes de que los Volcanes Canten / Before the Volcanoes Sing, 2022, color digital video, sound. Image courtesy of the artist and EMPAC / Rensselaer.

Clarissa Tossin

Thursday, October 10
4:30–6 PM

Clarissa Tossin works with moving image, sculpture and installation to propose alternative narratives for places defined by histories of colonization. Through a mix of research, storytelling and gestures of mapping and layering, Tossin generates unexpected moments of interconnectedness across time and space. Her work was recently featured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial. She is the fall quarter visiting professor in The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residencies.

Organized by The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residences in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

 

 

The California Studio Lecture

Curator Eungie Joo.
Photo: Dan Ross

Eungie Joo

Wednesday, October 23
4:30–6 PM

Eungie Joo is curator and head of contemporary art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Joo has curated several exhibitions this summer and fall at SFMOMA, including the site-specific installation Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) by Kara Walker, the museum’s first-ever commission for the admission-free, street-level Roberts Family Gallery. Her other projects on view include What Matters, Episode 2, New Work: Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Of Whales by Wu Tsang and Moved By the Motion. She is the fall quarter spotlight curator in The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residencies.

Organized by The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residences in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

 

Department of Art and Art History
Visiting Art Lecture Series

White and blue dog like sculpture by Fernando Palma Rodriguez.
Fernando Palma Rodríguez, Huehuecoyotl Coyote Viejo, 2023. Volcanic stone metate, acrylic. Image by Omar Olguin. Courtesy of the Artist and Gaga, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Los Angeles

Fernando Palma Rodríguez

Thursday, November 7
4:30 PM

Fernando Palma Rodríguez combines his training as an artist and mechanical engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. Central to Palma Rodríguez’s practice is an emphasis on indigenous ancestral knowledge, both as an integral part of contemporary life and a way of shaping the future. Drawing on Aztec mythology and pictorial codices — as well as colonial histories — his works reframe language through the physical activation of these linguistic symbols. He lives in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he runs Calpulli Tecalco, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture.

Organized by the Department of Art and Art History, and supported by the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists

Renny Pritikin

Reading and Talk by Renny Pritikin

Wednesday, November 13
4–5:30PM

San Francisco Bay Area curator, art writer and poet Renny Pritikin has been chief curator at New Langton Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Pritikin returns to Davis to share his memoir At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists.

Over his 40-plus years in the art world Pritikin worked with, befriended and sometimes almost got arrested with some of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most innovative and celebrated artists and writers. He was an early supporter of artists such as Nancy Rubins, Fred Tomaselli, Nayland Blake, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen and others, and was recognized for pushing the boundaries of contemporary art in museum practice with shows such as the first United States exhibition of The Art of Star Wars. In his memoir featuring 50 photographs of never-before-seen images, Pritikin shares personal stories about his encounters with the SF creative community from 1979 to 2018.

This program is co-sponsored by the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program and the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

2024-25 Eugene Lunn Memorial Lecture

Film makers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala
From Reality to Truth: (Re)Creating History in Film

Thursday, November 14
4–6 PM

How do you (re)create history in a film? How do you depict a concrete place and time when only scarce sources convey a vague idea of how they might have looked like and felt? How do you avoid reproducing the clichés that historical paintings put into your head, showing idealized peasants working in their Sunday clothes? How do you find images for a time that no longer exists? Is re-creating history even possible?

Austrian filmmaking duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala will share their path from fact to truth during the production of their film The Devil’s Bath, which is based on a largely forgotten real-life epidemic of suicide by proxy that plagued German-speaking areas in 17th and 18th century Europe. Franz and Fiala came to international attention with Goodnight Mommy (2014), Austria’s nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 88th Academy Awards. They will be in the US this fall for a new film produced by Robert Downey Jr.

The Devil’s Bath is an adaptation of UC Davis History Professor Kathy Stuart’s most recent book, Suicide by Proxy. The filmmakers worked closely with her during the development of their award-winning film. Dr. Stuart will join them
in conversation following their presentation about the making of the film.

Presented by the Department of History. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.

This annual lectureship honors cultural historian Eugene Lunn, who during his 20 years as a member of the faculty in the UC Davis Department of History distinguished himself as an esteemed teacher and mentor, and an influential scholar in the field of modern European intellectual history.

 

Riding Like the Wind

Reading and Book Signing with Iris Dunkle

Cover of Iris Dunkle's book, 'Riding Like the Wind'.

Tuesday, November 19
4:30–6 PM

This saga of a writer done dirty resurrects the silenced voice of Sanora Babb, peerless author of midcentury American literature. In 1939, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation’s collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle, a UC Davis lecturer in the Department of English, revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.

Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era’s literati, entered into an illegal marriage and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb’s field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb’s impact was profound. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know — and who tells them — can change the way we remember history.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

Art Jam

Students enjoying ice cream and working on art at the museum during Orientation.
Photo: Jose Luis Villegas

Friday, November 15
7-9 PM

Join us for a sweet combination of free food, music and after-hours access to this fall’s exhibitions. Settle in for an evening of cozy crafts with Davis Triceratops, a Guitar Club jam session and a set by the most popular band in Davis, Cowboys After Dark!

Art Jam is an experimental, semi-improvised gathering of people making things for fun. The flavor reflects the cast of collaborators: artists, performers and any student group with something to share.

 

 

The Manetti Shrem Museum is committed to keeping our visitors and staff safe and healthy by following UC Davis’ COVID-19 protocols.