Roy De Forest (1930-2007) transported viewers through fantastical lands filled with his own mythological maps, narratives and characters. Working across painting, sculpture and printmaking, he combined bright color, textured surfaces and recurring personal symbols to create scenes that hover between everyday experience and imagined narrative. In a 2004 Archives of American Art interview, De Forest said he had “no interest in sculpture without the [act of] painting.” His playful approach resisted the austerity of much postwar abstraction and became closely associated with Bay Area Funk and the artist-defined movement known as Nut Art. Born in Nebraska and raised in Washington state, De Forest earned a master’s degree from San Francisco State College in 1958. He joined the University of California, Davis, art faculty in 1965 and remained there until retiring in 1992. Through his influential teaching and singular artistic vision, De Forest helped establish UC Davis as an important center for experimental art on the West Coast. De Forest exhibited nationally throughout his career. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a major retrospective in 1974 that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017, the Oakland Museum of California presented Of Dogs and Other People, the first full retrospective spanning his career, reaffirming his importance to Northern California art.