On view
Bawdy irreverence, iconoclasm, parody, and puns are hallmarks of the work spawned by the art department at the University of California, Davis, in the 1960s and 1970s. In keeping with the counterculture of the time, the tone of this humor was often aggressive and transgressive. Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Peter VandenBerge, William T. Wiley, and others took new artistic license with the Bay Area’s figurative traditions. They jettisoned what they viewed as the pretension of the East Coast art world and adopted an earthy approach wholly authentic to the West Coast. Their laid-back, flippant attitudes reflected the shifting values of the time and often belied deeper social messages.
This Kind of Bird Flies Backward: Paintings by Joan Brown is the first in-depth examination of this beloved Bay Area artistʼs painting in over a decade. The exhibition is the first to explore Brownʼs art in the national context of the womenʼs movement: the movement paralleled her career, yet she has been largely excluded from its history.
Artist Anna Sew Hoy will create a new sculptural installation using cast-off materials and detritus from our local corporate culture. In Silicon Valley, start- up companies pop up and disappear on a steady basis, while established firms regularly upgrade IT inventory and office fixtures. How can electronic and office equipment be critical to the function of an organization one day and useless the next? Sew Hoy (who has long worked with found objects and everyday materials such as jeans and beer cans) will recycle—and take inspiration from—our communal, locally sourced e-waste.
Just as weather is made up of basic elements such as wind, cloud, rain, snow, fog and heat, works of art consist of line, shape, color, texture, and space. Possibilities are endless when artists use these formal elements, a wide variety of art materials, and their imaginations. Feeling brave? We invite you to look, play, draw, and build in the family gallery.
“Ordinary folks doing ordinary things”—that is how photographer Bill Owens described his subjects. Like a visual anthropologist, Owens astutely recorded the customs, symbols, and social relationships that characterized American middle-class culture in the 1970s. Owens adopted an air of objectivity that recalls the New Topographics, a generation of photographers such as Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, and Joel Deal, who portrayed the built environment with detachment.