How did it happen that a relatively obscure, rural California University, best known for its veterinary, medical and agriculture programs, was able to pull together a major roster of artists and teachers? Seymour Howard, art studio and history emeritus faculty member at Davis who taught there starting in 1958, has an incisive observation. He suggests that Sacramento was the capital and agricultural center of California, the eighth largest economy in the world. Latent and emerging geopolitical and financial powers were at play at that time, forces that ultimately resulted in the national emergence of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the Presidency. Clearly the Davis anarchist art impulse shared few values with Nixon’s Republicanism and the conservative drive of Reaganism, yet perhaps these two developments were parallel and mirror-image reactions to the same cultural pressures. In hindsight we can see that potent, enormous storms can emerge even from, or particularly in, rural locations, if the right temperature, pressure and energy come together, as they did at UC in those improbable years.

Such an improvised machine’s inherent centrifugal forces eventually caused parts to start flying free; in 1973 Wiley became the first to depart. A decade later De Forest left. By 1992 only Thiebaud remained, and at age 86 he still teaches two classes a year on an emeritus basis in 2007. What did the Davis experience mean for these artists? How did it work? The particular nature of the Bay Area arts ecology in the postwar era, and then the specifics of the Davis experience can offer us some clues about why history was made in the Central Valley in the early sixties.

Excerpted from catalog essay by Renny Pritikin

You See will travel to four other museums as follows:
May 3-June 22, 2008 Saint Mary's College/Hearst Art Gallery
Sept 11-Nov 20, 2008 Bakersfield Museum of Art
Jan 20-Feb 21, 2009 University of Nevada, Las Vegas/Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery
June-August 2009 Pasadena Museum of California Art

A 107-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, illustrated with color prints of every object and essays by Renny Pritikin, Jock Reynolds and Simon Sadler.

This exhibition has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius.

Image: Roy DeForest
Red Dog
1981

Image: Manuel Neri
Untitled
1982

Image: Wayne Thiebaud
Big Suckers
1971

Image: William T. Wiley
Mr. Unatural
1975