Renny Pritikin, director of the Nelson Gallery, says, “These two small exhibitions not only are witty and a great deal of fun, but share the philosophy that art can be found in and created in league with the everyday world.” Both exhibitions will run concurrently at the Nelson Gallery, room 124 of the Art Building on the UC Davis campus, from July 9th till August 14th with an opening reception on Thursday, July 9th from 6 to 8 pm.

The Black Market Type & Print Shop starts with a collection of more than 30 type-fonts copied from the artwork of internationally-known artists. Scanned and converted into working computer fonts, these letterforms are available for use by visitors to the exhibition via a free print shop. To take advantage of the free printing services visitors are obliged to use the types in at least part of their design. Through this process the visual language of contemporary art is subtly distributed beyond the gallery through street-level ephemera such as rock-show flyers and for-sale notices. Other material produced in previous iterations of the exhibition include personal letters, out-of-order signs, and “free kittens to a good home” posters.

Utilizing the Black Market Type, a group of 15 artists have been invited to make a text-only poster, to be posted in the public area surrounding the gallery. These include a small line of text at the bottom that quietly points back to the gallery. In the gallery these posters serve to incite the imagination of the visitor, offering possible formats and outcomes for their own ideas to take shape in the print shop.

Artist types included in the project: John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mel Bochner, R. Crumb, John Cage, Henry Darger, Julie Doucet, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Dzama, Tracey Emin, Howard Finster, General Idea, Thomas Hirschhorn, Chris Johanson, Jasper Johns, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Margaret Kilgallen, Duane Michals, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Gary Panter, Raymond Pettibon, Adrian Piper, William Pope.L, Richard Prince, Ad Reinhardt, Dieter Roth, David Shrigley

And the artists making posters using the type: Mike Arcega – San Francisco, Anne Walsh – Berkeley, Gareth Spor – San Francisco, Aurelien Froment – Paris/Dublin, Stanislao Di Giugno – Rome, Chris Sollars – San Francisco, Dan Seiple – Berlin, Germaine Koh – Vancouver, Arnold Kemp – New York/San Francisco, Jan Estep – Minneapolis, Marisa Olson – New York, Michael Mandiberg – New York, Amanda Ross Ho – Los Angeles, Matt Keegan – New York/San Francisco, and Lee Walton – North Carolina.

In the video, Routines, by Danish artist Mads Lynnerup, events in a Copenhagen square are miraculously predicted. Lynnerup spent four weeks observing people and their routines in the area around Sønder Boulevard, a central street in Copenhagen. Using notes and drawings based on what he saw during this time, he produced ten posters and a video of the different routines that he discovered in the neighborhood. This installation subtly, but brilliantly, captivates the viewer through mundane, overlooked acts in a way that makes them poignant and amusing; magic is created.

Mads Lynnerup was born in Denmark (1976) and lives and works in New York. He recently completed an MFA at Columbia University, New York and received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. He has shown his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; P.S. 1, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw and is in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art, Miami Art Museum, Orange County Museum of Art and the San Jose Museum of Modern Art.

Joseph Del Pesco was born in Wilmington, Delaware (1975). He is a contemporary art curator based in Oakland, California. He holds a masters degree in curatorial practice from the California College of the Arts and was awarded a curatorial residency at the Banff Centre in 2006. Along with artist Scott Oliver, the two formed the San Francisco Bay Area based Collective Foundation, a “research and development organization offering services to artists and arts organizations.”

Del Pesco has been until recently a curator for Artists Space in New York and has curated exhibitions at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Nelson Gallery and Fine Arts Collection at the University of California, Davis, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. Del Pesco has also published a variety of interviews with contemporary social practice artists such as Lee Walton, Jon Rubin, and Amy Balkin. Other writings have been published in TENbyTEN Magazine, Additionally, he started “Shotgun Review” which collects art reviews online and publishes them as a volumed series of books.

For further information or photographs, contact Katrina Wong at nelsongallery@ucdavis.edu or 530-752-8500.