Have you ever wondered how exactly museums get their collections of art? This exhibition of recent acquisitions to the UC Davis Fine Arts Collection offers insight into this practice, with an exhibition of some 40 works donated in the past three years. Alumni, professors, and collectors, who believe in the work of the Nelson, have added their gifts to the ongoing work of the museum in caring for and exhibiting great works of art. For the Nelson, the emphasis is on post-WWII art from Northern California.

“We at the Nelson are made humble by the generosity of our community in helping us build a world class collection, as we prepare to take the Nelson to a new level of ambition and visibility in new facilities,” said Renny Pritikin, director of the Nelson since 2004.

Works on view include hand-worked prints by Wayne Thiebaud given to honor the centennial of the University; drawings by Robert Arneson given by the estate in honor of the retirement of Chancellor Vanderhoef; prints by Malaquias Montoya given on the occasion of his retirement; a drawing by Arneson of Roy De Forest given by Gloria De Forest; a drawing by William T. Wiley on the occasion of the Nelson’s touring exhibition, You See; works by William Theo Brown and Paul Wonner donated by Norman Jones; a work by alum Melissa Pokorny; a work by alum Michael Tompkins donated by Professor Jeffrey Ruda; and more.

ALSO ON VIEW:
· In the Entryway Gallery (Room 125, Art Building): Three recently conserved works from the collection, by Weston, De Forest and Thiebaud.
· At the Buehler Alumni Center: Works donated to the collection from the art program at the Vacaville Medical Facility.

· At the Tsao Gallery in the Davis Art Center: Additional works by Arneson as well as his students will be on view in the exhibit A Seed Planted: A Tribute to Robert Arneson. The exhibit runs January 8-February 5, 2010; ArtAbout reception, Friday, January 8, 7-9pm.

For further information or images please contact Katrina Wong at kliwong@ucdavis.edu.

Nayland Blake is a noted New York artist who spent a decade living in San Francisco in the late 80s into the 90s. Known primarily as a sculptor, a large part of his current practice is blogging. He has kept up a near-daily diary of texts, photographs and most recently, cartoons on www.naylandblake.net for several years. This is the first-ever off-line exhibition of his autobiographical drawings cum cartoons, in which a philosophical character appears who greatly resembles a cross-fertilization among Blake, L'il Abner and Smoky the Bear. Original black and white drawings will be on view as well as digital images, in color, from cd. Blake is represented by Mathew Marks Gallery in New York and is the chair of the graduate program in photography at the ICP in New York.

Image: Nayland Blake
Self 30

Owen Smith is a nationally-respected Bay Area illustrator and artist. He is on the faculty in the design department of the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. On view will be a range of recent drawings and paintings in his signature pulp fiction, 1930's style of realism. Owen Smith's illustration clients include Sports Illustrated, Time, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker, for which he has created 15 cover illustrations. He has recently completed work on a new children's book for Simon and Schuster.

Image: Owen Smith
Krays

Available are works by Hung Liu, Don Ed Hardy, and more as well as posters by Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, and William T. Willey!

Please visit the auction site

Paintings and Drawings: Charles Campbell Gallery
1980
17.5" x 11.5"
poster

If you have any questions, please e-mail (nelsongallery@ucdavis.edu) or call (530.752.8500).

Please take a moment out of your busy day and check out the Auction’s website at
http://www.nelsongallery.info/nelsonartfriendauction/

The excellence of the UC Davis Fine Arts Collection has been made possible through generous donations by artists, alumni and other supporters in the community over the past 35 years. The past two years have seen unusually large and excellent gifts arrive, in particular the 2008 gift of twenty hand-embellished prints by Wayne Thiebaud, which will be on view for the first time. Also seen for the first time will be works by Diebenkorn, Oliviera and others in honor of the late Gurdon Woods, a gift in honor of his retirement by emeritus faculty member Malaquias Montoya, a gift of Arneson drawings from the estate in honor of Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef, an Arneson portrait of the late Roy de Forest given by the estate, and much more.

Image:
Wayne Thiebaud
Cupcakes & Donuts
Hand worked aquatint with watercolor
2007/2008
Gift of Wayne and Betty Jean Thiebaud

This small show of three treasures from the collection is offered to share with visitors the ongoing “behind-the-scenes” work of a museum. These works by Edward Weston, Roy De Forest, and Wayne Thiebaud were identified as being particularly worthy and particularly in need of rehabilitation. On view are the finished products.

Image:
Edward Weston
Shell on Rocks at Point Lobos, 1931
Gelatin silver print
Gift of John Williams

This exhibition is of work that was made at the art workshop at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville, part of the state’s prison system. Jeff Hesemeyer, who was the founder and teacher of that program for many years, facilitated this donation.

Image:

John Thomas
Yard Days, 2002
Acrylic on canvas board
Gift of California Medical Facility

This exhibition not only contains fine examples of quilts made by former slaves, but also 21st century creations informed by time-honored veins of African-American quilting. Felicenne Ramey of the Nelson Board, with Renny Pritikin, its director, curated the exhibition from the collections of Avis C. Robinson of Washington DC and Sandra McPherson of Davis. Quilts by Avis Robinson hang in The Whitney Museum, The Corcoran and The Washington Post Headquarters. Sandra McPherson, a former English professor at UC Davis, has made a name in the literary world with poetry rooted in quilting traditions.

This exhibition is supported by a gift from the Nehemiah Corporation and is in association with a concurrent exhibition at 40 Acres Art Gallery in Sacramento, Amazing Wonders: Quilts by African American in the Northern California Region, that will run from October 13 until December 23, 2009. For further information and images please contact Katrina Wong at nelsongallery@ucdavis.edu

PLEASE NOTE THE NELSON GALLERY’S NEW HOURS: MONDAY THROUGH THURSDAY FROM 11 TO 5, SATURDAY AND SUNDAY FROM 2 TO 5, AND FRIDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.

MERCH ART COMES TO THE NELSON GALLERY AT UC DAVIS FROM SEPTEMBER 24TH TO DECEMBER 13TH, 2009

OPENING RECEPTION WILL BE OCTOBER 1, 5:30-7:30 PM

“It seemed a whimsical way to participate in a market otherwise closed to us by virtue of the astronomical prices these artists command,” write Banka and Gordon.

From puzzles to wine labels, Christmas ornaments to golf balls, Merch Art covers the full gamut of how art can be incorporated into everyday merchandise. Works included in the exhibition by such artists as Alexander Calder, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and many more.

A catalogue will be published with color illustrations and with essays by Banka and Gordon, as well as Nelson Gallery director Renny Pritikin and UC Davis art historian Blake Stimson.

The Nelson Gallery is located in Room 124 of the Art Building on the UC Davis Campus. For further information and images please contact Katrina Wong at nelsongallery@ucdavis.edu

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.

At the Nelson, will be a sculptural installation by Julia Elsas, paintings and collages by Crystal Haueter, paintings by Cynthia Horn, a video installation by Evie Leder, and a sculptural assemblage installation by Josh Short. A catalogue with color plates and essays by Renny Pritikin accompanies the exhibition and will be on sale.

The opening of the exhibition will be from 6 to 8 pm at the Nelson, room 124 of the art building on May 29th.

For further information and photographs contact Katrina Wong at nelsongallery@ucdavis.edu.

From the collection of Lawrence Banka & Judith Gordon of San Francisco.

Image:
Pablo Picasso
Dove of Peace
Jigsaw Puzzle
1966, ink on cardboard
14.5 " x 14.5 "
(Photograph by Lloyd Hryciw)

The artists whom we highlight in this collection rank among the most notable of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wide ranging in its scope, our collection features a pantheon of figures, like Alexander Calder, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst, David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol.

Despite these famous names, the exhibition is meant to be ironic and fun, to reveal an amusing side to the art market, while simultaneously giving viewers a glimpse into issues concerning supposed high and low art. The luminaries represented here are the cultural comets arcing across the sky, glowing with the white-hot light of relevance. And, like real comets, following behind is the tail comprised of dusty, dirty ice, or in this case, the ephemera of modern culture. These are the items that may reflect the artists’ work but more prominently, underscore their notoriety. These are the golf balls, Rubik’s cubes, buttons, and other forays into popular culture that may feed their fame but not necessarily advance their art.

Getting the Goods
When we began our quest a few years ago—inspired by ephemera we already possessed such as the Holzer golf balls—the sheer quantity of items available and artists engaged in this activity was mind-boggling, as well as enticing. It seemed a whimsical way to participate in a market otherwise closed to us by virtue of the astronomical prices these artists command. As Suzanna Andrews observed in Art of the Steal [Condé Nast Portfolio, April 2008], “In the past 20 years, since art-market prices first began to spike in the late 1980s, the kind of people who buy art has slowly evolved. While there have always been investors with extremely sophisticated taste who take the time to educate themselves about the art they buy, an increasingly large segment of investors has not bothered with connoisseurship and has simply bought art that was in vogue and likely to turn a profit.”

To keep our purchases manageable, we limited ourselves to artists who appear in the catalogues of major auction houses. To pay $700,000 for a Gilbert & George is well beyond our meager budget, but we could collect these notable personages in the form of a Rubik’s cube and an umbrella. Applying this criterion, we added the Karel Appel wine label, Hockney matchbox, Koons plush toy, Picasso jigsaw puzzle, Josef Albers and Rauschenberg record albums, and many, many more. A second criterion we applied was to limit items to those produced during the artist’s lifetime: He or she must have had some involvement in the object’s creation and, we assume, in its approval.

Taking Stock
Of the artists we chose, several were easy catches in this quirky arena. Others proved far more elusive prey. The difficulty we had collecting their ephemera energized us, making our hunt more interesting and attainment all the more satisfying. We’re having great fun with this collection, yet each acquisition raises anew the larger question of its relevance. So we continue our search, both for additional items and clues to what it might mean.

–Lawrence Banka & Judith Gordon

Jeff Koons
Puppy
Plush toy (medium)
1997, dyed plush fabric and stuffing
9" x 10" x 6.5"

Cindy Sherman
Untitled
Beach Towel
2006, dye on cotton
70" x 60 "

Yayoi Kusama
Untitled
Necktie
1997, dye on silk/cotton blend
55" x 4"

(Photographs by Lloyd Hryciw)

Guest curated by Felicenne Ramey with Renny Pritikin. From the collections of Avis C. Robinson of Washington DC and Sandra McPherson of Davis. In association with a concurrent exhibition at 40 Acres Art Gallery in Sacramento. This exhibition is supported by a gift from the Nehemiah Corporation.

Image: Sharecropper's Masterpiece