Santa Barbara Independent: La Artista Adriana Arriaga, Next-Generation Chicanx Art in Santa Barbara
September 2020: Talking on the phone with Arriaga revealed the sharpness of the intellect behind this array of disarmingly direct images. Delving deeper into her work and her background revealed a story that not only touches on the ambitions of a new generation of artists of color but also highlights a statewide system of higher education that has, after decades of painstaking reforms, finally come into its own. Read more...
Sacramento Bee: UC Davis grad exhibition moves online to showcase student projects during coronavirus
May 2020: UC Davis’ graduate exhibition, an annual interdisciplinary showcase of student work, has been housed in the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art for the past three years. But due to the pandemic, the showcase has moved to the museum’s website, beginning Thursday. Read more...
Arts & Humanities Exhibition by 29 Students in 7 Disciplines Moves Online
May 2020: UC Davis College of Letters and Science graduate students aren’t letting the lack of a physical space stop them from celebrating and sharing their work with the public. The Arts & Humanities 2020 Graduate Exhibition, usually held at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, will instead take place on the museum website May 28–June 14. Read more...
Spring Quarter Snapshot: Manetti Shrem Museum Continues to Share Art
May 2020: As many remain sheltered in place, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is focused on providing virtual avenues for art, activity and connection through a digital initiative: Manetti Shrem Museum At Home. Read more...
The Solace and Joy of Manetti Shrem Museum at Home
April 2020: “Loss. Loneliness. Claustrophobia. Agoraphobia. Freedom. Lifted-spirit type of feeling. Melancholy and joy—maybe in the same piece,” painter Mary Heilmann explains in a video featured in the Manetti Shrem Museum’s new newsletter, Manetti Shrem Museum At Home. Heilmann is describing the range of emotions she works to evoke in her abstract paintings, but she could just as well be naming what we are all feeling lately, separately but together, in our homes. Read more...
UC Davis News: Bay Area Couple Donates $1 Million for New Art at Manetti Shrem Museum
January 2020: The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, will for the first time have a fund dedicated to purchasing and acquiring new art. Janet and Clint Reilly, a notable San Francisco couple with deep civic, philanthropic and business ties to the Bay Area, have pledged a $1 million family gift to establish the Janet and Clint Reilly Acquisition Fund at UC Davis.
The gift will support the Manetti Shrem Museum’s Fine Arts Collection, which focuses on the representation of UC Davis’ legacy and aims to become the primary repository of works by the university’s first-generation art faculty such as Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson. The museum plans to strengthen the collection and fill in gaps through strategic acquisitions.
“This generous gift from Janet and Clint gives us the ability to expand our Fine Arts Collection and ensure that current and future generations can engage with the powerful legacy of the college’s first-generation faculty artists,” said museum Founding Director Rachel Teagle. Read more...
Square Cylinder: Stephen Kaltenbach @ Manetti Shrem
January 2020: Organized by Constance Lewallen, adjunct curator of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and independent curator Ted Mann, this meticulously researched and beautifully presented exhibition gathers representative samples from the essential phases of Kaltenbach’s career. They range from the minimalist ceramic sculptures and architectural blueprints he made as a student, to the Time Capsules that are the show’s centerpiece, to his infamous series of Artforum ads, to documents detailing ephemeral and unrealized efforts, to large-scale paintings and works on paper that point to the artist’s life-long obsession with mortality. Read more...
San Francisco Chronicle: Manetti Shrem Museum’s stellar gala lauds UC Davis artist
January 2020: In spite of a three-year stint amid the Manhattan art scene, UC Davis art alum Stephen Kaltenbach has lived the majority of his artistic career in “downtown” Davis. And that circle was drawn full recently during the Winter Gala celebrating the exhibition “Stephen Kaltenbach: The Beginning and The End” at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. Read more...
Sactown Magazine: In the Name of the Father
January, 2020: After graduating from UC Davis in 1967, Stephen Kaltenbach headed east and thrived in the heady New York art world, exhibiting alongside future greats like Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, and inhabiting provocative alter egos à la Sacha Baron Cohen before Sacha Baron Cohen was even born. But it was his return to Davis that resulted in one of Sacramento’s most beloved paintings: a hauntingly evocative portrait of his dying father. With the launch of his first solo American museum show in over 40 years, the artist reflects on the man who inspired his masterwork and his own starring role as both father and son. Read more...
The Sacramento Bee: Decades after leaving New York art scene, a UC Davis grad reveals his secret work
January, 2020: In the late 1960s, fresh out of graduate school at UC Davis, Stephen Kaltenbach went to New York City to explore Minimalism. After three years, he wound up on the brink of major career success in the emerging field of Conceptual art. Read more...
KQED: Six Bay Area Art Shows to See in 2020
January, 2020: Stephen Kaltenbach is a trickster. The artist behind multiple identities, with many modes of making, he’s the author of a long con that is his own art historical legacy. If you haven’t heard of him, here’s a possible reason: This will be his first solo museum exhibition in the United States in nearly 40 years. Once a promising artist in the New York conceptual scene of the 1960s, Kaltenbach “dropped out,” moved back to California (he studied at UC Davis) and began making work in a very different vein: psychedelic paintings, populist public art, classical-tinged sculpture. But all of this was part of a larger, lifelong project to play with the reception and interpretation of authorship. Read more...