Summer Celebration July 14 at Art Museum

by Dateline Staff
June 24, 2019

Combo: Kathy Butterly at work, in studio; flanked by two of her sculptures, "Color Hoard-r" and "Frill Seeker." — Kathy Butterly, MFA ’90, in her New York City studio, and two of her sculptures: Left — “Color Hoard-r,” 2013, clay and glaze, 5 x 3¾ x 3 inches; Kathy Butterly; image courtesy the artist. Right — “Frill Seeker,” 2015, clay and glaze, 4½ x 4¾ x 4 inches; courtesy Shoshana and Wayne Blank; image courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

A new season and new exhibitions can mean only one thing at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art: a celebration!

AT A GLANCE

WHAT: Summer Season Celebration, featuring the debut of ColorForm and Landscape Without Boundaries
WHEN: 2-5 p.m. Sunday, July 14
ARTIST TALK: Kathy Butterly, 3 p.m.
WHERE: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public

•••

Landscape Without Boundaries runs through Dec. 15, ColorForm runs through Dec. 29. Summer hours and admission:

11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday
Closed Monday
Free admission

As in the Summer Season Celebration, Sunday, July 14, when you can be among the first to see ColorForm, sculptures and drawings by UC Davis alumna Kathy Butterly; and Landscape Without Boundaries, comprising works from the university museum’s collection (the artists include our own Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley).

You can hear from Butterly, too, at her artist’s talk at 3 p.m. ColorForm curator Dan Nadel will join her.

The celebration also will include art activities for the whole family, music by So Much Light, and free ice cream and other refreshments.

ColorForm

Butterly, who received her Master of Fine Arts degree at UC Davis in 1990, is distinguished among modern and contemporary sculptors for her move to a highly personal, yet nakedly accessible ceramic language of line, form and color that tilts ever closer to emotive, endlessly inventive abstraction.

ColorForm is Butterly’s first retrospective exhibition, charting the evolution of her sensibility, skill set and philosophical stance, all of which have strong historical roots in the work of Viola Frey, Ken Price and Arneson, her mentor at UC Davis (she was one of his last students before his death in 1996).

The exhibition encompasses Butterly’s entire career through approximately 50 sculptures and 20 drawings, while focusing on the last 10 years of work, including sculpture made especially for this occasion.

Roy De Forest artwork — Roy De Forest, “The Problem of James R.,” 1968, latex on canvas, 64 x 64 inches. Fine Arts Collection, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, UC Davis. Gift of James C. Israel Family. Copyright 2019 Estate of Roy De Forest/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo by Cleber Bonato.

Landscape Without Boundaries

Nadel also curated this exhibition, which charts the ways in which painting, sculpture and drawing addressed the Northern California landscape in the years after World War II.

The roots of Landscape Without Boundaries lie in the blend of nature, agriculture and industry surrounding Davis and the artists who lived and worked here, giving them an awareness of and daily interaction with the environment of the Central Valley, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and north end of San Francisco Bay.

Here the landscape could inspire a map of an artist’s psychology, become the basis of a surrealist image or provide the raw material for a freshly invented world. Collectively, this artwork seeks the depths of the human spirit and luxuriates in the paradise of the ordinary hillside. It is profoundly attuned to being alive, in this place, at any time.

Beyond Arneson, Thiebaud and Wiley, the exhibition includes significant works Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Mike Henderson, Robert Hudson, Judith Linhares, Gladys Nilsson, Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, Martín Ramírez, Peter Saul, Cornelia Schulz and Joseph Yoakum.

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