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Out There + American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the CollectionPost an Event »

Richard L. Nelson Gallery, UC Davis

January 15 - March 14, 2011

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One Shields Avenue Art Building Room 12 Davis, CA 95616
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Out There + American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection Gordon Cook Study for Storage Tank
Both of these exhibitions are at the Nelson Gallery in Nelson Hall (the former University Club) on the UC Davis campus. Gordon Cook: Out There Out There, selection of twenty paintings, drawings and lithographs by the San Francisco artist Gordon Cook (1927-1985), will be one of two exhibitions to inaugurate the new quarters of the Richard Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis. Opening on January 15, 2011, and continuing until March, the Cook show focuses on Cook’s fascination with water views – including many sites in the Sacramento Delta – at the same time giving a strong sense of the wide range of his work. A native of Chicago, Cook moved to San Francisco in 1951 and soon became an integral part of the artistic circle that included such Bay Area notables as Wayne Thiebaud, Joan Brown, Robert Arneson and Elmer Bischoff. He was a master printer, a member of the Dolphin Swim and Boating Club, and taught printmaking during the 1960s at the San Francisco Art Institute and later at Sacramento State College (now California State University), UC, Davis, the Academy of Art College and Mills College, Oakland. In 1987, two years after his untimely death, Cook was honored by a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Oakland Museum. His estate is represented by the George Krevsky Gallery, San Francisco. Beside Cook’s waterscapes, the exhibition includes a number of still-life paintings, vertiginous etchings of the shorelines of the San Francisco headlands, and one example of the ingenious freestanding painted cutout constructions Cook liked to make for his friends and family. American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection presents a survey of portraiture over the past 100 years. Through this centennial review a genealogy of stylistic development emerges with a special focus on artists and activities in and around UC Davis and Northern California. The strength of the UC Davis collection allows for a vivid trip through American art history, a colorful story of independent thought and the ongoing fight for liberty and equality. Taking its name from arguably the most famous painting of Americans (American Gothic, Grant Wood), American Gothic investigates how artists have chosen to picture themselves and their neighbors through the 20th and 21st century. Informed by and yet rejecting European academic traditions, American artists pioneered new methods and styles that reflected the attitudes and social ideas of their times. The ideals of early modernism gave birth to a complex self-reflexivity and artists turned a critical eye to their community, picturing the evolving complexity of their contemporary life. From Whistler through Warhol this exhibition will include significant presentations of major artists with a special focus on the Davis 5 (de Forest, Thiebaud, Arneson, Neri, and Wiley). Also presented are important works by Mark Tobey, Nathan Olivera, Deborah Butterfield, Bruce Connor, Bruce Nauman, Nancy Holt, Anthony Hernandez, Chris Johanson and many more. Guest curator Lee Plested, originially from Vancouver, Canada, he holds a MA in Curatorial Practice from San Francisco's College of the Arts, and has selected over 100 pieces from the collection, including several new acquisitions never before seen.
Out There + American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection William T. Wiley Scarecrow, 1975 aquatint etching on paper 10" x 8"