New Exhibitions in Art, Design Featured on UC Davis Campus
The Design Museum opens winter quarter with a new exhibition, It’s Bugged: Insects’ Role in Design; the C.N. Gorman Museum opens with sculpture, multimedia and photographic works by Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation/Cherokee); and the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art next week unveils a winter-spring exhibition of works by painter and professor emeritus Wayne Thiebaud.
It’s Bugged: Insects’ Role in Design — Exploring two sides of the relationship between people and insects. The first side shows how makers, designers, architects and artists draw upon nature’s patterns to create beautiful and useful materials and structures. The other side of this relationship involves the collaboration with insects as producers of raw materials, such as harvested silk and red dye made from cochineals. While the insects are (likely!) not conscious of this duality, the outcomes are useful for insects and for people in different ways. This makes our relationship with them complex and compelling. Through April 22, Design Museum, 124 Cruess Hall. Catch an interview with the museum's director, Tim McNeil, on Capital Public Radio's "Insight" program. He talks in the interview about how omnipresent insects and insect designs are in everyday culture, including the beehive design and the prevalence of insects on Gucci bags. The exhibition includes an ancient Chinese robe with a dragon motif and more modern examples. Commissioned works are also on display. Regular hours: noon-4 p.m. weekdays and 2-4 p.m. Sunday. Opening reception: 6 p.m. Thursday (Jan. 11).
Holly Wilson — Solo exhibition by the award-winning multimedia artist, who, according to her website, uses the figure as a vehicle to lure viewers into her stories. “As a storyteller; her work weaves together the threads of various narratives to create a tapestry that tells stories that are sacred and precious, personal and universal, powerful and at times volatile,” the website continues. Wilson (Delaware Nation/Cherokee) uses the figure as a vehicle to lure the viewer into her stories. The exhibition features new and recent multi-media works in sculpture, installation, and photography. Jan. 9-March 16, C.N. Gorman Museum, 1316 Hart Hall. Regular hours: noon-5 p.m. weekdays and 2-5 p.m. Sunday.
Wayne Thiebaud: 1958-1968 — The timeframe begins around the era he began transitioning from the impressionistic style of his early period toward the representational paintings for which he became widely known: paintings of everyday objects of American life — from gumball machines to swimsuits and slices of pie — rendered with exaggerated colors reminiscent of commercial advertising. This transition — which would lead to his becoming one of Northern California’s best known and most accomplished artists — coincided roughly with his appointment in 1960 to the Department of Art, which was then in the process of assembling a distinguished faculty that also would include Roy De Forest, William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson, among others. Thiebaud officially retired from UC Davis in 1991 but continued to teach into the next decade. Jan. 16-May 13, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. Regular hours: noon-6 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday; noon-9 p.m. Thursday, and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday. Public opening celebration: 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 18.
Contributors include Dateline staff, and Michael French, College of Letters and Science