When Bob Riley arrived at the Nelson Gallery in September, he discovered a jumbled office, virtually no staff and 5,000 masterpieces and curiosities in the Art Building basement.

He also saw ghosts such as art professor Robert Arneson and past director/curator Price Amerson each time he went down to see what else was packed in the dusty stacks.

The new director and curator treats it all like the greatest adventure of his 50 years.

"I’m the guardian of California Funk," he says cheerfully, acknowledging that he has committed himself to the burnishing of the art department’s national claim to fame.

Make no mistake, though. Despite his appreciation of UC Davis’ past and his amusement with a witty collection filled with "provocative clowning," Riley is a big-picture curator: He sees the gallery, its six sprawling collections and UC Davis’ connection to the art world as an extension into the future.

Riley comes to campus with credentials that fill seven pages of a résumé, including a dozen years as curator of media arts with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and teaching positions at Stanford, San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts & Crafts, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

His job, Riley says, is to educate the public about art, using the campus’s Fine Art Collection and outside art and artists to explore where art has been and where it is going. "If collected wisely, we can present through exhibitions, artistic arguments how past eras made it possible for artists to move forward," he says.

Both the people and plans for a new visual arts center attracted Riley to UC Davis from his last job in Nova Scotia. "I was first intrigued by the UC Davis artists and their ways of working with materials. I also like the academic structure – critical studies and the cultural concentrations where students can cross over."

Riley says he also likes to come to places on the brink of having a national profile – he helped create programs for the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art as well as for The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. In UC Davis’ case, it is restoring a national profile that the Nelson’s helped create – along with art professors such as Wayne Thiebaud, Arneson, Roy De Forest and William T. Wiley.

The reputation has kept the art department among the top 10 art schools for years. Ever since the death of Amerson in fall 1999, however, the Nelson’s direction has been on hold.

Riley says he is looking forward to using his background in time-based and moving-image media to teach with the Center for Technocultural Studies. He wants to spread art beyond the first floor of the Art Department where the Nelson Gallery is housed and in the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center to many campus venues. He encourages requests from schools and colleges.

In the meantime, Riley is busy being an administrator and handyman, hiring a new registrar/collection manager, figuring out how to build inexpensive worktables and planning exhibitions out into the future.

"Imagination is the best resource when one is split between two jobs," Riley says.

His plans include documenting and indexing onto a database the existing prints, paintings, sculptures and video art that comprise the six collections. He just hired Jemima Harr from the Triton Museum of Santa Clara to take on the challenge.

Riley is also involving undergraduate students, a longtime Nelson tradition, in the backstop work needed for exhibitions. At his request, beginning with the current exhibition on Emmet Gowan’s aerial photographs, art history graduate students are writing explanations to accompany exhibitions to give them experience in communicating artistic perspectives.

Riley says it’s time to start building the collection again, including the campus’s outdoor public art – the last major purchase being Arneson’s set of Eggheads over a decade ago.

Almost daily Riley makes a new discovery that delights him, he says, like Andy Warhol’s shopping bag print from his first one-man show.

Riley has an immediate ambition: to clean up the Nelson Gallery’s back office and open the doors to students, staff and faculty. "I found that the Nelson has been very introspective, so one of the things I’ve done is scrape off the ‘do not enter’ sign on our office door."

His position, which used to be within the Department of Art, was put under the direction of Dean Elizabeth Langland to acknowledge the broader responsibilities expected of the Nelson director/curator with a visual arts center being planned near Mondavi Center.

He’s already forged alliances with the campus’s two other academic art museum directors, Dolph Gotelli of the Design Museum in environmental design and George Longfish of the Carl N. Gorman Museum in Native American studies.

"It’s the wish of Dean Langland for us to integrate our program with the other art museums and put the Nelson back on the national map," Riley says. "The promise of the visual arts center is a bonus – even if it gets put off for a few years, it still allows the Gorman Museum, Design Museum and Nelson to work as a consortium to get art to the public."