Ongoing exhibitions.

The winter quarter brings new exhibitions to the campus’s galleries and museums. And one of those exhibitions will be in a new space: the Richard L. Nelson Gallery, which is moving out of the Art Building after 34 years.

The Nelson’s new home is the old University Club, renamed Richard L. Nelson Hall, after the same Nelson for whom the gallery is named: the first chair of the Department of Art, and the person who hired many of the luminous artists that made UC Davis a center of the art world starting in the 1960s.

The new gallery’s public opening is scheduled from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 15, with some two dozen minilectures, along with music, food and more. Read more below.

A preview event is scheduled the night before, from 6 to 8 o'clock Friday, Jan. 14. Admission is $75 per person, with tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis. They are available via the Nelson Gallery’s Katrina Wong, (530) 752-8500 or kliwong@ucdavis.edu.

The preview, organized by the Nelson ARTfriends, will include an auction of artwork. Some of the auction items can be previewed at nelsongallery.ucdavis.edu (click on “Upcoming”). If you want to bid, you must attend the event, as there is no online bidding.

Whereas the old Nelson Gallery comprised 1,200 square feet, the new gallery offers more than 4,000 square feet of space. Remodeling has been under way since October, to prepare Nelson Hall for its new occupant.

“I am thrilled to have the kind of room that allows a curator to spread out and think expansively,” said Renny Pritikin, director of the Richard L. Nelson Gallery and the university’s Fine Art Collection.

“This will be a specially designed facility with excellent sight lines and new lighting. Most importantly, we will for the first time be able to exhibit selections from the collection on a regular basis in dedicated gallery space, alongside rotating special exhibitions.”

Meanwhile, planning and fundraising are under way to build the UC Davis Museum of Art, kitty-corner from the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Officials said the Nelson Gallery’s new home in the old University Club will help smooth the transition to the forthcoming museum.

Now, about the winter quarter exhibitions, starting with these two at the new Nelson:

• American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection — A survey of portraiture over the past 100 years, from the university’s Fine Art Collection. Guest-curator Lee Plested has selected more than 100 pieces, including several new acquisitions never exhibited previously at the Nelson.

Through this exhibition, according to the Nelson Gallery, “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.”

American Gothic, which takes its name from the Grant Wood work, arguably the most famous painting of Americans, investigates how artists have chosen to picture themselves and their neighbors through the 20th century and into the 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, the exhibition includes significant presentations of major artists with a special focus on the Davis Five: Robert Arneson, Roy de Forest, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley.

The exhibition also includes important works by Mark Tobey, Nathan Olivera, Deborah Butterfield, Bruce Connor, Bruce Nauman, Nancy Holt, Anthony Hernandez, Chris Johanson and many more.

Plested, originally from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, holds a Master of Arts in curatorial practice from San Francisco's College of the Arts, and has organized exhibitions in museums in Vancouver and throughout Canada, as well as the Bay Area.

The Nelson Gallery announced that it will publish a collection of essays and color plates.

• Gordon Cook: Out There — Twenty paintings, drawings and lithographs by San Francisco’s Gordon Cook (1927-85), focusing on Cook’s fascination with water views, including many sites in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, while at the same time giving a strong sense of the wide range of his work: still-life paintings and an example of the freestanding painted cutout constructions that Cook liked to make for his friends and family.

Out There is guest-curated by renowned San Francisco critic and poet Bill Berkson.

The exhibition comes 22 years after the Nelson’s presentation of a Cook show organized by Price Amerson. In recognition of that event, people who visit the Out There exhibition will be able to view a video of Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud’s 1988 tribute to Cook.

The Chicago native moved to San Francisco in 1951 and soon became an integral part of the artistic circle that included such Bay Area notables as Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud, Elmer Bischoff and Joan Brown.

Cook taught printmaking during the 1960s at the San Francisco Art Institute and later at Sacramento State College (now California State University, Sacramento), the Academy of Art College and Mills College, and at UC Davis, where Arneson and Thiebaud also taught.

The Nelson announced that it will publish an Out There brochure with a Berkson essay and color plates.

More about the Jan. 15 opening

Organizers said 22 arts figures, including UC Davis faculty, local artists and others, have been invited to speak for five minutes each about a work that each speaker will select from American Gothic: Regionalist Portraiture from the Collection. These talks will be spread out through the course of the gallery's opening day, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

In addition, guest-curator Plested will lead a tour of the American Gothic exhibition from 11:30 a.m. to noon, organizers said.

Hours at the new Nelson: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. daily except Friday (by appointment only). The telephone number is the same: (530) 752-8500. Admission is free.

Other new exhibitions in winter quarter:

• BAG: Bags Across the Globe — Faculty member Ann Savageau and her students present bag designs that make use of textile waste. Savageau sees these recycled, reusable bags as alternatives to plastic bags, and a good use for the 1.25 million tons of textile waste that go to U.S. landfills every year. Jan. 18-March 11, Design Museum, 145 Walker Hall. Hours: noon-4 p.m. Monday through Friday and 2-4 p.m. Sunday.

• Sa Moana: The Sea Inside — American Samoan artist Dan Taulapapa McMullin presents oil paintings and installation sculptures that express the complexities of contemporary life for Pacific Islanders. The exhibition, comprising new works developed recently in the Cook Islands and Fiji, and in California, address the issues as tsunami, climate change, the indigenous body, communal traditions and urban change. “From indigenous icons and social media images, Taulapapa investigates the critical position of Pacific Islanders in contemporary Oceania in works that challenge perceptions about Polynesian art," reads a postcard announcement for the exhibition. Jan. 6-March 10, C.N. Gorman Museum, 1316 Hart Hall. Hours: noon-5 p.m. Monday-Friday. Artist's talk, 4 p.m. Thursday, March 10, followed by closing reception.

• Which Came First — A pictorial representation of chicken reproduction in linocut, by Craft Center screen-printing student manager Emily Sin. Jan. 3-Feb. 4, Craft Center Gallery, South Silo. Hours: 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday, and 10 a.m.-6 p.m. weekends. Reception, 5-6 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 15.