Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is a fine arts museum located at the University of California, Davis in Davis, California. Its full name is the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art. The museum opened on November 13, 2016. According to The New York Times, the museum includes "trailblazing contributions by the school’s renowned art faculty, which contributed to innovations in conceptual, performance and video art in the 1960s and 70s". Background Richard L. Nelson was the founder of the art department at UC Davis, and he recruited a faculty in the early 1960s that included highly successful artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Roland Petersen and William T. Wiley. Several were associated with the Funk art genre. In a negative 1981 review in The New York Times, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer referred to Arneson as the leader of "a spirit best defined as defiant provincialism" at UC Davis. That phrase has since been embraced as a defining description by artists associated with UC Davis. For nearly 60 years, the art faculty hoped for and discussed the possibility of building a dedicated art museum, according to museum director Rachel Teagle.