The Nut Artmovement was an artistic movement centered in Northern California, that flourished primarily in the late-1960s and early-1970s.
The Nut Artmovement was an artistic movement centered in Northern California, that flourished primarily in the late-1960s and early-1970s.
The term "Nut Art" was coined by artist Roy De Forest (in conversation with writer David Zack) to describe an approach to art making which embraced humor along with the phantasmagorical. According to De Forest, Nut artists sought to create fantasy worlds reflective of their own quirks and eccentricities. As such, Nut Art placed a high degree of emphasis on evolving visions, of which specific artworks were produced as part of the ongoing process of self-definition, or in service to creating new personas and personal mythologies. [1] (Among these personas was that of Ralph "Doggy" Dinsmore, a persona used by De Forest.)
As with Conceptual art, the idea or underlying concept with Nut Art was paramount. [1] As a result, the creation of the Nut artist was not restricted by style or medium, allowing the movement to embrace emerging formats such as performance, text pieces, and appropriation, in addition to more traditional two and three dimensional mediums such as drawing, photography, and sculpture. Because of the emphasis on concept and satire, Nut Art welcomed contributions from participants without formal artistic backgrounds as well as those with advanced technical skill and training. [1] Nut Art also reflected the importance of process over product, which had been a central tenet of the Action painters a generation previous. [2]
Besides De Forest, other key practitioners of Nut Art included Robert Arneson, [3] Clayton Bailey (as well as Bailey's alter-ego Dr. Gladstone [2] ), Victor Cicansky (alter-ego Victor Ceramski), Robert Cumming, Lowell Darling, Betty G. Bailey, Jack Ford, David Gilhooly, Jerry Gooch, Linda Renner, Peter Saul, Sally Saul, Harold Schlotzhauer, Richard Shaw, Irv Tepper, Chris Unterseher, Peter VandenBerge, Franklin Williams, Maija Zack (alter-ego Maija Woof), and David Zack. [4]
David Zack, who was both a poet and an art critic, reviewed many of the group's exhibitions. [1]
The first major exhibition of Nut Art took place in 1972 at the University Art Gallery of California State University, Hayward. The show was co-curated by Clayton Bailey (then art faculty) and Gallery Director Irene Keil. [4] The show produced a catalog which included a preface written by De Forest. [1]
The Bay Area Figurative Movement was a mid-20th-century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at University of California, Davis for nearly three decades.
Roy De Forest was an American painter, sculptor, and teacher. He was involved in both the Funk art and Nut art movements in the Bay Area of California. De Forest's art is known for its quirky and comical fantasy lands filled with bright colors and creatures, most commonly dogs.
David Gilhooly was an American ceramicist, sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. He is best known for pioneering the Funk art movement. He made a series of ceramic frogs called FrogWorld, as well as ceramic food, planets, and other creatures.
Funk art is an American art movement that was a reaction against the nonobjectivity of abstract expressionism. An anti-establishment movement, Funk art brought figuration back as subject matter in painting again rather than limiting itself to the non-figurative, abstract forms that abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were depicting. The movement's name was derived from the jazz musical term "funky", describing the passionate, sensuous, and quirky. During the 1920s, jazz was thought of as very basic, unsophisticated music, and many people believed Funk was an unrefined style of art as well. The term funk also had negative connotations because the word had an association with a foul odor. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Funk was a popular art form, mainly in California's Bay Area in the United States. Although discussed as a cohesive movement, Funk artists did not feel as if they belonged to a collective art style or group. This is because while its artists shared the same attitudes and created similar works, they were not necessarily working together.
Telematic art is a descriptive of art projects using computer-mediated telecommunications networks as their medium. Telematic art challenges the traditional relationship between active viewing subjects and passive art objects by creating interactive, behavioural contexts for remote aesthetic encounters. Telematics was first coined by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in The Computerization of Society. Roy Ascott sees the telematic art form as the transformation of the viewer into an active participator of creating the artwork which remains in process throughout its duration. Ascott has been at the forefront of the theory and practice of telematic art since 1978 when he went online for the first time, organizing different collaborative online projects.
William Thomas Wiley was an American artist. His work spanned a broad range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, performance, and pinball. At least some of Wiley's work has been referred to as funk art.
The history of art in the San Francisco Bay Area includes major contributions to contemporary art, including Abstract Expressionism. The area is known for its cross-disciplinary artists like Bruce Conner, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Voulkos as well as a large number of non-profit alternative art spaces. San Francisco Bay Area Visual Arts has undergone many permutations paralleling innovation and hybridity in literature and theater.
American Figurative Expressionism is a 20th-century visual art style or movement that first took hold in Boston, and later spread throughout the United States. Critics dating back to the origins of Expressionism have often found it hard to define. One description, however, classifies it as a Humanist philosophy, since it is human-centered and rationalist. Its formal approach to the handling of paint and space is often considered a defining feature, too, as is its radical, rather than reactionary, commitment to the figure.
Lawrence Calcagno was a San Francisco Bay area abstract expressionist painter.
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies. It comprises virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, immersive installation and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts such as architecture, painting or sculpture.
The California Clay Movement was a school of ceramic art that emerged in California in the 1950s. The movement was part of the larger transition in crafts from "designer-craftsman" to "artist-craftsman". The editor of Craft Horizons, New York-based Rose Slivka, became an enthusiastic advocate of the movement.
Cybernetic art is contemporary art that builds upon the legacy of cybernetics, where feedback involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The relationship between cybernetics and art can be summarised in three ways: cybernetics can be used to study art, to create works of art or may itself be regarded as an art form in its own right.
The Candy Store Gallery introduced many important artists and styles of art, and was a leading showcase for the Funk artists of Northern California, United States.
Clayton George Bailey, was an American artist who worked primarily in the mediums of ceramic and metal sculpture.
Victor Cicansky, is a Canadian sculptor known for his witty narrative ceramics and bronze fruits and vegetables. A founder of the Regina Clay Movement, Cicansky combined a "wry sense of style" with a postmodern "aesthetic based on place and personal experience". In recognition of his work, Cicansky was appointed member of the Order of Canada (2009) and the Saskatchewan Order of Merit (1997), and was awarded the Saskatchewan Lieutenant-Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts (2012), the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012), as well as the Victoria and Albert Award for Ceramic Sculpture. His work is found in the National Gallery of Canada, Gardiner Museum, Burlington Art Centre, Confederation Centre Art Gallery, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto (Japan).
Betty Graveen Bailey was an American multidisciplinary artist. She lived and worked in Contra Costa County, California, and was part of the Nut art movement.
Maija Peeples-Bright is a Latvian-born American and Canadian painter, ceramist, and arts educator. She is known as one of the pioneers of the Funk art movement in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s. Maija Peeples-Bright has gone by the names Maija Zack, Maija Woof, Maija Bright, and Maija Peeples.
Susan Landauer (1958–2020) was an American art historian, author, and curator of modern and contemporary art based in California. She worked for three decades, both independently and as chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art (SJMA) and co-founder of the San Francisco Center for the Book. Landauer was known for championing movements and idioms of California art, overlooked artists of the past, women artists, and artists of color. She organized exhibitions that gained national attention; among the best known are: "The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism", "Visual Politics: The Art of Engagement", and retrospectives of Elmer Bischoff, Roy De Forest, and Franklin Williams. Her work was recognized with awards and grants from the International Association of Art Critics, National Endowment for the Arts and Henry Luce Foundation, among others. Critics, including Roberta Smith and Christopher Knight, praised her scholarship on San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Bernice Bing, among others, as pioneering. In 2021, Art in America editor and curator Michael Duncan said that "no other scholar has contributed as much to the study of California art". Landauer died of lung cancer at age 62 in Oakland on December 19, 2020.
Jim Melchert was an American visual artist, arts administer, and professor. He is known for his ceramics and sculptures. Melchert was part of the Funk art movement.
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