Nut artmovement was an artistic consciousness movement centered in Northern California, that flourished primarily in the late-1960s and early-1970s.
Nut artmovement was an artistic consciousness 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 also a poet and 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]
California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art school. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996 it opened a second campus in San Francisco, and in 2022 the Oakland campus was closed and merged into the San Francisco campus. CCA enrolls approximately 1,239 undergraduates and 380 graduate students.
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. Spanning two decades, this art movement is often broken down into three groups, or generations: the First Generation, the Bridge Generation, and the Second Generation.
Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at University of California, Davis for nearly three decades.
Yōga is a style of artistic painting in Japan, typically of Japanese subjects, themes, or landscapes, but using Western (European) artistic conventions, techniques, and materials. The term was coined in the Meiji period (1868–1912) to distinguish Western-influenced artwork from indigenous, or more traditional Japanese paintings, or Nihonga (日本画).
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, also known as David James Gilhooly III, 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.
Malaquías Montoya is an American born Chicano poster artist and a major figure in the Chicano Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
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's 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.
Munich School is the name given to a group of painters who worked in Munich or were trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Munich between 1850 and 1918. In the second half of the 19th century the Academy became one of the most important institutions in Europe for training artists and attracted students from across Europe and the United States.
Lawrence Calcagno was a San Francisco Bay area abstract expressionist painter. He described his artistic motivation in the following words
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.
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, CM, SOM, 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.
Adelie Landis Bischoff was an American artist, and wife of artist Elmer Bischoff.