During his famous seven-decade career, painter Wayne Thiebaud has created a body of work that continues to captivate and inspire new viewers.

A pre-Pop Art innovator and figurative artist known for his elevation of everyday objects, Thiebaud crossed paths with generations of students, starting in 1960 when he joined UC Davis’ then fledgling art department as professor. Although he officially retired in 1990 (he continued to teach until 2002), he remains a professor emeritus at the school.

His greatest reach in the world of painting is the subject of an exhibition at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, entitled “Wayne Thiebaud Influencer: A New Generation”, on display until November 12 – closed just three days before turning 101. The Sacramento artist, who still paints daily, will be honored with the Wayne Thiebaud Foundation, which will receive the Margrit Mondavi Arts Medallion at the museum’s annual gala on Thiebaud’s birthday weekend.

For the associate curator of the Manetti Shrem Museum, Susie Kantor, there was a desire that the exhibition not only look back on 100 years of Thiebaud’s life and work, but also “to consider the 100 years of Thiebaud’s life and work. coming years’ of art inspired by him. Kantor was particularly interested in the work of the students of his more than 40 years of teaching at Davis.

“He describes himself as a painter and a teacher, and I think they are just as important to him,” Kantor says. “He gets so much from teaching and his students. He talked about it to keep him young, so maybe that’s the secret to longevity.

“Wayne Thiebaud Influencer” presents the work of 19 artists, 13 of whom were his students, who were inspired by different aspects of Thiebaud’s canon. Their work is presented in conversation with that of Thiebaud, allowing viewers to make comparisons and connections and see the chain of influence from generation to generation.

Featured artists include Christopher Brown, April Glory Funcke, Grace Munakata, Bruce Nauman, Vonn Cummings Sumner and Patricia Wall, all of whom have studied with Thiebaud, as well as Andrea Bowers, Robert Colescott, Alex Israel, Jason Stopa, Jonas Wood and Lynette Yiadom -Boakye. Many of the artists featured have become teachers themselves.

“A lot of artists who studied with him talked about the idea of ​​a daily practice,” Kantor explains. “Many of them still do sketchbooks. This rigor in daily practice, this idea of ​​process is really key, but the value they place on it comes from working and studying with Wayne.

Sumner, who is based in Santa Ana and Palo Alto and has seven paintings in the exhibit, chose to attend Davis because Thiebaud was a faculty member. He obtained both his baccalaureate (in 1998) and his MFA (in 2000) with a specialization in painting from the school.

“I wanted to study with him because I loved his paintings, and to my surprise and luck, I found him to be a very good teacher,” Sumner says. In graduate school, he became Thiebaud’s teaching assistant and developed a deeper creative dialogue with the older artist. The two maintained a “close mentor / mentee relationship” for 20 years.

Among Sumner’s works featured in the exhibition is the 2020 oil “The Elephant in Room II,” a work in which Sumner sees Thiebaud’s influence. It is a memory painting created without photo reference, a practice also employed by Thiebaud.

“Wayne teaches his students how to see, basically,” says Sumner. “This type of ‘seeing’ includes critical thinking, developing our own questions, creating tension and problems to resolve with painting. “

Munakata, a Berkeley-based mixed media painter who features three works in the exhibition, also studied with Thiebaud as an undergraduate and graduate student in the 1980s and was his teaching assistant for his color course. beginner. She still remembers seeing Thiebaud’s painting “Yellow Dress” in 1974 and showing it to her students at Cal State East Bay “to help students see color in one ‘color’ and feel the hand and human intelligence in the choices he made. “

Munakata’s 2019 acrylic painting “Reykjanes”, an abstract inspired by an Icelandic landscape, is one of her two works in the exhibition. She notes: “In Thiebaud’s urban and river landscapes, impossible combinations of planes and scales converge, although unlike my work, its devices read like a single, crazily knit landscape.

Berkeley painter Christopher Brown, whose 2017 oil “Twice Over” is in the exhibit, says the influence of Thiebaud’s “Cityscape” series depicting San Francisco remains significant even 50 years after first seeing times studying for work in an exhibit at the Davis Student Union. The tension between organization and chaos represented in the grid-like patterns of the “Cityscape” works is evident in the architectural subject matter of “Twice Over”.

“When you’re a young artist, you see the most obvious and attractive things in any other artist’s work,” says Brown, such as technical skills that you might not yet have mastered. “But, you just learn by looking at him, ‘Oh, that’s how he put it together, that’s how he painted it, look at the way he uses color. His paintings speak of these fundamental things. What is beautiful about his work is the way he takes these things, these elements, and he intensifies them.

“Influencer Wayne Thiebaud: a new generation”: 11 am-6pm Thursday to Friday; 10 am-5pm Saturday-Sunday. Until November 12 (closed November 11 for Veterans Day). To free; reservations recommended. Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, 254 Old Davis Road, Davis. 530-752-9623. manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu

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