DAVIS, CA.- The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, announces the opening exhibitions that will inaugurate its new, architecturally significant museum building beginning Sunday, November 13.

Hoof & Foot: A Field Study is a site-specific commission by Bay Area artist Chris Sollars; A Pot for a Latch is a participatory installation by the Mexico City-based artist Pia Camil; Out Our Way is the most comprehensive museum exhibition to ever examine the forces that in the early ‘60s propelled UC Davis into the forefront of art internationally; and The Making of a Museum is an exhibition on the architecture and making of the new museum organized by the architectural firm SO – IL.

Exhibitions remain on view from November 13, 2016 through March 24, 2017.

“Our new contemporary art museum is a place where artists, students and scholars from every discipline will be encouraged to connect the present with the past. We are going to be an open place where ideas are exchanged,” says Rachel Teagle, founding director.

Drawn from the collections of major museums and private collections nationwide as well as the Manetti Shrem Museum’s own permanent collection, Out Our Way presents 240 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. Characteristic of the majority is an instinctive embrace of the vernacular and the desire to ingeniously transform the stuff of daily life.

“Nearly 60 years ago, Richard L. Nelson, the founding chair of the UC Davis art department, allowed—no, even encouraged—the artist teachers he hired to challenge and push one another,” says Teagle, who is co-curator of the exhibition with guest curator Jessica Hough. “These artists were incredibly different from each other, artistically and philosophically. Today, some are internationally recognized, others recently re-discovered. But each was an essential ingredient in a unique cross-pollination.”

Represented in Out Our Way are Nelson and 12 artists he hired during his tenure (1952-1970): Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, Roland Petersen, Manuel Neri, Ralph Johnson, Ruth Horsting, Daniel Shapiro, Tio Giambruni, Jane Garritson, and John Baxter.

A viewer will encounter a signature work by each artist in the first gallery of Out Our Way, providing a foundation from which to dive deeper into the artists’ processes in galleries organized around moments of pivotal change.

A prime example of how profound change can well up quickly within an artist is Cup of Coffee (1961) by Wayne Thiebaud. Already present are hallmarks of Thiebaud’s mature style − the use of shadow, and color coming together in the outline of objects — and the kind of formal investigation that consistently set him apart from the Pop artists.

Other exhibition highlights include Roland Petersen’s Picnic (1965) and Robert Arneson’s Herinal (nd); seminal works like Manuel Neri’s Ceramic Loop IV (c. 1961-1965), a ceramic sculpture featured in the University Art Museum, Berkeley’s Funk (1967); and brash experiments that strike one today as prescient. Period photographs, printed materials and film clips provide context for these works of art, created in an art world very different from the networked one of today.

Out Our Way proposes that the tight community formed by these artists in the 1960s was a generator of creativity. Underlining this premise is the surprising number of featured artworks that were exchanged between artists.

Chris Sollars / Hoof & Foot: A Field Study
In conjunction with the grand opening, Bay Area artist Chris Sollars will create a large-scale video installation highlighting the symbiotic relationship of learning between animals and students on the campus of UC Davis, a university rooted in agriculture and home to the world’s foremost veterinary medical school.

For the commission, the artist uses the hoof and foot as a grounding point and creates imagery generated by conversations with UC Davis faculty members and students. Sollars has reached out to students, asking them about topics such as the the body, socialization and stress, and confronting conflict. These conversations have formed the basis of the artist’s imagery and the parallels he draws between how students and animals on campus react in to stress.

Prior to the opening, Sollars and a crew of students will ride through campus on a tricycle, with a cart in front that is rigged with a projector, projecting a video trailer of the art installation onto walls of buildings near where students congregate. Multi-channel video projections will be used in the final installation.

Sollars is best known for creating mixed-media installations that reclaim, recapture and disrupt public spaces through interventions and performances. Among other honors, he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2013), San Francisco Arts Commission: Individual Artist Commission Grant (2013), and a Headlands Center for the Arts residency (2009).

Pia Camil/ A Pot for a Latch
This participatory sculptural installation by Pia Camil is inspired by the outdoor market booths of the artist’s hometown, Mexico City, as well as indigenous gifting economies and modernist art and design. It is fabricated of six open grid panels, each equipped with hooks, shelves and hardware. On designated days during the run of A Pot for a Latch, the members of the public will be invited to exchange their personal items for others on display. The installation highlights the dialogue between vernacular and fine art aesthetics and references an alternative economy that circumvents transactional commerce. Its title references the Native American gift-giving feasts of the Northwest Coast.

Pia Camil often transforms urban and industrial objects into handmade ones, perhaps suggesting the failing aspects of modernist culture and critiquing the appearance of decay often associated with the urban landscape in Mexico City.

The artist first presented A Pot for a Latch at The New Museum in New York in January. Her other solo exhibitions have included, "The little dog laughed" at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; "Entrecortinas: abre, jala, corre" at OMR Gallery, Mexico City; "Espectacular Telón" at Sultana Gallery, Paris, and "Cuadrado Negro" at the Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. Camil’s work is in the permanent collection of La Colección Jumex, la Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, among others.

SO – IL/ The Making of a Museum
This exhibition assembles video, artifacts, models and drawings illustrating the process of creating the Manetti Shrem Museum, a building designed to be in alignment with its environment and region and accommodate new ways of learning about art. The Making of a Museum has been organized by SO – IL, the architectural practice chosen with associate architect Bohlin Cywinski Jackson and contractor Whiting-Turner to design and build the new museum. In the exhibition, SO – IL takes viewers through the inspiration and interpretation phase, the design process, and the construction phase.

The museum’s design signature, the Grand Canopy, is visible along Interstate 80. The sweeping roof tops the low-slung, single-story 30,000-square-foot interior. Its permeable structure channels the intense light of the region into constantly changing shadows and silhouettes.

The canopy arcs as high as 34 feet on the freeway side, and dips as low as 12 feet on its front, which is across the street from the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, a primary entrance to the campus that forms part of an arts corridor. The Grand Canopy cover comprises 910 triangular, honed aluminum infill beams, fit into an intricate pattern that evokes the patchwork texture and topology of the Central Valley. Just 40 slender, white steel columns support these 15,200 linear feet of beams, as well as 4,765 linear feet of steel.

Within the museum’s fluid interior, a glass lobby leads to a central courtyard, which opens to the sky, and to three distinct pavilions offering differing spatial qualities that accommodate exhibitions, art making, classrooms and operations.

Founded by Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu in 2008, and currently run in partnership with Ilias Papageorgiou, the Brooklyn-based SO-IL is known for projects ranging from innovative workspaces to cultural centers. The name SO-IL, which stands for Solid Objectives–Idenburg Liu, reflects the firm’s aim to distill concepts and ideas into simple built forms.

Admission to the museum is free.