[ Upbeat Music ] This program is brought to you in part by the UC Davis College of Letters and Science — education without boundaries for a life of boundless impact.

Robert Arneson's Eggheads are a defining element of UC Davis.

They symbolize that we're serious about all we do, but we're also comfortable with being a little quirky, a little unconventional.

UC Davis' commitment to public art further illustrates the vital role of liberal arts in education — one that enhances our understanding of the modern world and enlightens us to make it a better place.

UC Davis was so fortunate to attract a really stellar roster of artists as their founders of their art department.

There's been a lot of thinking and talking.

What was the secret sauce?

What made UC Davis so special?

There was a lot of conflict in the 1960s.

There was the Civil Rights Movement and violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement.

There was the Vietnam War and protests against the Vietnam War.

And then there was the rise of the counterculture.

It was just freewheeling, and we had birth control.

We had free speech.

We had a lot going on in this country.

It promulgated a completely open atmosphere where there weren't really any rules.

In Northern California, the counterculture was particularly predominant, and it was associated with San Francisco, but also Berkeley, the Peninsula, and here at Davis.

Davis did have a lot of social movement and a lot of excitement about trying to change the world in the 1960s.

And in particular, there was a lot of focus on the counterculture and creating art and art happenings that challenged the dominant culture.

UC Davis is a funny place for an artist to come.

After the Second World War, especially with the GI Bill, the campus — like lots of campuses in the UC system — had to expand really fast.

And with the rapid expansion, one of the things that happens is the art department is created and expanded.

Regional artists are recruited — artists that could bring a distinctive mood or a vibe that is not necessarily trying to teach art with a capital A.

Some people say that the secret sauce was founding department director Richard Nelson.

That he conscientiously curated a group of individuals who were very different from one another but had tremendous respect for one another.

Other people say that UC Davis allowed artists the freedom to experiment.

William T. Wiley, one of the founding first-generation artists, said, "at UC Davis, I felt like anything could happen."

I transferred to Davis middle of my junior year, and I wanted to be a potter.

So I came here — really in December of '69 — and ended up in this TB 9 — the ceramics building.

There was that freedom in TB 9 that it wasn't such a formal place.

It was dirty.

And, you could just be away from the academia and then all the rules.

It was like its own country.

It was the end of the '60s, the beginning of the '70s.

I mean, it was totally different.

There were no card locks on the doors to go in.

Everybody went in and out.

TB 9 was open all the time.

People worked there day and night.

And there were no questions asked.

The structure inside was like the old Carquinez Bridge with struts and rivets, and it was cold, really cold in the winter — and boiling hot in the summer.

Kilns were firing.

Foundry was firing.

We were all in one atmosphere.

The Quonset hut we now lovingly refer to as TB 9 predates UC Davis as a university.

My understanding was that Temporary Building No.

9 first housed the campus post office.

And in the 1950s, as UC Davis became a university and started to attract this stellar lineup of artists in their founding art department, the artists slowly found their way into that space and started taking over that Quonset hut as an art-making space.

Founding artist Tio Giambruni built a foundry.

They did experimental smelting of materials, made sculpture.

We had fires at night.

You know, this was in the winter with our lawn chairs around it.

So it was like a beach.

We were in the sandpit of the foundry with our fire.

And I'd do my homework there and work, and I met all of these wonderful artists.

I mean, my teachers were Bob Arneson, Roy De Forest, William Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri and Ralph Johnson.

I think it was an incredible introduction to what it was to be an artist.

Well, I'm Sandra Shannonhouse.

I was married to Bob for 19 years, and we built this studio together in 1980 — opened in 1981.

That wall is pretty much the drawing wall.

And then there's a mirror over there — a three-way mirror, which I'll show you, which is pretty interesting.

Well, if you're in here, you can adjust these so you can see the back of your head so you can get the shape of it.

You know, people always making sculptures of themselves or sculptures of heads and there's no place for the brain.

It's flat back here, and that's not the way it is.

And everybody's head has a different shape.

So he thought it was very fortunate to have a nice-shaped head.

Underneath here is his wheel.

And so all of these tools are tools he would use when he was at the wheel.

And then those sticks that are hanging there he would use — as well as a baseball bat — to work on sculpture but also to work on pieces on the wheel.

Not everybody, but a lot of people — and Bob especially — started really thinking about what something in clay could be, what it should be, why it should be, and how it really should have the imprint of the artist and not look like it came out of a production line or a mold or an industrial process.

We don't need to make perfect little cups.

We can make cups that have a personality.

We can make cups that wiggle a little bit, you know.

To really understand Robert Arneson's commitment to ceramics, it's important to understand that when he was first hired at UC Davis in the late 1950s, he was hired into the home ec department.

Ceramics were not understood as a material for making art.

Ceramics were for making coffee pots, teapots, plates, cups.

And if you were working in ceramics, you were working in the home ec department.

It became Robert Arneson's life mission to advance ceramics as a material of the vanguard making of art.

That ceramics could be an expressive medium as important in the world of art as oil paint or bronze sculpture.

It is common when I talk to Arneson students that they get tears in their eyes talking about the time they spent in TB 9 was the most important time in their life.

Arneson was known for open-door studios.

He knew that artists had to make when the creative urge struck them.

He was such a good teacher.

There's a lot of technical stuff in ceramics, and, you know, he was just right there, hands-on, whenever you needed him — or when you didn't.

He liked working when they were working.

He liked being a model.

You know, you work, you get your work done, and then you play.

But you have to get your work done.

You have to come in every day and no excuses.

He loved teaching.

They loved being his student — that energy, rigor, kind of no bulls**t. He certainly changed the understanding of ceramics as a medium.

Arneson also, I think, really opened an important door for understanding the role of humor in advancing social critique.

I remember once looking at Robert Arneson's own home, and he had installed ceramics around the house.

He'd done his own tiling with his own tiles.

And he would mold into the tiles things that he was just thinking: "f'ing hot today ... really windy."

So it's about living in the moment.

And of course, that's absolutely part of that kind of countercultural moment.

I just love how he took classical sculpture and thumbed his nose at it, literally.

My actual favorite one is my secret glaze formulas, which is this book that's completely — it's ceramic.

You can't open it.

But it's like got every glaze known to man spattered on to it and just making fun of the whole secret glaze recipes and things.

Probably his most important legacy was how powerfully he turned his eye on himself.

Arneson's own body was often the subject of his artwork.

Arneson was struggling to understand himself as a human through his art.

I would even say the Eggheads are part of his process to understand what it means to be a professor and to teach on a university campus.

This does a good job of removing simple scuff marks.

Just like as much as we can take off before we have to strip the wax.

Today, what we're doing is more of like a restoration.

We're going to strip it down.

We're going to reapply a patina and get it back to — close to its former glory.

Bob's particular technique on it was to make it speckled, kind of like an eggshell.

So we have various spray guns that will spray the paint and the ferric on in multiple layers.

That's the fun part about patina is that you can have a layered effect.

It's not like painting a car or painting anything else that's really opaque.

There's lots of layers and nuance to it.

The Eggheads came to be toward the end of Robert Arneson's life.

He proposed the idea of the Eggheads — this series of five installations of seven sculptures throughout our campus — that were a commentary on the campus.

He knew the campus well, and he proposed those Eggheads to both honor the students and the institution and to let them keep asking questions.

I mean, isn't that what art's about?

It's interesting, isn't it, that the Eggheads don't even really have their own pedestals.

Sometimes they're actually sort of mashed straight into the ground.

They're on our level.

They're completely accessible.

It's a takedown of academic pretense.

All of those things that we've learned to laugh at through the Eggheads.

I remember him explaining the message behind each one.

And his appreciation for sort of what he got away with.

And I think that's kind of what he felt like.

They're approachable, ostensibly benign, but — there's the one keeping the eye on the administration.

And the fact that they're embraced the way they are would have thrilled him.

Every time I've been here, teachers, students, everyone has stopped and asked what we were doing and were very interested, because I feel like the sculptures are beloved.

I think everybody at Davis knows what they are and know what they represent.

They understand the Bob Arneson sense of humor, and I think they really appreciate them as conversation pieces.

What makes the Eggheads so special is that our campus adopted a work of art — a true work of art — as the symbol of our community.

I believe that the Eggheads have exceeded far more than Robert Arneson ever intended they might achieve, and it's because they've become a symbol of our community.

This is called a warping board, and this is a weaving tool.

When you're setting up a loom, you have to be able to create a whole bunch of threads that are all the same exact length.

So this is how you do that.

I sort of think about everything in my life as an extension of my weaving practice.

I weave cloth, but I also weave community, and I weave story, and I weave ideas.

Part of my practice is very much like an introverted studio practice that involves learning more about myself and my body and my unconscious through the act of making.

And then there's another part of my practice that's very oriented toward community.

I love this metaphor that these separate threads are interlacing and not losing their individual characteristics but together forming a stronger cloth than they ever could on their own.

Part of why the art department at UC Davis has been so successful is it's always had this beautiful tension between the incredible legacy of their first-generation artists and always looking to how are those artists serving the next generation of artists?

This is my installation for my thesis show.

My work is about the human in nature.

Humans believe we can control nature, but we can't.

So whatever humans produce — even the plastic — actually, it comes back to nature and to our bodies.

That's what I'm saying in my work.

We at the Manetti Shrem Museum are very proud to host an annual graduate exhibition where we get to see the best and brightest of graduating students out of the design and art departments.

But what's equally exciting to me are all the students from across the curriculum who participate in that exhibition.

I believe that today the arts at UC Davis are still fulfilling their most important function, and that is teaching our student body at large the importance of creativity and personal expression in everything that we do.

At the undergraduate level, we have a lot of students who are double majors in the sciences and in art, and they bring those practices of observation, those approaches to seeing into their own work.

Brain and body, how don't they go together?

I mean, so I've always been really interested in neuroscience, and my background is primarily in dance.

And I've always been really interested in kind of how dance can move people and what it makes them feel and why.

And neuroscience seemed like a good way to study that and combine the two.

Theatre and dance at UC Davis is an exciting enterprise.

We have a group of very committed students who are the heart and soul of this department, alongside our staff and our faculty.

We're trying to be attentive to their needs and their desires as people who are trying to go into the world of the arts, but also people who will go into the world with an artistic sensibility.

People who understand how to connect to people.

What it means to be in relation.

How to think outside of the box.

In our department, we have this holistic approach to research and practicum in a way that if I'm teaching a composition student, it's not just about what it means to put notes on a page.

That would be sort of more in line of what my life was like.

It's more about what the history of a particular genre can be, or if they're interested in ethnomusicology and what other cultures are doing with their musical practices and traditions.

I think our program has the distinctive quality of really trying to make sure that everyone feels like they can belong and have something to do musically as a community.

To be able to be engaged with young artists and new ideas and people discovering a visual language — or things that are beyond language that can only be expressed through a particular medium — you know, those are just like such powerful experiences that I have the privilege of nurturing and guiding every day.

And I learn so much from it too.

Teaching here for me makes it really exciting to spend all this time talking about art and about ideas with young people and to hear what they have to say, what they have to make.

To spend time with young people keeps you on your toes and keeps you finding out technologies and ideas.

It's hard work.

It's hard labor.

And it requires dedication.

But you hardly notice, because it's so much fun.

The best thing for me is to give the possibility to my students to interact with different researchers.

For example, right now we are collaborating with professor Reagan from the veterinary school where we are developing this litter box for cats with my student Shuyi Sun.

That also gives us — my students here in the lab — different views of what it means to do research.

There is that spirit of collaboration.

And that's what everybody notices when they first come to UC Davis, is just how collaborative the faculty are.

They are predisposed to wanting to collaborate and work across disciplines.

Being able to see things in a different light is really what makes great art.

So you're kind of embracing even their ruinous state.

It's the next stage.

Yeah.

They're evolving.

Yeah.

We started this project with a question: What is a fence?

And that came about from a found material that I scavenged and brought in, which was a fallen down fence.

In order for them to actually have some kind of relationship with this found material and not just see it as dirty garbage, I asked them, you know, to ponder the question: What is a fence?

So the class is very research heavy.

They did a lot of writing.

They did some prose work around that question, talking about fence as a barrier, fence as a protector, fence as a sort of sociological construct.

And you sort of find out, you know, where they are and they find out where each other is in their thinking and the scope of their imagination.

Doing impressions of the fence in clay and then bisque firing it was very fruitful, because we got all this texture and information about the wood in the clay.

So even though this is actively being weathered and is continuing to evolve every day being outside, these pieces are kind of holding like vital information about a state that the wood used to be in.

What is a fence?

There's a lot of answers to that, because it's so simple.

What I love about Robin's classes is that while she gives you like a direction, she also gives you a lot of freedom.

We can just take that very vague prompt and do what we will with it, and whatever comes out of it is going to be exciting because it wasn't expected.

I'm really excited about the future of the arts.

There is an energy on this campus for people to want to experience the arts.

I can tell you that as a dean when I go to events, the events that are most attended — where I see standing room only — are only the arts events.

There's a lot of energy and momentum behind the arts at Davis at the moment.

The gift of Maria Manetti Shrem has given us a transformative moment that will have impact for the rest of the program's future.

We just got $20 million from Maria Manetti Shrem, and it's like hmm.

That is going to be a game changer for students on the ground.

But most of all, it's going to position us as a top-ranked university.

Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem's support of the arts at UC Davis has allowed our students and our faculty to engage with the arts in really holistic ways from being able to go to the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum and see some extraordinary examples of the best of contemporary art, to then coming into the art department and into our classrooms and getting to work in a really personalized manner with both the extraordinary artists that we have on faculty and our extraordinary visiting artists.

I've often said, I want us to be the arts destination in Northern California from the Sierras to the seas.

There's no reason why, if you live in Sacramento, you have to go all the way to San Francisco to go experience the art world.

You could do that right here.

The thing that I get most excited about with the Mondavi Center is the founding belief from Larry Vanderhoef when he decided to have a performing arts center at UC Davis, that a well-rounded life has to involve engagement with the performing arts and the arts writ large.

And also by extension at UC Davis, that a well-rounded education doesn't happen unless you can engage with the performing arts.

I'm an engineer, and I study science, mathematics and engineering, which in some ways is how we try to improve the quality and the duration of our lives.

But art you can think of as a discipline which makes that life worth living.

The best way to keep a legacy alive is to keep it in dialogue with young artists, and that's still very much happening today.

It's a continuum, and I feel so incredibly honored to be sort of part of that legacy.

I love the history of this place.

I love all of the photos on the wall that show the family of this and being a part of that lineage.

And I never would have imagined that I would have ended up in Davis, but I feel incredibly grateful.

I have continued to find exactly what I need here.

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