Ended Aug 6
Nut Art
May 28 – Aug 6, 2017
Artists: Robert Arneson, Betty Bailey, Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Hannah Greely, Calvin Marcus, Maija Peeples-Bright, Benjamin Reiss, Peter Saul, Sally Saul, Chris Unterseher and 1 more
Robert Arneson, Betty Bailey, Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Hannah Greely, Calvin Marcus, Maija Peeples-Bright, Benjamin Reiss, Peter Saul, Sally Saul, Harold Schlotzhauer, Richard Shaw, Irvin Tepper, Chris Unterseher, Franklin Williams
Parker Gallery is proud to announce our inaugural exhibition, Nut Art.
Nut Art was a movement founded in the late 1960s by five Northern California artists: Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Maija Peeples-Bright (then Maija Zack, aka Maija Woof) and David Zack. Legend has it, the group was at De Forest’s “purple house under the golden hills of Port Costa, California…looking out the window at some horses and drinking Swan Lager beer.” David Zack, an arts writer and correspondence artist, was searching for a new movement; something that might be an artists’ answer to the Funk moniker adopted by curator Peter Selz. “Roy’s mother Oma came up with a round tray full of open brown bottles of Swan Lager, plus some vegetarian bacon crisps. Everyone said Nut Art at once. Nut Art was born.”
Nut Art exhibitions shortly followed, including one organized by Clayton Bailey in 1972 at California State University Hayward. For the exhibition’s staple-bound catalog, De Forest wrote what is commonly referred to as the Nut Art manifesto. The manifesto declares, in all caps:
“THE WORK OF A PECULIAR AND ECCENTRIC NUT CAN TRULY BE CALLED ‘NUT ART’…THE NUT ARTIFICER TRAVELS IN A PHANTASMAGORIC MICRO-WORLD, SMALL AND EXTREMELY COMPACT, AS IS THE LIGHT OF A DWARF STAR IMPLODING INWARD AND IN PASSAGE COLLAPSING PARADISE AND HELL TO ONE AS IT VANISHES FOREVER WITH OUR JOYS, SORROWS AND UNREQUITED LOVE.”
Nut Art at Parker Gallery brings artists from Bailey’s 1972 exhibition together with contemporary artists who help reveal that the spirit of Nut Art is alive and well. Nut Art includes 10 works from the original exhibition, many of which have not been publicly exhibited since 1972. This exhibition is being held on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Funk exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, and in conjunction with the retrospectives of Roy De Forest at the Oakland Museum of California and Franklin Williams at the Sonoma County Art Museum.
