From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest in the Kramlich Collection

The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, at the University of California, Davis, opens its winter season with new exhibitions that are intertwined with William T. Wiley’s (1937-2021) living legacy of challenging convention. William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line presents Wiley’s lifelong collaboration with Bruce Nauman through the enigma that is the Slant Step—an infamous object in contemporary art history. Last year, Nauman created yet another Slant Step that is the first to take the form of a new media artwork. Slant Step (Scanned) continues Nauman’s lifelong artistic collaboration with Wiley, making the Step relevant to a new generation and connecting to the new media art featured in From Moment to Movement. These two exhibitions are complemented by a celebration of Mary Heilmann’s time at UC Davis, a period when her future as an artist was in question and when she found purpose through making art while in dialogue with Wiley and Nauman.

From Moment to Movement: Picturing Protest in the Kramlich Collection
On view through June 19, 2022
Curator: Susie Kantor

Protest can take varied forms, from active demonstrations to bearing witness to histories. Drawn from the renowned Kramlich Collection of new media art, this exhibition presents a large-scale exhibition of video and film installations spanning 30 years of new media work. Featuring an international, intergenerational group of artists—Shiva Ahmadi, Dara Birnbaum, Kota Ezawa, Theaster Gates, Nalini Malani and Mikhael Subotzky—the exhibition explores ideas of resistance, the role of media in shaping our understanding of events, and the power and politics of viewing.

Mary Heilmann: Squaring Davis
On view through May 8, 2022
Curator: Dan Nadel

Decades before she would become a preeminent contemporary abstract painter, Mary Heilmann started studying with William T. Wiley at UC Davis and found a place whose unique life-as-art ethos meshed with her spirit and inspired her to keep creating art despite her doubts. This exhibition reunites Heilmann’s Northern California oeuvre of rarely seen ceramics from the mid-1960s, sculptures and a group of “Davis Square” paintings—an integral part of Heilmann’s breakthrough body of work of red, yellow and blue geometric abstractions

William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line
On view through May 8, 2022
Curator: Dan Nadel

From 1962 to 1969, while teaching at UC Davis, William T. Wiley developed a complex methodology and compound symbol language to explore philosophical, environmental and psychological questions across all available media. The results are startling, often beautiful and always engaging. William T. Wiley and the Slant Step: All on the Line brings together key works from this era, including the Slant Step, a peculiar wooden “step” purchased at a Marin County salvage shop. It epitomized Wiley’s outlook on art and jump-started conceptual art in Northern California. This exhibition gathers for the first time many of Slant Step objects produced by Wiley, his former student, Bruce Nauman, and their peers, while also debuting a new digital Slant Step work by Nauman.

About the Manetti Shrem Museum
The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, is a contemporary art museum and cultural resource dedicated to making art accessible and approachable to all. It builds on UC Davis’ legacy of exceptional teaching and practice of the arts to offer engaging experiences, exhibitions and educational programs that reflect and serve the community, now and for generations to come. The museum shares the university’s core values of innovative research, interdisciplinary experimentation and a commitment to educational programming. One-third of the museum’s 50,000-square-foot space is devoted to instruction, including a 125-seat lecture hall, classroom space and the drop-in Carol and Gerry Parker Art Studio. Opened in November 2016, the museum has earned LEEDv3-NC Platinum status and was recently named one of the 25 Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years by ARTnews.

Media contact: Laura Compton, llcompton [​at​] ucdavis.edu.