The Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture honors the
Thiebauds’ long commitment to educating the eye and hand along
with the mind. The endowment, started in 2015, complements the
Art Studio Program’s Visiting Artist Lecture
Series and The California
Studio, both core components of the Art Studio
M.F.A. Program. The Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud
Endowed Lecture features practicing artists, along with
critics, curators, writers, historians, and museum professionals,
to provide cultural insights and context for contemporary art.
The Thiebaud Endowment also aims to bring more than one guest per
year and/or extend the length of their UC Davis engagement.
Wangechi Mutu, whose works are all rooted in her investigations
and advocacy around human representation, is chosen for this
year’s Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture. Mutu
will give a public lecture on Thursday, May 12.
Njideka Akunyili
Crosby, whose art negotiates the cultural terrain between her
adopted home in America and her native Nigeria in collage and
photo transfer-based paintings, will give the
seventh Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture on
Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020. This year’s lecture celebrates
Wayne Thiebaud’s centennial birthday.
Leonardo Drew, known for creating reflective abstract
sculptural works that play upon the dystopic tension between
order and chaos, will give the sixth Betty Jean
and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture on Thursday, Feb. 6,
2020.
David Salle, a contemporary American painter and
essayist, will give the fifth Betty Jean and Wayne
Thiebaud Endowed Lecture. Salle was one of a group of young,
mostly New York, so-called neo-expressionist artists who came
into prominence and became art stars in the 1980s, along with
Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl and others. His collage-like
paintings feature overlapping imagery from a variety of
sources—such as magazines, interior décor, and art
history—layering figures and patterns into colorful compositions
rendered in a straightforward, uncomplicated style.
Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New
Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He came
to the magazine from The Village Voice, where he was the
art critic from 1990 to 1998. Previously, he had written
frequently for the New York Times’s Arts and Leisure
section. His writing has also appeared in Artforum,
Art in America, the New York Times Magazine,
Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
Painter Rackstraw Downes will give the inaugural Betty Jean and
Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture at UC Davis on May 6, 2015. He
will talk about about painting from observation on site in the
contemporary environment. He will also be visiting the studios of
current MFA candidates in Art Studio.
The Art Building is located on Hutchison Drive, about halfway
between the Memorial Union and Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus.
There is limited parking behind the building, but there is
visitor parking nearby, across the Arboretum in lot VP5.
