When world-renowned artist and UC º£½ÇÔ´´ Professor Emeritus Wayne Thiebaud added a few more of his paintings to the university collection in 2016, the building that would be the university’s first art museum — the — was still under construction.
Amid the rumble of heavy equipment and pounding hammers on a 106-degree day, he said he never really thought he would witness a museum being built where he started teaching in the 1960s. Nor did he think his work, which is exhibited around the world, would be displayed there.
“No, I had imagined we’d get a Quonset hut way back in the sticks that no one would ever see.†Instead, the museum is located at a prime gateway to campus, he noted. “I’m very touched.â€
A “Quonset hut†is where art at UC º£½ÇÔ´´ more or less began, though. And art is still made there every day.
Many in the UC º£½ÇÔ´´ art community view Temporary Building 9, or TB 9, a metal structure at Old º£½ÇÔ´´ Road and Hutchison Drive constructed from old military surplus materials, as the main creative space on campus since the 1960s, when the art department grew there. The building, which has served as a police station, post office and food sciences area, is where Thiebaud and many of his lifelong friends and colleagues — the first-generation art faculty at the university’s first art department — created a place to work.
There, the group assembled as a “team of rivals†by founding art department chair Richard Nelson, including Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William Wiley, Roland Petersen, Roy De Forest, Tio Giambruni and Manuel Neri, among others, freely made art in a 24-hour environment away from the distractions of the main campus and the rest of the world. Former students and faculty alike, many of them now internationally known artists, reminisce about the magical space that gave birth to the first-generation faculty and later-famous artists. They also reminisce about the heat — when summer days, along with the kilns and fiery foundry are rumored to have brought the temperatures to 120 degrees.
A modest building of national significance
Air conditioning, and heat, only came to the two main teaching studios in 2003, and to the individual studios in 2018-19. The same year that the Manetti Shrem Museum opened, in 2016, the building gained recognition for its importance in art history with its inclusion on the and the California Register of Historical Resources.
It has always been known as a place where artists can freely create.
Arneson, creator of the “Eggheads,†and other UC º£½ÇÔ´´ first-generation art faculty are among those associated with the California Funk and the Figurative movements of the mid-century. Arneson, of