UC Davis News 7/20/12 9:27 PM Home About Blog RSS Sitemap FAQ Contact Feedback Make OneGate Your Homepage UC Davis News Related Pages UC Davis Magazine Share this Comments (286) Feedback UC Davis Egghead Blog Description UC Davis UC Davis News The UC Davis News Service KDVS Search UC Davis News Service: distributes press releases California Aggie regarding campus, academic and research news and For advanced search, visit View More upcoming events. Search/Archives. View More Resources UC Davis News EXHIBITIONS: Summertime displays at galleries, museums and library Online University Psychology Summertime and the viewing is easy (and free) in campus galleries and 100% Online museums, and at Shields Library. Psychology Degrees From Arizona State • Cielo Rojo — Maceo Montoya, artist, writer and assistant professor, University Department of Chicana/o Studies, presents 17 paintings in charcoal and ASUonline.asu.edu/… acrylic on paper, plus five limited-edition silkscreen prints based on the Online Learning Cielo Rojo series. Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer, or art workshop of the Choose from 80+ online degrees. new dawn, 1224 Lemen Ave., Woodland. Call for exhibition hours: (530) Classes start Sept 3. 402-1065. Enroll today. www.APUS.edu • Flatlanders on the Slant — The fourth annual Flatlanders exhibition takes on a new slant, as in Slant Step, the seemingly useless object Masters in Engineering forever linked to UC Davis artists William T. Wiley and Bruce Nauman. Earn a Masters of Through Aug. 17, Nelson Gallery, Nelson Hall. Summer hours: 11 a.m.-5 Civil Engineering p.m. Monday-Thursday and Saturday; and Friday by appointment. The Degree Online at Norwich University Slant Step comes home for good. MCE.Norwich.Edu • Ignite! the Art of Sustainability — UC Davis is the first stop for this DeVry University® traveling exhibition comprising the works of 13 California artists, Online Flexibility Of Online including two from the UC Davis faculty: Professor Ann Savageau and Study. Focus On Professor Emerita Gyöngy Laky, each of whom works with reused and Personal Attention. repurposed materials. Through Aug. 31, Design Museum, Cruess Hall Get Started. www.DeVry.edu (enter off California Avenue). Regular hours: noon-4 p.m. Monday University of through Friday (closed weekends and holidays). See separate story. Phoenix® Official Site. College More Ignite! Two works from the exhibition are being shown at the Degrees for the Real Pence Gallery, 212 D St., Davis. Regular hours, 11:30-5 p.m. Tuesday- World. Get Started Sunday, and 7-9 p.m. (6 p.m. opening for members), 2nd Friday Today. Phoenix.edu ArtAbout. http://www.onegate.com/go/og/search-services/uc-davis-news/ Page 1 of 186 UC Davis News 7/20/12 9:27 PM • Pottery and Pictures — By Craft Center glass, wood and ceramic UC Davis News instructors Suzanne Gerttula and Andrew Groover. Through July 27, Craft EXHIBITIONS: Center Gallery, South Silo. Reception, 5-7 p.m. Friday, July 13. Summer Summertime displays at galleries, museums and hours: 12:30-10 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 12:30-7 p.m. Friday and 10 library a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday. The Slant Step comes • Visualizing History, Then and Now: Recent Acquisitions — Featuring home for good works that reflect and respond to Native American experiences in the NEWS BRIEFS: Retirement plan social and political realm. Through Aug. 17, C.N. Gorman Museum, 1316 contribution rates go Hart Hall. See separate story. up THE OUTDOORS: Out with the lawnmower, in AT SHIELDS LIBRARY with sustainability IN MEMORIAM: Norm • Reimagining Shields, Part 2 — Proposals for a new north entry and Haard and Ming Wong renovated courtyard, from design students. Mark Kessler, assistant A wrinkle in space-time professor, had asked them to consider ways to better connect the library Researchers outline and the Quad “as the heart of the American campus.” Kessler blamed national low carbon “missteps in design” for leaving the campus with the library and Quad fuel standard (VIDEO) adjacent “but unresponsive to one another” — i.e., with its west-facing Fulbright scholars: Yeh, entrance, Shields Library “turns its back on the Quad.” Said Daniel Mascal and Spiller Goldstein, Arts and Humanities librarian: “Come see how this talented Campus demonstrations: News group of students imagined a redesigned Peter J. Shields and let us know and updates what you think.” Send questions or comments to Goldstein, UPDATED NEWS BRIEFS: [email protected]. Retirement plan contribution rates go • UC Davis Traditions Past and Present — A sampling from the up photograph collection of the university archives, keeper of such Poisons on public lands memories as Labor Day, Frosh Dinks, Tank Rush, Frosh-Soph Brawl and put wildlife at risk Wild West Days. Exhibit prepared by Sara Gunasekara, collections (VIDEO) manager. For more information or to share your memories of UC Davis UC Davis and the Higgs boson: Past, present traditions, send an e-mail to Special Collections, [email protected]. and future The photograph collection. • Library Staff Favorites — A wide array of titles and subjects representing the diversity of reading tastes among library staff. Visual bibliography. Exhibit prepared by Michelle Brackett, [email protected], and Robin Gustafson [email protected]. The Shields Library exhibitions are in the lobby. Summer hours (through Sept. 14): 7:30 a.m.-8p.m. Monday-Thursday, and 1-7 p.m. Sunday. Holidays and other exceptions. Follow Dateline UC Davis on Twitter. The Slant Step comes home for good AT A GLANCE WHAT: Flatlanders on the Slant WHEN: Through Aug. 17 http://www.onegate.com/go/og/search-services/uc-davis-news/ Page 2 of 186 UC Davis News 7/20/12 9:27 PM WHERE: Nelson Gallery, Nelson Hall SUMMER HOURS: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Thursday and Saturday; and Friday by appointment CATALOG: A fully illustrated catalog is available. More Exhibitions. By Dave Jones Two UC Davis artists came upon it nearly 50 years ago, this odd assembly of wood covered in green linoleum, a footrest of some sort — and a slanted one at that. It cost 50 cents at a salvage shop, but, as the old saying goes, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, or, in this case, the art world’s treasure, an icon of the 1960s — a muse for countless other works. It came to be called the Slant Step, made a splash in a Bay Area show, and, then, after just a few years on campus, the step was gone, off to see the world, or the East Coast, anyway, returning occasionally for exhibitions like the one this summer at the Nelson Gallery. See separate story about the show, Flatlanders on the Slant. The show’s opening reception July 12 included a surprise announcement: UC Davis art alumni Frank Owen (an abstract painter) and Art Schade (sculptor) had donated the Slant Step to the university’s Fine Arts Collection. “This is a very important piece of UC Davis’ art history, and we are so grateful to have it,” Dean Jessie Ann Owens of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies told Dateline UC Davis. In fact, in any discussion of the UC Davis art department’s claims to fame, the Slant Step ranks right up there with the California funk movement. The Slant Step’s history as an “objet d’art” began in 1965 when Professor William T. Wiley and graduate student Bruce Nauman came across the seemingly useless object in a Marin County shop. Wiley paid the 50 cents and Nauman kept the step in his studio for inspiration (and footrest!). Owen studied art at UC Davis around the same time (bachelor’s degree in 1966 and master’s in 1968) and would become the Slant Step’s caretaker for 45 years. “Somebody has got to keep the damn thing, so we — myself, Arthur Schade and a couple of other buddies — kept it,” Owen said in a 2010 interview with the Vermont Quarterly, out of the University of Vermont, a few months before his retirement from the art faculty. All through his academic career, Owen used the step as his “teaching pal” — in Sacramento, San Francisco, New York, Virginia, North Carolina and, finally, Vermont, asking his students to ponder its meaning (and their own). Still, in his interview with the Vermont Quarterly, he cautioned: “We shouldn’t take it too seriously; it’s essentially a whimsical entity. It’s just some clunky, funny, funky object that nobody knows what it’s about. And it looks so humble.” Coming out party in 1966 http://www.onegate.com/go/og/search-services/uc-davis-news/ Page 3 of 186 UC Davis News 7/20/12 9:27 PM In 1966, Wiley organized the Slant Step Show that served as a coming out party of sorts for what would become a symbol of American art of the era. The San Francisco show featured Slant Steps “made of bread, of colored plastic with electric lights inside, of wood and metal and silk, and probably of chewing gum, too: It’s that kind of show,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s account. About the aesthetic meaning of Slant Step-inspired work, Owen told the Vermont Quarterly: “It’s so characteristic about an attitude that Bay Area artists had — well, compared to New York — at the time. ... “So the Slant Step, I always have seen it as a San Francisco version of a Bronx cheer to all of the theoretical folk — raising the point that art is what artists make, not what theoreticians say you should make. If we want to make art about this stupid, humble, little, green linoleum object, why, we’ll do it.” In 1967, Owen took the step along for the first day of his first paid teaching job, advanced drawing, at California State University, Sacramento: “I plunked it on the model stand and I unrolled a scroll on which I’d written all of these different constructions using meanings of the word to draw — drawn close, drawn against, drawn through, drawn fine — and I told the students to make drawings based on this language of this object.” The next year he and his wife left for New York.