Nature’s Gallery was on display this summer in the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C.
Nature’s Gallery fuses art and science
Take a garden of plants and insects, send in a class of students, put some clay in their hands, and what do you get? A learning experience that merges art and science. Take their ceramic creations, put them together into a mural and put them on display in the U.S. Botanic Garden, and what do you get? More than 300,000 visitors from across the nation and around the world making an emotional connection to botany and entomology thanks to UC Davis.
“I have never felt so rewarded by anything in my career as I have by seeing people engage with Nature’s Gallery,” said entomology professor Diane Ullman, co-director of UC Davis’ Art-Science Fusion Program, one example of the university’s tradition of interdisciplinary study.
“Nature’s Gallery is very sensuous, very visual,” said Ullman, who observed as people speaking a variety of languages interacted with the mosaic mural. “Parents touched it, children touched it… Every person who came in contact with that wall learned something about the plant and insect world.”
With the summer exhibition’s close in Washington, D.C., the mural’s 148 tiles are back at UC Davis, where the mural will soon have a permanent home in the arboretum.
“This is a model for ecological and scientific literacy, and we created it at UC Davis,” Ullman said.
2007 THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES
Murals of Malaquias Montoya
Malaquias Montoya has used his “art of protest” to champion farmworkers, oppose the Vietnam War and fight the death penalty. Now he is using it to inspire California kids in rural towns like Elmira, Knight’s Landing and Dixon. Montoya’s latest project — a 12- by 40-foot mural at Beamer Park Elementary School in Woodland — was completed in May. Among the most prominent living Chicano artists, Montoya has work in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and more than a dozen other museums, libraries and universities.
University writing program cited as ‘stellar’
The U.S. News & World Report college guide for 2008 cited UC Davis as one of 15 schools with a “stellar” writing program across disciplines. The University Writing Program teaches writing to undergraduate and graduate students across campus, with 2,400 enrollments in 320 course sections in fall 2007. It also provides consultations and workshops for faculty and teaching assistants who want to integrate writing into courses in the disciplines and to coach and comment on students’ writing more effectively.
Bawdy, witty show of ‘California Funk’ art founders on display
UC Davis assembled its largest public show of work by faculty members Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley¾five of the most significant artists ever to live and work in Northern California¾in a traveling exhibit. The You See exhibit, made possible by a $60,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, was displayed at the Richard L. Nelson Gallery at UC Davis, before traveling to Moraga, Bakersfield, Las Vegas and Pasadena in 2008.