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A new season and new exhibitions can mean only one thing at the : a celebration!

As in the Summer Season Celebration, Sunday, July 14, when you can be among the first to see ColorForm, sculptures and drawings by 51�ԹϺ��� Davis alumna Kathy Butterly; and Landscape Without Boundaries, comprising works from the university museum’s collection (the artists include our own Robert Arneson, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley).

You can hear from Butterly, too, at her artist’s talk at 3 p.m. ColorForm curator Dan Nadel will join her.

The celebration also will include art activities for the whole family, music by So Much Light, and free ice cream and other refreshments.

ColorForm

Butterly, who received her Master of Fine Arts degree at 51�ԹϺ��� Davis in 1990, is distinguished among modern and contemporary sculptors for her move to a highly personal, yet nakedly accessible ceramic language of line, form and color that tilts ever closer to emotive, endlessly inventive abstraction.

ColorForm is Butterly’s first retrospective exhibition, charting the evolution of her sensibility, skill set and philosophical stance, all of which have strong historical roots in the work of Viola Frey, Ken Price and Arneson, her mentor at 51�ԹϺ��� Davis (she was one of his last students before his death in 1996).

The exhibition encompasses Butterly’s entire career through approximately 50 sculptures and 20 drawings, while focusing on the last 10 years of work, including sculpture made especially for this occasion.

Landscape Without Boundaries

Nadel also curated this exhibition, which charts the ways in which painting, sculpture and drawing addressed the Northern California landscape in the years after World War II.

The roots of Landscape Without Boundaries lie in the blend of nature, agriculture and industry surrounding Davis and the artists who lived and worked here, giving them an awareness of and daily interaction with the environment of the Central Valley, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and north end of San Francisco Bay.

Here the landscape could inspire a map of an artist’s psychology, become the basis of a surrealist image or provide the raw material for a freshly invented world. Collectively, this artwork seeks the depths of the human spirit and luxuriates in the paradise of the ordinary hillside. It is profoundly attuned to being alive, in this place, at any time.

Beyond Arneson, Thiebaud and Wiley, the exhibition includes significant works Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Mike Henderson, Robert Hudson, Judith Linhares, Gladys Nilsson, Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, Martín Ramírez, Peter Saul, Cornelia Schulz and Joseph Yoakum.