Benicia Public Library Board of Library Trustees will have several art topics of discussion on its Tuesday meeting agenda.
Library Director Diane Smikahl will present the board with the chance to talk about Lifetime Achievement in the Arts proclamations for two widely-known Benicia artists.
Both will be read during Tuesday’s City Council meeting, which will start at 8 p.m. in City Hall, 250 East L St.
One proclamation will recognize the award-winning sculptor and painter Manuel Neri, whose works are in collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; the Denver Art Museum, the El Paso Museum of Art, Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, N.J., the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art at the State University of New York; the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University; the Oakland Museum of California, the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the San Diego Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the di Rosa in Napa, Portland Art Museum in Oregon and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Neri, originally from Sanger, studied electrical engineering at San Francisco City College until he took a ceramics class, which inspired him to become an artist. He studied abstract expressionism under Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, then moved into figurative art. He has taught sculpture and ceramics at California School of Fine Arts and has been a member of the University of California, Davis, faculty. He is the 2006 recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
The other proclamation will recognize the late Robert Arneson, the Benicia native who early in his art career was a cartoonist for the Benicia Herald. But he came to the artistic forefront in the 1960s, when he was among the California artists who began using everyday objects in confrontational art pieces in a movement called Funk Art.
Arneson, who died in 1992, has been called the father of the ceramic Funk movement. He created a series called “Eggheads,” and the artist often depicted himself in his pieces. One of his most controversial pieces was his bust of the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, who was assassinated alongside Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978.
His works are in many of the same collections as Neri’s, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kyoto, Japan, and the U.S. Embassy in Yeravan, Armenia. Seventy pieces are owned by the Nelson Gallery at University of California, Davis, where he was a faculty member.
Smikahl will tell the board of the City Council’s acceptance of the five-year loan of two paintings by the late Julius Hatofsky, which will be displayed at the library where a reception will take place, and the Council’s agreement to allow the temporary display of Mark Brest van Kempen’s artwork near the city’s downtown waterfront.
She also will give the panel an update on the public art piece “Wind, Water, Land,” made of repurposed materials and accompanied by educational materials, that will be displayed in the Benicia Community Center once it’s completed.
The board will hear other reports on the upcoming California Library Association Conference and from the panel’s liaisons on its art gallery, the Friends of the Library, the Library Foundation, the Poet Laureate Committee, the Benicia Historical Museum and the Benicia Historical Society.
If You Go
The meeting will start at 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Benicia Public Library Edna Clyne Conference Room, 150 East L St.
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