On Saturday, March 21, 2026, at Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Director Greg Flood gave a gallery talk during the opening reception of the exhibition Cornerstones: Robert Arneson and the Brick. Featuring more than 25 never before or rarely seen ceramic and bronze sculptures, drawings, and prints, this exhibition is the first to focus on Arneson’s use of the brick as an integral form in the development and trajectory of his career. The exhibition is on view through May 9, 2026.
Artist Information
Born in Benicia, CA, in 1930, Robert Arneson earned his BA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1954 and his MFA from Mills College in Oakland in 1958. In 1962, Arneson was hired to teach ceramics at the University of California, Davis, which he did for 29 years until retiring in 1991. He died in 1992. Robert Arneson has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and multiple museum retrospectives, including Robert Arneson, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1974; Robert Arneson: A Retrospective, organized by the Des Moines Art Center in 1986, which traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and the Oakland Museum of California; Robert Arneson: Self-Reflections in 1997 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Arneson and the Object at the Palmer Museum of Art in 2004, which travelled to the Greenville County Museum of Art. His work was also included in the landmark FUNK exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1967; the 1979 West Coast Ceramics exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Ceramic Sculpture: Six Artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1981; What Nerve! Alternative Figures in American Art at the RISD Museum in 2014, and Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025-2026, curated by Dan Nadel.