See the Shrem
A good place to start your Davis/Yolo art tour is at that new museum, the $30 million, 30,000-square-foot Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, which opened last fall. Set on the south edge of campus, the Shrem at a first glance resembles a Sacramento Valley agricultural building hybridized with a spaceport — a low-slung gray rectangle gracefully draped with an elegant perforated aluminum “Grand Canopy.”
Step inside — and you get to enter without paying any entrance fee, making this one of the great art bargains in California — and you discover that the museum is airy and welcoming. Many visitors make their first stop in the interior courtyard, where Yoko Ono’s installation “Wish Trees for Peace” invites them to write notes on pieces of paper and attach the messages to the work’s living trees. The wishes are revealing and heartfelt: “I wish that we could speak from a place of kindness and civility” and “I wish my dad could be at peace.”
From here, you can venture into the main gallery. Through next Sunday, March 26, the museum will be exhibiting “Out Our Way,” celebrating the astonishing constellation of young and soon-to-be-famous artists (among them Wayne Thiebaud and Robert Arneson) who gathered at UC Davis in the 1950s and ’60s.
The museum will be closed from March 27 to April 13. It will reopen with exhibitions of recent gifts to the museum and works by Oakland-born artist Sadie Barnette. Whichever show you see, on your way out be sure to admire William T. Wiley’s 4,000-pound steel, wood and bronze “Gong,” which is the very definition of interactive art: You get to bang the gong.