Roy De ForestBob and Roy Ware

Poster listing the exhibit with a surrealist frog and coffee cup hybrid as the central image
Robert Arneson poster for Bob and Roy Ware Show at the Candy Store Gallery, Folsom, California, April 12–May 9, 1970. Courtesy of the estate of Robert Arneson.

Roy De Forest joined the cohort of highly innovative and free-spirited faculty at the University of California, Davis, known for their “anti-syllabus philosophy,”1 in the fall of 1965. As curator Renny Pritikin described, De Forest’s close friendships with fellow teachers Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud, and William T. Wiley “changed the nature and perception of art in California forever.”2 A collaborative ethos permeated the school’s art program and De Forest fit right in, inviting students to attend faculty gatherings and to show in exhibitions with him. In 1969 Arneson and De Forest collaborated on the production of thirty-five ceramics that Arneson threw on his potter’s wheel, the two artists taking turns sculpting appendages and finishing them with brightly colored glazes. Bob and Roy Ware was exhibited at the Esther Robles Gallery in Los Angeles and Adeliza McHugh’s Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, California.

  1. Peter Plagens, quoted in Susan Landauer, Of Dogs and Other People: The Art of Roy De Forest (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California, 2017), 70. ↩︎

  2. Renny Pritikin, in Robert Taylor, “You See Exhibit Celebrates Pop, Funk and Cakes,” Eastbay Times, May 7, 2008, available at eastbaytimes.com/2008/05/07/you-see-exhibit-celebrates-pop-funk-and-cakes/. ↩︎