After this Friday (June 30), the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art is closing for the summer — so you have only a few more days to see Dear 1968, “YúYú” and Recent Gifts, and the art and humanities graduate student exhibition, from this point forward, including Faith Sponsler’s Glass Mountain, winner of the Keister and Allen Art Purchase Prize.
Randy Roberts, the museum’s deputy director, said the summer closure is a one-time occurrence for the purpose of doing work in the building that cannot be done with art and people present. The work list includes resealing floors, reconfiguring the layout of some of the public spaces (moving walls) and reworking the ventilation system to go with the new layout.
The changes are driven by experience: The museum had drawn 68,321 visitors through last Sunday (June 25), giving staff an understanding of how people make their way around the building.
The museum is set to reopen Sept. 17, and a grand reopening for the fall exhibitions is scheduled for Sept. 28. The fall exhibitions:
- John Cage 33 1/3 — The composer’s first participatory work debuted at UC Davis nearly 50 years ago, in Freeborn Hall. The John Cage website gives this description: “A dozen phonographs and almost 250 records were arranged on tables around a room without chairs on which to sit. Loudspeakers were distributed around the space. The audience was given no instruction, but after a while, people began putting records on the phonographs.” The Manetti Shrem Museum will re-create this experience, inviting the public to play albums on turntables that will fill the exhibition galleries, “celebrating the improvisatory spirit that helped change the course of experimental music and art during the second half of the 20th century.”
- Dimensions of Black — Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in collaboration with the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art, this exhibition traces the legacy of UC San Diego’s Master of Fine Arts program by drawing from the museums’ permanent collections. With more than 30 artworks from the 1960s to today, the exhibition traverses crucial interests and perspectives that have shaped the art of our time. Artists include Robert Colescott, Charles Gaines, Sam Gilliam, Mark Steven Greenfield, David Hammons, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Martin Puryear, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems and Jack Whitten.
The exhibitions will run through Dec. 28.