Biography

Manuel Neri was born in Sanger, California, in 1930. He studied at the California College of Arts from 1951-56 and at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) from 1956-58. He has received both Guggenheim and NEA awards and was awarded honorary doctorate degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1990 and the California College of the Arts in 1992.  He has spent much of his life teaching; first at the California School of Fine Arts from 1959-65 and then at the University of California Berkeley from 1963-64 and the University of California, Davis from 1965-90. He has participated in, and has been featured worldwide in numerous group and solo exhibitions, and in museums and private galleries. His work is in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among numerous others. SJMA currently has one drawing and one sculpture in its permanent collection. This would be the third work by Neri to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2005)


Born in Sanger, California in 1930, Neri was studying electrical engineering at San Francisco City College when he took a ceramics course and was inspired to become and artist. Neri enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts from 1951-56 and at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) from 1956-58, where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. Neri initially took up abstract expressionism, but later turned to figurative art. In the late 1950s, he was a member of the artist-run cooperative gallery The Six Gallery, along with Wally Hedrick, Bruce Conner, and his wife Joan Brown. Neri has spent much of his life teaching; first at the California School of Fine Arts from 1959-65 and then at the University of California, Berkeley from 1963-64 and the University of California, Davis from 1965-90. Neri currently lives in Benicia, California. [Bio from Juicy Paint Exhibition, input by R. Faust, 8/11/2010]

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