Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.  
-Peter Ustinov

Bawdy irreverence, iconoclasm, parody, and puns are hallmarks of the work spawned by the art department at the University of California, Davis, in the 1960s and 1970s. In keeping with the counterculture of the time, the tone of this humor was often aggressive and transgressive. Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Peter VandenBerge, William T. Wiley, and others took new artistic license with the Bay Area’s figurative traditions. They jettisoned what they viewed as the pretension of the East Coast art world and adopted an earthy approach wholly authentic to the West Coast. Their laid-back, flippant attitudes reflected the shifting values of the time and often belied deeper social messages. 

Similarly, subsequent generations of artists have enlisted the fetching power of humor to make a point. The narrative paintings of M. Louise Stanley, Robert Colescott, and John Bankston are populated by humorous, even wacky, characters, through whom the artists raise issues of gender, race, and sexual identity.  In Desire for the Other (2004), (a thirty-foot long, millipede-shaped red couch stuffed with household objects), Brian Goggin comments on our insatiable desire for “things.” Walter Robinson’s larger-than-life, hot pink and melting animal cookies point to the realities of global warming.  SJMA has invited artists Kathy Aoki and Imin Yeh to make new works, inspired by the notion of Renegade Humor, just for this exhibition. 

Also included are works by Ray Beldner, Squeak Carnwath, Enrique Chagoya, Llyn Foulkes, Viola Frey, Jane Hammond, Dennis Oppenheim, and Richard Shaw, among others. 

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