Presented by: Presented by The Joe Orgill Family Fund for Exhibitions

Organized by: Organized by The Crocker Art Museum

Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) was raised in California and is today one of America’s greatest and most admired living artists. Appreciated for creating “a world of longing — a serene abundance that is always a windowpane away,” as Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker has stated, Thiebaud is a recipient of the National Medal of Arts (1994) and the Gold Medal for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2017). He made his reputation in the early 1960s with still lifes of comforting, ubiquitous foods, the type served at snack counters, cafeterias, and middle-class diners, such as pies and cakes, ice cream cones, lollipops, and other delectables painted with thick impasto, which at the same time evokes simpler times and places. By the mid-1960s, Thiebaud turned to the figure and then landscape and, in the 1970s, gained new recognition for his dramatic, vertiginous interpretations of the San Francisco cityscape. Many of these same qualities are exemplified in the artist’s sweeping, bird’s-eye portrayals of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta scenes, a group of paintings he started in the mid- 1990s.

Wayne Thiebaud 100: Paintings, Prints, and Drawings is an extensive, celebratory retrospective featuring the full range of the California artist’s achievements on canvas and paper. The exhibition of 100 objects in every medium and from every period of the artist’s practice spans the scope of his accomplishments in, as Crocker Art Museum curator Scott Shields asserts, “the redefinition of ordinary things or actions through scale, color, space, and light.” Wayne Thiebaud 100 provides a new appreciation of the artist’s subtle humor and technical accomplishment for those who have long enjoyed his work and those new to his art.