Robert Carston Arneson was an American sculptor and professor of ceramics in the Art department at UC Davis for nearly three decades.
Career
Arneson was born in Benicia, California. He graduated from Benicia High School and spent much of his early life as a cartoonist for a local paper. Arneson studied at California College of the Arts in Oakland, California for his BFA and went on to receive an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1958. During the start of the 1960s, Arneson and several other California artists began to abandon the traditional manufacture of functional ceramic objects and instead began to make nonfunctional sculptures that made confrontational statements. The new movement was dubbed Funk Art, and Arneson is considered the father of the ceramic Funk movement. His body of work contains many self-portraits which have has been described as an "autobiography in clay". Doyen from 1972, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art is an example of the artist's humorously caricatured self-portraits. Even his large Eggheads sculptures bear a self-resemblance. Among the last works Arneson completed before his 1992 death, five Eggheads were installed on campus at UC Davis around 1994. The controversial pieces continue to serve as a source of interest and discussion on the campus, even inspiring a campus blog by the same name. Two additional copies of Eggheads were installed in San Francisco. One of Arneson's most famous and controversial works is a bust of George Moscone, the mayor of San Francisco who was assassinated in 1978. Inscribed on the pedestal of the bust are words representing events in Moscone's life, including his assassination: the words "Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang", "Twinkies," and "Harvey Milk Too!" are visible on the front of the pedestal.
Teaching career
Arneson's teaching career began soon after receiving his MFA degree from California College of Arts, with a stint at Santa Rosa Junior College, in Santa Rosa, California. This was followed by a position at Fremont High School in Oakland, California, before advancing to teach design and crafts at Mills College, also located in Oakland. Arneson's next appointment was at UC Davis, where his talents were recognized by Richard L. Nelson, who had founded the Art Department. It was during this period of the early 60s that Nelson was assembling a faculty that would come to be celebrated as one of the most prestigious in the nation. In addition to Arneson, Nelson had also selected Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley, each of whom would go on to achieve international recognition... Initially hired to teach design classes, it was Arneson who established the ceramic sculpture program for the Art Department. It was in many ways a bold and radical move, in that ceramics were not yet recognized as a medium appropriate for fine art at that time. Since its founding, the campus ceramics studio has been housed in a corrugated metal building known as TB-9, and it was here that Arneson held court for nearly three decades until his retirement in the summer of 1991.
Death
Arneson died on November 2, 1992, after a long battle with liver cancer. His home town of Benicia, California established a park in his memory, along the Carquinez Strait.
