Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art
254 Old Davis Rd, Davis, CA 95616
In the 1960s, Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem started collecting paintings that they found interesting. In 1971, they endowed a museum to house their collection of 2,000 works on paper from 20th-century artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The museum opened in 1976 at UC Davis with a permanent home for the couple's collection of 250 modern artworks on paper including drawings by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Today it houses more than 7,000 works of art from all over the world. The Museum hosts an annual exhibition program featuring national and international contemporary artists working in many mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, and video.
Visitors can also explore exhibitions online through its digital collections portal where over 700,000 images of artworks and documents are available. The Manetti Shrem Museum is free to all visitors and offers a variety of activities for children such as drawing classes and workshops that help kids learn about the arts in contemporary culture.
The museum also has an Art + Design Education Center with monthly family events designed around various themes; it features hands-on projects geared toward ages three to seven years old.
The Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California in Davis is a place where students can take courses, view exhibitions that honor UC Davis' art history, or just go to enjoy the artwork. The museum presents programs such as lecture series and artist talks which give opportunities for visitors to learn about contemporary arts from artists including Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, and William T. Wiley who attended UC Davis previously!
The museum is a live experiment for teaching, producing, and interacting with art, with formal classrooms and art studios that open onto the lobby. Outdoor screenings are possible in smooth zones of the corrugated facade, and a glass-walled plaza serves as an outdoor sculpture exhibition.
It is characteristic of its location and time: a horizontal, light-filled, porous, and flexible integration of the inside and outdoors set amid sweeping views of the flat plains and farms of California's Central Valley, within near sight of the horizontal blur of I-80. The design envisions a future museum that is neither secluded nor exclusive, but accessible and porous; not a static shrine, but a dynamic public event.
Dixon, California is blessed with some of the area’s most interesting and historically significant attractions. Here’s a list of some of our favorites:
Bohart Museum of Entomology
Putah Creek Riparian Reserve
Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology
Cool Patch Pumpkins
The Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven
Berryessa Brewing Co.
Manetti Shrem Museum
UC Davis Arboretum
All of these wonderful points of interest are located just a short distance from our central location at 1150 North 1st Street in Dixon! Stop by for a visit anytime!