50 Phelan Ave, San Francisco, CA 94112, United States
City College of San Francisco
5212 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94618, United States
California College of Arts and Crafts
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
San Francisco Art Institute
Young Manuel Neri among his sculptures
50 Phelan Ave, San Francisco, CA 94112, United States
City College of San Francisco
5212 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94618, United States
California College of Arts and Crafts
800 Chestnut St, San Francisco, CA 94133, United States
San Francisco Art Institute
University of California (Berkeley)
artist educator painter sculptor
Ethnicity:
Manuel Neri's parents came from Mexico, North America.
Manuel Neri was born on April 12, 1930, in Sanger, California, United States. He is a son of Manuel Neri and Guadalupe Penilla.
Manuel was raised primarily in the San Joaquin and San Fernando valleys where his parents worked the land.
Manuel Neri entered the City College of San Francisco in order to become an electrical engineer in 1949. The lessons on ceramics he received from Peter Voulkos pushed him to change the direction of his studies.
To pursue his artistic training, Neri enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1951 and spent there totally five years.
In 1956, he became a student of the California School of Fine Arts (currently the San Francisco Art Institute). During his two-year stint at the institution, Neri had been taught by Bay Area representatives like Elmer Nelson Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and David Park. It was there when the young artist became fascinated with the human body and produced his first figurative sculptures. Some elements of the compositions were painted in order to concentrate attention on forms and gestures.
Despite, Manuel Neri received three honorary doctorates from San Francisco Art Institute in 1990, from the California College of Arts and Crafts 1992 and from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design three years later.
Manuel Neri began his career from the one-year military service in the United States Army which he joined in 1953.
Since the early 1950s, Neri’s involvement in the art world began from the Six Gallery in San Francisco where the artist met many of his colleagues, such as Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo among others. The first solo show where Neri demonstrated his early paintings and sculptures made from various substances (mostly wire and cardboard) was also organized in the Gallery in 1957. Two years later the artist presented his artworks at the Spatsa Gallery of the city. Thereafter, Neri started to use plaster for his compositions.
By the 1960s, the artist was completely involved in the Bay Area Figurative Movement and became one of its prominent representatives.
In 1959, he joined the teachers’ stuff of the San Francisco Art Institute where he had taught sculpture and ceramics till 1965. The same period, he also gave lessons at the art department of the University of California in Berkeley which he left in 1964. The following year, Neri relocated to the University of California in Davis where he had transmitted his knowledge to the young artists for twenty-five years.
The same period, the artist opened a studio in Benicia, California and at the beginning of the 1980s moved it to Carrara, Italy to have possibilities to work with marble.
He got acquainted with the writer and poet Mary Julia Klimenko who served as a life model for his multiple sculptures and paintings in which he united traditional anatomical forms by Rodin, Giacometti and Degas with modern technics. Despite, Neri completed various state commissions including these from California state, and contributed as a draftsman to many artists' books. Manuel Neri produced original drawings for the writings of Mary Julia Klimenko, poetry collections by Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, and W.S. Merwin.
During his career, Neri demonstrated his artworks in many prestigious galleries in the United States, France, Germany, Austria, United Kingdom, Australia and Japan.
Nowadays, the artist lives and works in San Francisco and in his workshop in Carrara, Italy.
Manuel Neri is an accomplished artist whose figurative and colourful sculptures recognized all over the world contributed to the development of the Bay Area style in 1950s-60s.
Neri’s accomplishments in the art field were marked by multiple prestigious awards, including the ones from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture and the Bay Area Treasure Award.
One of the artist’s works was bought in 2007 at the Sotheby's auction in New York City for $289,000.
The artworks by Manuel Neri are nowadays preserved at various well-known galleries and museums, like the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University Art Museums, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Yale University Art Gallery and others.
According to Manuel Neri, the human body is a white canvas which is able to translate various ideas.
Quotations: "It was a fantastic moment. I realized then that the female body has the magic. The male may have the power, but the female has the magic."
Quotes from others about the person
"Neri values the centrality of the figure in the history of art and its immense eloquence as a form, but at the same time, he is always aware that, in the atmosphere of the late twentieth century, he will be required to establish himself as the authority in his work, the source of both its authenticity and its communicability." Bruce Nixon, an author
Manuel Neri was married several times.
One of his wives became the painter Joan Brown whom he married in 1962. The family produced one child, named Noel.
The artist has six more children from other marriages. Their names are Raoul, Laticia, Maximilian, Ruby, Julia and Gustavo.
Julia is the daughter of American photographer, Joanne Leonard.
