Funk Art Movement

Funk art: the art of the absurd, the ridiculous, the exaggerated. The term “funk” emerged from the Beat generation. Trumpet player Miles Davis, playing in a San Francisco jazz club said, “Man, that’s a funky note,” and painter and sculptor Manuel Neri, who was in the North Beach audience that night, paid attention. Along with his peers, Neri applied the term to his artwork. The Beat generation became the rebellious underbelly of the 50s, their experiments with lifestyle extending into written, musical and artistic creation. 

 Having roots in Bay Area Abstract Expressionism and San Francisco Beat art, the essence of the Funk movement was bred in TB-9 (Temporary Building 9) on the University of California, Davis campus. By the time faculty members Robert Arneson and William T. Wiley began using the term in reference to their art, the artistic style had developed into a resistance movement. The development of the Funk movement was in contrast to the work by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin, who were quickly becoming pioneers of the New York minimalist art movement in the early 1960s. Responding to the New York minimalism and completely rejecting popular academic styles were concerns of the funk art movement. These California and West Coast artists were strongly influenced by the experimentation of the Beat generation, rejecting the stringent nature of minimalism. Their resulting work was overzealous in pursuit of form, color and subject matter. They were unafraid of making “bad” art in forging new paths of discovery.  The Funk Art Movement flourished throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and it gave way to eras such as the “Bad Painting Movement” and others in the 1980s and 1990s.

As a son of a professor at UC, Davis, John Natsoulas grew up meeting and learning from many of the Funk artists who had led the movement. Roy De Forest and Robert Arneson were particularly influential in mentoring and advising Natsoulas during the earliest years of the gallery’s formation. Natsoulas gained his expertise in the Funk Movement by fostering these relationships, and continuously exhibiting and publishing about the Funk Movement over the last 40 years.