California Mural Conference and Workshop Featuring John Pugh Comes to Davis

On Saturday, October 11th at the John Natsoulas Center of the Arts (preliminary schedule), John Pugh will present an overview of his works and professional career following a special powerpoint presentation by John Natsoulas on the murals of Emmy Lou Packard and Friends. Monto Kumagai and the Davis Mural Team will then speak about local works and the Davis Transmedia Art Walk with a tour of UC Davis and the Davis Transmedia Tour after a lecture from a guest speaker Malaquias Montoya. On Sunday, October 12th, there will be a workshop by John Pugh.

Featuring

 John Pugh

 John Pugh is an American artist known for creating large trompe-l’oeil wall murals giving the illusion of a three-dimensional scene behind the wall. Pugh has been creating his murals since the late 1970s. He attended California State University Chico, receiving his BA in 1983 and the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2003. He has received numerous public and private commissions in the United States, Taiwan, and New Zealand. He lives in Santa Cruz, California. His particular mural style sparked the term “Narrative Illusionism”.

 Malaquias Montoya

Malaquias Montoya began the Mexican and Chicano Mural Workshop at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in 1980. Already a prolific muralist in the California Bay Area, Montoya sought to create a curriculum where students could participate in the creation of community art that both challenged and empowered its viewers. Greatly influenced by Mexican Muralism and Los Tres Grandes (Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros), Chicano Muralists sought to tell the stories of their community on the walls of their neighborhoods. In this tradition, Montoya’s classes painted murals on schools, community centers, drug prevention centers, food co-ops, and storefronts throughout the East Bay, addressing issues as wide-ranging as education, health, and the numbing effects of mass media, to wars in Central America. In 1989, Montoya left CCAC for the Chicana/o Studies Department at the University of California, Davis, where the mural workshop, along with the silkscreen poster workshop, became an integral part of the Chicana/o Studies curriculum. Montoya’s classes painted murals throughout Solano and Yolo counties, forming an important bridge between UC Davis and the surrounding region. Recent projects include murals at Pacific Coast Producers Tomato Cannery, the Yolo County Migrant Head Start, and Woodland Community College.

Davis Mural Team

Our objective is to bring murals into communities around the country. We teach communities to make personal high quality murals. all of this is made possible by a team of some of the best painters and muralists in areas from abstract to photo-realism. Our team help cities and non-profits and is available for hire for both indoor and outdoor murals. Interact, explore, and share art in the outdoor environment. We are placing transmedia art in urban settings in Davis, California. Silent images, paintings, and sculptures invoke memories from the past. Davis Mural Team consist’s of Bill Maul, Guy Diehl, Kerry Rowland-Avrech, Myron Stephens, Joe Bellacera, Jennifer Pochinski, Victoria Smith, Ted Fontaine, John Natsoulas, Kelly Detweiler, and visiting Artist in Residence Alex Reisfar.