The exhibition features more than 120 works—paintings, ceramics, photography, video, sculpture, mixed media, installations, textiles, wood, and works on paper—and includes a large contemporary section from the past twenty years.

ARTISTS OF INVENTION: A CENTURY OF CCA was organized by guest curator Lee Plested, Oakland Museum of California Chief Curator of Art Philip Linhares, and exhibition designer Ted Cohen, all CCA alumni. The contemporary section was organized by CCA alumni Liz Mulholland, Abner Nolan, Chris Perez, Jessica Silverman, and Bay Area curator Tara McDowell.

“A balance of technical skill and independent vision has always marked the art associated with CCA,” Lee Plested said. “The result has been some of the most idiosyncratic and expressive art in America.”

The exhibition, arranged by era, includes:

• The Society of Six, a band of renegade plein-air painters from the 1920s;

• California production ceramists, such as Edith Heath and Jacomena Maybeck, who taught at the college in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively;

• Weaver Trude Guermonprez, who chaired the crafts department in the 1960s and 1970s, and textile artists Kay Sekimachi and Lia Cook;

• Bay Area Figurative painter and CCA instructor Richard Diebenkorn, whose mode was further developed in the work of alumni Nathan Oliveira and Manuel Neri;

• The modern studio ceramics movement, pioneered by Peter Voulkos and continued by Robert Arneson and Viola Frey;

• John McCracken, who began his explorations in Minimalism while a student;

• West Coast Conceptualism, which broke ground with the work of David Ireland and Dennis Oppenheim;

• Photorealism pioneer Robert Bechtle and his peers Richard McLean, Ralph Goings, and Jack Mendenhall, a current faculty member;

• Social commentators Squeak Carnwath and Raymond Saunders; and

• A new generation: videographers Kota Ezawa, Désirée Holman, and Sergio de la Torre; photographers Larry Sultan, Todd Hido, and Liz Cohen; painter David Huffman; and mixed-media artists Lynn Marie Kirby and Amy Franceschini, among many others.

The picture shows Kay Sekimachi, Amiyose III, 1965. Textile. Oakland Museum of California, gift of the Art Guild. -- www.museumca.org