The Permanent Collection
The Museum of Northern California Art consists of 356 works of art by over ninety-six artists in a variety of media including paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and ceramics. This inaugural collection was donated to the museum by board member Reed Applegate, a Chico resident who began the collection in the mid-sixties and limits it to artists who have lived in Northern California at one time. Northern California, as currently defined by the board of directors, is the portion of the state north of, and including, San Jose.
The vision of the museum and the donor is to extend the collection not only in size, but also in breadth to include video art, installation art and conceptual art.
A small, but notable, sample of artists represented in this extensive collection includes:
- Robert Arneson
- Sal Casa
- Richard Diebenkorn
- Roy De Forest
- David Gilhooly
- Richard Hornaday
- Nathan Oliveira
- David Park
- Ann Pierce
- Wayne Thiebaud
- Janet Turner
- Peter Voulkos
The Reed Applegate Collection
Reed Applegate's collection of Northern California art, the inaugural monCA collection, began with a single purchase in 1964. It was a restrike of a Katie Kollwitz work, “The March of the Weavers.” Over the next several years, another print would occasionally be purchased or an artwork traded with an artist friend.
Applegate began to focus on purchasing from area artists in the mid 1970’s. By the early 1980’s the idea of creating an art museum featuring Northern California artists started to take shape and he decided to expand the area of the collecting to include well-known Bay Area and Sacramento artists. If the collection had well-known artists, then peoples’ attention could be directed to lesser-known artists. Thus the boundaries of the collection were established: the southern border would be a line from San Jose across to the Nevada border and the northern boundary would be Oregon.
The collection includes several works by major artists including prints by Wayne Thiebaud, Roy De Forest, Nathan Olivera and Robert Arneson, paintings by Roland Peterson, Paul Wonner, and California Society of Six member Maurice Logan and an ink wash figure drawing by David Park.