Manuel Neri (American, born 1930)

Manuel Neri was born in Sanger, California in 1930. He studied at several schools between 1951-1958 including: the California School of Fine Arts, the California School of Arts and Crafts and the University of California, Berkeley. Neri taught at the University of California-Davis for twenty-five years before retiring from teaching in 1990. Neri has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1979; a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980 and a Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2006. He has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally including: the Denver Art Museum; the San Jose Museum of Art; the Isetan Museum of Art, Japan; theMuseum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; the Seattle Art Museum; the San Francisco Art Institute; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington. In 1983, Laumeier mounted a one-person exhibition of Neri’s work.