Michael McMillen, Raft of History, 1984. Mixed media assemblage. Oakland Museum of California, Ted and Ruth Nash Collection. Photo by M. Lee Fatherree.

The prized art collection of Ted and Ruth Nash, including work by Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, Roy De Forest, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Nathan Oliveira, Richard Shaw, Mary Snowden, Wayne Thiebaud, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley and 130 others from Northern and Southern California, has a new home with the Oakland Museum of California. The gift of 275 artworks came to the museum after Mrs. Nash’s death, in April 2007.

In A LEGACY OF ART: THE TED AND RUTH NASH ART COLLECTION, the museum will display a selection of 20 works from the bequest, August 24–December 30, 2007, in the Art Gallery.

“We are deeply grateful to Ruth and Ted Nash and their family for this extraordinary gift to the Oakland Museum of California collection. It deepens the museum’s already extraordinary holdings of California art, and particularly strengthens our representation of the preeminent artists of the latter half of the 20th century,” said Executive Director Lori Fogarty.

“As the museum plans for the major renovation and reinstallation of its collections in 2008, the Nash bequest will make a dramatic impact on the museum’s presentation of California’s artistic development,” she continued. “We look forward to sharing the legacy of these generous and committed collectors.”

Robert Arneson, Wolf Head, 1989. Bronze on wood base. Oakland Museum of California, Ted and Ruth Nash Collection. Photo by M. Lee Fatherree.

Ruth Prentice Nash and her husband, Edmund (Ted) Nash, began collecting contemporary California artists after moving to San Francisco from New York in 1955. The couple was particularly interested in ceramic art.

In 1999, after a long and cordial association with the Oakland Museum of California and its chief curator of art, Philip Linhares, the couple promised their collection to the museum. The curator values the collection at more than $5 million.

Linhares met the Nashes in the late 1960s, while he was director of exhibitions at the San Francisco Art Institute. Together they visited studios where young and innovative artists were creating work that would alter and reinvent contemporary art. Later Mrs. Nash became a docent in the natural sciences department of the Oakland Museum of California.

“Ruth was a tireless advocate of California art and artists,” Linhares said.

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