Sospeso's two-part program at the Whitney Museum in New York forms an evocative musical commentary on the Mies van der Rohe and Wayne Thiebaud exhibitions.  To accompany the works of artist Wayne Thiebaud, Sospeso offers a glimpse of the diversity of musical life in California.

Wayne Thiebaud is a figurative painter who achieved overnight acclaim in New York, almost by accident, as a peculiarly California pop artist. He has described himself as "a kind of painting cartoonist."  Born in Mesa, Arizona, Thiebaud's iconic images of food may have stemmed from his beginnings as a free- lance cartoonist in 1939. From 1940 to 1941, he wrote showcards for Sears, Roebuck in Long Beach, California. While serving in the army from 1942 to 1945, Thiebaud worked as a cartoonist, creating a character, Aleck, for the comic strip Wingtips. He also painted murals for the officersą club and the post theater before being assigned to the first Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California.

In 1946, while employed as a cartoonist, he became an advertising artist in Hollywood for Universal Studios. In 1949 Thiebaud enrolled at California State University at San Jose and subsequently transferred to the university at Sacramento, where he received a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1952. From 1950 to 1956, he worked on commissions for the California State Fair and Exposition, serving as a design and art consultant. Thiebaud taught studio art and art history at Sacramento City College from 1951 to 1959, becoming chairman of the department in 1954. From 1959 to 1972, he taught at the University of California at Davis.

In 1962, after his work was included in the big Sidney Janis display called The New Realism, which officially launched pop art into the new York art world, Thiebaud became widely recognized as one of the major new Pop painters. Thiebaud himself persistently (though never loudly) disclaimed his association with Pop art, insisting that he was basically a humble practitioner working in painting's three traditional categories: still life, portraiture, and landscape. In 1968 he represented the United States in the Sao Paulo Biennal in Brazil. In 1981 the College Art Association named Thiebaud the most distinguished studio teacher of the year. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1985.

Karen Tsujimoto, in Wayne Thiebaud (University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1985, for the San Francisco Museum of Art), has written that in his paintings "Thiebaud satisfies an age-old principle of the still life tradition: that the artist discover some virtue, not in inanimate objects as such, but in the isolation of objects. Through his technique of isolation, Thiebaud invests his images with a significance normally denied them. 'The objects are, for me, like small landscape buildings, or characters in a play with costumes,' Thiebaud once stated."

Gene Cooper, in Wayne Thiebaud: Survey 1947-1976 (Phoenix Art Museum, 1976), comments that Thiebaud's works "reveal in bald facts who and what we are. But Thiebaud passes no negative judgment when painting these commonplace subjects; rather, he paints them out of sense of true affection. By focusing on their banalities he pushes them in the direction opposite to the familiar. In his still lifes, mediocrity is raised to level of significance." 

Biography compiled from Art Computer Graphics at Fullerton College and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.