Design Destination: A Thiebaud Mosaic!?
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Known for his lush paint handling and images of pies that look good enough to eat – or throw, Wayne Thiebaud is surely one of the best artists who ever made Sacramento home. But many people have never visited one of his largest works, the entertaining ‘Water City.’
Created in the late 1950s, the work adorns the exterior façade of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District headquarters building, and is easily viewed by visitors. It’s on S Street in East Sac, just off Highway 50 west of 65th Street.
The building itself is of interest, designed by the Sacramento firm of Dreyfuss & Blackford. In 2010 the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
According to the Crocker Art Museum, Thiebaud also designed SMUD’s distinctive target-like logo.
Today known worldwide for his paintings, Thiebaud in the mid-1950s was a young artist who taught at Sacramento City College. His design of a “highly abstract kind of water city” was executed by Thiebaud with his students.
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The work is a joy to explore, in part because it is so different from Thiebaud’s standard look.
Actually, Thiebaud has more than one standard look. Besides his still life paintings, and figures that look a lot like still lifes, he’s known for vertiginous, impossible cityscapes; implausibly colored scenes of the Delta and Delta farmland; and strange, compelling, mountainous abstractions.
While at SMUD, stop by the district’s art gallery, which shows a variety of art by mostly local creators.
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