Nov. 13, Tuesday -- UC Davis will pay tribute to the late Roy De Forest from 4 to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, in the lobby of the Art Building on campus, where the longtime professor spent more than 30 years teaching and creating his art. The event is free and open to the public.

Speakers will include former UC Davis art faculty members Squeak Carnwath, William T. Wiley and Manuel Neri and alumnus Craig Nagasawa. Jessie Ann Owens, dean of the UC Davis Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies; Lucy Puls, chair of the Art and Art History Department; and Mike Henderson, a professor of art; will also give tribute.

De Forest had already established a national reputation as a painter when he joined UC Davis as a young lecturer in 1965. He became a full professor in 1974 and remained on the faculty until December 1992. He was often associated with the California Funk movement whose Dadaist-inspired irony put Northern California on the art-world map. He died May 18 at age 77.

A son of migrant farmworkers, De Forest studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and at San Francisco State University. His work was exhibited throughout the United States, most prominently at a Roy De Forest Retrospective that opened in 1974 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and moved in 1975 to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. His last New York show, in 2005, was the subject of a rave review in the New York Times.