Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman is born in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Bruce Nauman receives his BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Bruce Nauman marries fellow student Judy Govan.

Bruce Nauman enrolls in the relatively new art department at the University of California, Davis. William T. Wiley becomes an important teacher and eventually friend of Nauman’s.

William T. Wiley takes Bruce Nauman to the Mount Carmel Salvage Shop and shows Nauman the slant step. Nauman asks Wiley to buy it, and it lives in Nauman’s studio for a long time.

Nicholas Wilder Gallery opens on La Cienega Boulevard and shows work by Joe Goode and Bruce Nauman.

Bruce Nauman and William T. Wiley participate in the first Slant Step Show at the Berkeley Art Gallery, which includes the original slant step object. According to legend, the step was stolen by Richard Serra and taken to New York.

Nicholas Wilder and Joe Goode drive north to visit Bruce Nauman in his studio and, as a result, Nauman has his first solo show in May at the Nicholas Wilder Gallery along La Cienega Boulevard. Nauman’s Mold for a Modernized Slant Step is included in this exhibition.

Bruce Nauman receives his MFA from UC Davis.

As their professor–student relationship evolves into a friendship, Bruce Nauman and William T. Wiley play music together around Davis in bands called the Moving Van Walters and His Truck and then Blue Crumb Truck. Nauman plays guitar and bass.

Allen Ruppersberg participates in his first group exhibition, New Directions, at the Westside Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles. The show also includes Bruce Nauman and Ed Ruscha.

Bruce Nauman and William T. Wiley’s band Blue Crumb Truck plays at the opening of Funk at the University Art Gallery in Berkeley.

The Nauman family moves into William T. Wiley’s house and studio in Mill Valley (north of San Francisco) for the summer while Wiley travels through Europe.

Bruce Nauman has a solo exhibition at Sacramento State College Art Gallery.

Judy Chicago lives in Pasadena, California, around the corner from Bruce Nauman’s studio.

Stephen Kaltenbach, Bruce Nauman, and William T. Wiley contribute to Phil Weidman’s Slant Step Book.

Bruce Nauman has a solo exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery.

Bruce Nauman becomes a professor at the University of California, Irvine.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organizes the traveling exhibition Bruce Nauman: Work from 1965 to 1972, which travels to the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1974.

Bruce Nauman has a solo exhibition at Nicholas Wilder Gallery titled Flayed Earth/Flayed Self (Skin/Sink).

Nicholas Wilder Gallery hosts the traveling exhibition The Consummate Mask of Rock, a solo exhibition of Bruce Nauman's work.

Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Joe Goode, Bruce Nauman, and Ed Ruscha are included in the group exhibition Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, host the traveling exhibition Bruce Nauman: Drawings/Zeichnungen, 1965–1986.

Bruce Nauman has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, titled Bruce Nauman: Video, 1965–1986.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, hosts the traveling exhibition Bruce Nauman (Retrospective.

Bruce Nauman has a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago titled Bruce Nauman: Elliott's Stones.

Sterling Ruby sees the Bruce Nauman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and considers it a formative experience for his own art.

Sterling Ruby works at the Video Data Bank, an organization cofounded by SAIC. In Ruby’s words: “I wasn’t exposed to a lot of video art until I started my employment as a secretary at the Video Data Bank. Prior to Chicago, I studied at a four-year foundation program in Pennsylvania where I did figure and still life drawing for eight hours a day. Needless to say, there was no video art in the curriculum. After being promoted from the VDB front desk, I learned how to edit and wound up dubbing endurance-based performance art for eight hours a day. I was holding the [Vito] Acconci, [Lynda] Benglis, and [Bruce] Nauman master tapes and it was a nice opportunity to learn the history of video art in parallel to watching the history of performance art.”

Larry Bell, Judy Chicago, Douglas Huebler, and Bruce Nauman are included in the group exhibition A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, organizes the traveling exhibition A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s.

Jim Nutt has a solo exhibition at MCA Chicago titled Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character. It is accompanied by Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, which included works by Nutt, Aaron Curry, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, Gladys Nilsson, and Karl Wirsum.

Joe Goode, Stephen Kaltenbach, Mike Kelley, Tom Marioni, Bruce Nauman, Senga Nengudi, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ed Ruscha are included in the group exhibition Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974–1981 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.