Clayton Bailey

Known for his innovative and irreverent ceramic and metal sculpture, Clayton Bailey was a lead figure in the Funk Art and Nut Art movements. He lived in Port Costa, California, for many years, and from 2013 until recently, he ran the Bailey Art Museum in Crockett, California.

Bailey was a tenured professor of ceramics at Cal State Hayward (known today as Cal State East Bay). After his retirement at age fifty-seven, he was dedicated to his work in the genres of ceramic and metal sculpture. He also veered into performance art in the persona of his alter ego, “Dr. George Gladstone,” who wore a white lab coat and pith helmet while performing excavations and pranks.

Bailey’s most notable creations include a coin-op electric chair, a growling robot made from scrap metal that greeted visitors to museums and art galleries showing his work, and the Port Costa Sky Cam, which used to post a picture a day to his website.

Bailey had thirty-three solo museum shows, and his work is in the permanent collections of more than sixty major museums, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the de Young Museum, California;, the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; and the Valentin-Karlstadt in Munich, Germany.