Manuel Neri

Manuel John Neri Jr. was born April 12, 1930, in Sanger, California, to Mexican immigrant parents; some auction and archival records also list him as John Manuel Neri. He enrolled at San Francisco City College around 1949 to 1950 to study engineering, but a ceramics class taught by Peter Voulkos redirected him toward art. He went on to study at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1951 to 1952, at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland through the mid-1950s, and at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1956 to 1958, where his teachers included Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Frank Lobdell. Available sources do not confirm whether he completed a formal degree at any of these institutions.

Neri became associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement's turn toward the human figure in the late 1950s and 1960s, working in plaster, and later bronze and marble, often left rough and painted in bright, gestural color. He taught art at the University of California, Davis, from 1965 to 1990. His honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, an Award in Art from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in the early 1980s, honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute (1990), the California College of Arts and Crafts (1992), and the Corcoran School of Art (1995), the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and SFMOMA's Bay Area Treasure Award in 2008.

Manuel Neri died on October 18, 2021, at his home in Sacramento, California, at age 91; his death, from natural causes, was reported by The New York Times and by ARTnews, among others. His daughter, the artist Ruby Neri, curated the first posthumous solo exhibition of his work, presented jointly by Salon 94 and Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in 2026.

Institutional writing on Neri consistently frames him as one of the defining sculptors to emerge from the Bay Area Figurative circle, valued for treating plaster, bronze, and marble as painterly surfaces rather than finished, polished forms. Museum attention has been sustained rather than episodic: a 1983 solo show at Laumeier Sculpture Park, a 2015 presentation of works from his trust at the Nasher Sculpture Center, and successive university museum exhibitions at Stanford's Anderson Collection and the Yale University Art Gallery in 2018 and 2019 each reinforced his standing as a figure central to postwar American sculpture. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Manuel Neri's documented auction record is a marble sculpture, Untitled (1983), which sold for USD 289,000 on November 15, 2007. Available market sources report the price and date consistently but do not name the selling auction house or sale location, and no higher price has been documented since. His public auction activity is comparatively limited set against the scale of his museum presence, and recent estimates for smaller works, such as a 2025 Sotheby's listing for the painted plaster Blue Blond, have run in the low five figures.

Neri's market sits well below his museum stature: his highest documented auction price is USD 289,000, and the number of public sales is small enough that any single result should be read with caution rather than as a trend line. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification through the Manuel Neri Trust and his representing galleries, Hackett Mill, Robischon Gallery, and Yares Art, carry extra weight. Collectors should also be aware that his name is occasionally catalogued as John Manuel Neri, and that he is unrelated to a same-named Mexican American football coach who died in 2026.