Robert Arneson. The Candy Store

Clockwise from left: Roy De Forest, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, Peter VandenBerge, Adeliza McHugh, and Maija Peeples-Bright at the Candy Store Gallery, Folsom, California, 1981.

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The Candy Store Gallery in Folsom, California, started in 1962 when the health department denied Adeliza McHugh’s business application to sell homemade almond nougat candy from a small house downtown; she opened an art gallery instead. Though she had no formal art training, McHugh recognized the energy in the art departments at local colleges and universities, looking to faculty at Sacramento State University and the University of California, Davis, for inspiring work.¹ In 1964 she invited Robert Arneson to show at the gallery. He gave her a few works, doubtful that anything would sell, but McHugh returned in a few weeks with a check and a request for more work.² The Candy Store gave many UC Davis artists their first shows, and McHugh became a catalyst in advancing funk art—a movement named by art historian Peter Selz, who described it as “largely a matter of attitude.”³ Funk artists used deliberately crude techniques and materials to rebel against elitism and the concept of taste within the art world.⁴ And McHugh’s passion for such nonconformist works turned many sweet-toothed shoppers into art collectors.⁵