If Beat was indeed a movement, and Abstract Expressionism indeed a style, Funk was not quite a movement nor a style, just a state of mind among Bay Area artists at the turn of the 1960s: witty, provocative, anti-sculpture, a bastard child of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, of Jean Arp's abstract sculptures and of Joan Miró's “Object” (1936).

Peter Voulkos was also the inspiration for the Bay Area Funk Art. After exhibiting his large-scale ceramic sculptures at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1958 and at the Landau Gallery in 1959, he was hired by UC Berkeley in the Fall of 1959 to establish a ceramics studio (in the future location of the Berkeley Art Museum). His relocation north shifted the center of mass of the ceramics movement from Los Angeles to the Bay Area and then further north, because he influenced Robert Arneson, who then led a new generation of ceramic sculptors.

The Bay Area had a modest tradition of ceramics: the German-educated Marguerite Wildenhain (who had been one of the first students of the Bauhaus) taught for two years at the California College of Arts and Crafts before joining the commune at Pond Farm and Antonio Prieto (who had graduated from the New York State College of Ceramics of Alfred University) was hired to replace her in 1946 by the California College of Arts and Crafts and in 1950 moved to Mills College, succeeding the founder of the ceramics program there, Fred Carlton Ball (a former student of Glen Lukens at the University of Southern California). Prieto's students included Mary Tuthill.

Chinatown native Win Ng (briefly a classmate of John Wiley at the California School of Fine Arts), made abstract clay sculpture at the same time that he was establishing (in 1960) a commercial brand of mugs with his gay lover Spaulding Taylor. (In 1982 Ng became one of the first people in San Francisco to be diagnosed with AIDS).

Peter Voulkos almost immediately veered into bronze, but he nonetheless revitalized ceramic sculpture at UC Berkeley, attracting students such as James Melchert (class of 1961) and Stephen DeStaebler (class of 1961). Stephen DeStaebler made landform sculptures in clay in the 1960s and then in the 1970s totemic sculptures in clay. James Melchert made a series of "ghostware" objects (glazed earthenware) such as "Ghost Box" (1964) and cryptic works such as the 40 sculptural variations on the letter "a" (1964). Harold Paris (a New Yorker hired in 1961) made monumental ceramic walls like the "Walls for Mem" of 1961-63). Voulkos' studio assistant Ron Nagle (San Francisco State College class of 1961) specialized in highly-stylized ceramic cups and jars, similar to what Kenneth Price was doing in Los Angeles.

In 1962 the Bay Area-born Robert Arneson, who had studied ceramics under the Spanish ceramist Antonio Prieto at Mills College, was hired to start a ceramics program at UC Davis, between Berkeley and Sacramento, which became the center of the most influential school thanks to his students, assistants and colleagues such as William Wiley (who graduated in 1962 from the California School of Fine Arts and joined Davis in 1963 and expanded funk to painting), Peter VandenBerge (a 1962 graduate from Sacramento who was hired as Arneson’s first student assistant), Roy DeForest (who joined the faculty in 1965), David Gilhooly (who graduated in 1965), Manuel Neri (who joined in 1965), Clayton Bailey (hired by Arneson in 1967 from Wisconsin), Chris Unterseher (who graduated in 1967), Richard Shaw (who graduated in 1968), Margaret Dodd (who graduated in 1968 and returned to her home country of Australia).

Arneson's “toilet-wares”, notably "His and Hers" (1964), riffed on Marcel Duchamp's urinal "Fountain" of 1917. The satirical strain led to the colorful "Typewriter" (1966), with the keys replaced by polished fingernails, and to his anti-romantic self-portrait heads, from "Self-Portrait of the Artist Losing His Marbles" (1965) to "Assassination of a Famous Nut Artist" (1971). On the other hand, Arneson's "Alice Street Series" (1966-68) of painted ceramics, dedicated to his house's street, notably the large-scale "Big Alice Street" (1968, remade in 1974 as "The Palace at 9AM"), signaled the ambitions of the movement.

Arneson, Richard Shaw, David Gilhooly, Roy DeForest and Clayton Bailey preferred the label “Nut Art” to "Funk".

David Gilhooly, one of Arneson's first students, devoted much of his ceramic sculptures to frogs, peaking with the monumental "Many Lives of Frog Fred Manorial Obelisk" (1975).

Roy DeForest, who returned in 1960 to San Francisco where he had originally studied, was more of a painter than a sculptor, notable for vibrant, colorful canvases ("Every Trapper Should Have an Indian Dog,” 1960).

The top prankster of the Funk school was perhaps Clayton Bailey, who in 1968 switched to California State University at Hayward, became Roy DeForest's neighbor in the East Bay, founded the pataphysical First Psychoceramic Church, and in 1971 invented his fictional alter-ego, "Dr George Gladstone", an archeologist credited with collecting the (imaginary) fossils housed in the (fictional) Wonders of the World Museum.

Richard Shaw, born in Hollywood, the son of Disney story writer Dick Shaw (co-creator of the TV series "Mister Magoo" of 1960-62), became an instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1966 even before graduating from UC Davis in 1968. He increasingly specialized in meticulous porcelain simulations of mundane items, a three-dimensional version of trompe-l'oeil painting ("Couch and Chair with Landscape and Cows", 1967).

Chris Unterseher specialized in miniature porcelain dioramas of ordinary life, and Peter VandenBerge, Arneson’s first graduate student assistant in 1962, a Dutch who had grown up in Indonesia, turned to elongated clay heads in 1975.

In 1966 San Francisco's DeYoung Museum opened a wing dedicated to Asian Art (which would become the Asian Art Museum), thanks to a donation by Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, and suddenly California ceramists could admire first-hand centuries of Chinese and Japanese ceramics.

The acceptance of ceramic as an artistic medium was rapid in the 1960s. In 1961 Rose Slivka, the editor of Craft Horizons, published the article "The New Ceramic Presence", and Artforum's editor John Coplans embraced the clay sculpture movement and publicized it with many articles from 1963 to 1966. "Work in Clay by Six Artists", held at the San Francisco Art Institute in November 1962, gathered four former Peter Voulkos students at UC Berkeley (James Melchert, Stephen DeStaebler, Ron Nagle and Ann Stockton) and two artists from the Art Institute (Manuel Neri and Ricardo Gomez). By then Nagle and Melchert were both instructors at the Art Institute. In August 1963 Paul Mills, director of the Oakland Art Museum, Walter Hopps, then curator of the Pasadena Art Museum, and Artforum's editor John Coplans curated the exhibition "California Sculpture" at the Kaiser Center in Oakland (infamous for Arneson's ceramic toilet). The annual "Contemporary American Sculpture" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in December 1964 was notable for the range of materials being employed by sculptors, way beyond the traditional marble and bronze. New York's Museum of Contemporary Crafts organized the exhibition "New Ceramic Forms" in 1965. John Coplans curated in October 1966 the exhibition "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics" at UC Irvine. Suzanne Foley curated "A Decade of Ceramic Art, 1962-1972" at the San Francisco Museum of Modem Art in October 1972. In 1976 Peter Voulkos, John Mason, and Kenneth Price were included in the bicentennial survey of the Whitney Museum titled "200 Years of American Sculpture". Ceramic art was definitely legitimized by the exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York in December 1981, organized by Richard Marshall (Whitney's curator) and Foley, titled "Ceramic Sculpture", that featured six California artists: Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Kenneth Price, Robert Arneson, David Gilhooly, Richard Shaw.

The other sculptural school of the Bay Area was centered around the San Francisco Art Institute, where artists such as Robert Hudson, Alvin Light and Manuel Neri tinkered with metal, wood and plaster. Neri specialized in colorful life-size plaster figures of women ("Joan Brown Seated", 1959).

Most Bay Area sculptors, regardless of their favorite material, were influenced by the Beat assemblagists and their surrealistic appropriation of ordinary objects, and also to some extent by Pop Art.

The term "Funk Art" was popularized by an exhibition curated by Peter Selz at UC Berkeley in April 1967 that featured Peter Voulkos, Voulkos' student Jim Melchert, Stanford graduate Mowry Baden, Bruce Conner, Manuel Neri, etc.

The passion for "found objects" originated perhaps when Clay Spohn organized in December 1949 a costume party at the California School of Fine Arts for which he assembled an extravagant "Museum of Unknown and Little-Known Objects". Then came Seymour Locks and Bruce Conner. George Herms exhibited his assemblage sculptures "Secret Exhibition" in 1957 and "Meat Market" in 1961.

Wiley, who had risen to prominence with a series of paintings titled "Columbus Rerouted" (1961–62), started adding found objects to his paintings, and then straddled into Dadaist conceptual art with a rolled painting titled "One Abstract Expressionist Painting Rolled and Taped" (1966). It was Wiley who conceived the legendary "Slant Step Show" at the Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco in 1966 around an ugly and useless object found in a thrift shop.

The pantheon of Funk Art was completed by Viola Frey, who trained under ceramicist Katherine Choy at New York's Clay Art Center and moved to North Beach in 1960 working as an accountant. Both Arneson (class of 1954) and Frey (class of 1956) had been students at the California College of Arts and Crafts, and she was finally hired there in 1971. Frey started out humble, with allegorical sculptures such as "Planet Full of People - Pink Nudes" (1969), but would soon turn to large-scale compositions like "Double Self" (1978).

Funk Art predated Pop Art. Collage artist Jess Collins, a former nuclear engineer at CalTech, functioned as a bridge between the two cultures with his seven "Tricky Cad Cases" (1954-59), obtained by shuffling frames of the popular Dick Tracy comic strip.

The most commercially successful of UC Davis' second generation was perhaps Wayne Thiebaud's assistant Bruce Nauman, a Midwesterner who in 1966, while teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute, settled in the Mission district of San Francisco and dabbled in a variety of media before moving to Pasadena in 1969: photography, neon art, video art, printmaking, sculpture, performance art.

Another UC Davis student was Steven Kaltenbach, who graduated in 1967 and moved to New York, where he erected his "Room Constructions", and in 1970 he returned to California and spent seven years painting the moving photorealistic "Portrait of My Father" (1979).

In 1960 UC Berkeley hired Don Haskin, who had run a bronze foundry in Minnesota. Haskin, Voulkos and Paris set up the Garbanzo Works, the first bronze foundry for Bay Area artists which made bronze sculpture a lot more affordable. Julius Schmidt, for example, switched from cast iron to bronze. Their students spread the idea: Tio Giambruni built a foundry at UC Davis, Bruce Beasley in Oakland, DeStaebler north of Berkeley, David Lynn east of Oakland, and Bill Underhill in New Mexico.