Manuel Neri (b. 1930, Sanger, CA; d. 2021, Sacramento, CA) was an American sculptor whose work reimagined the expressive possibilities of the human figure in postwar art. Born to Mexican immigrant parents, Neri studied at San Francisco City College, UC Berkeley, California College of Arts and Crafts, and California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Frank Lobdell. A director of the Six Gallery cooperative, he helped organize the legendary October 1955 reading where Allen Ginsberg first performed "Howl." Working primarily in plaster, bronze, and marble, Neri developed a sculptural language that fused classical figuration with raw gesture, surface abrasion, and an almost painterly use of color—approaching each work as a process of continual revision so that every figure bore visible traces of its making.
Neri's work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Major exhibitions include Manuel Neri: Assertion of the Figure at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2018) and Manuel Neri: The Human Figure in Plaster and on Paper at the Yale University Art Gallery (2019). His achievements were recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award (2006), and the Bay Area Treasure Award from SFMOMA (2008).