Eerie Grotto Okini, 1982
Woodblock Print, 22" x 30"
William T. Wiley was born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1937. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, earning his B.F.A. in 1961and his M.F.A. a year later. Since 1960 he has participated in numerous exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among others. His work can be found in collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Like Robert Arneson and other California funk artists of the 1960s, Wiley delights in the absurd and the incongruous, while his sense of fantasy recalls the pre-Surrealist dreamscapes of Giorgio de Chirico. His densely layered paintings and prints depict imaginary worlds and cosmic struggles, complete with hermetic symbols and often humorous observations scrawled within the images and in the margins. His equally inventive sculptures also address the enchantment of the mundane. Over the years, Wiley’s influence has been pervasive, especially with the New Image generation of the 1970s and 1980s.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.