William Wiley
William Wiley is one of the most influential of the artists that emerged from Northern California during the1960's. He is principally known for paintings and drawings that break traditional genre conventions. His paintings contain surreal imagery or enigmatic phrases, and often take on the form of constructions populated by cartoonish figures. In these works and in his unconventional sculptures and prints, Wiley’s focus has been more on process rather than product. As a result, his assemblages are often held together by a whimsical idea or visual pun as much as by their material components. Wiley taught at the University of California at Davis from 1962-1973. He currently lives and works in Marin County, in Northern California. His work is in the collections of, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.
Collaborations at Magnolia
In 1997 artists Robert Hudson, Richard Shaw, and William Wiley created at Magnolia a rich series of collaborative pieces. These collaborations came about as the fortuitous result of an endeavor to raise funds for the San Francisco Art Institute. SFAI Alumnus Jack Bowers approached all three artists, themselves alumni, to collaborate on a lithograph, which could be sold to benefit the school. The edition was to be printed at Magnolia Editions, in Oakland, under the supervision of Donald Farnsworth, also a graduate of SFAI. The selection of these three artists seemed a natural choice, as all three were good friends and shared similar artistic preoccupations.
The Magnolia collaboration project evolved over a period of three months, during which time the artists produced almost fifty different unique pieces en route to arriving at a final image, to be used for their editioned print. Each artist had prior experience with printmaking, but working at Magnolia provided the trio with an opportunity to experiment with new approaches to printed imagery. They were able to explore the potential of the collagraph, for example, an intaglio technique that allowed them to create richly textured backgrounds for prints involving collage elements. In addition, all three artists utilized digital equipment to generate pencil-plotted images or ink jet- pigmented prints, which they then incorporated into works on paper and assemblages.
Hudson, Wiley, and Shaw addressed their collaborative prints in the same uninhibited manner with which they tackled individual sculpture and painting projects. All three artists are considered seminal members of the Funk and Super-Object art movements that grew up in the Bay Area during the 1960’s. They have, for the past several decades, successfully mixed genres, used figurative and abstract imagery, employed unconventional materials or found objects, and included elements of narrative as well as aspects of popular culture, to create works that are simultaneously humorous, personal and anecdotal.
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