What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect
March 17, 2010 - July 18, 2010
This retrospective surveys the witty, idiosyncratic, and introspective work of California artist William T. Wiley (b. 1937). Layered with ambiguous ideas and allusions, autobiographical narratives and private symbols, Wiley’s art—which includes paintings, assemblage, theatrical events, film, and conceptual projects—is enlivened by self-deprecating humor and a sense of the absurd. What’s It All Mean will be on view in Galleries 4, 5, and 6 in spring 2010.
Wiley attended the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1960s and later joined the faculty at UC Davis. His work was exhibited in group shows in San Francisco and New York even during his student years. Along with Bruce Nauman, Robert Arneson, and Roy DeForest, Wiley was a key figure in the Bay Area Funk movement; in 1967, Peter Selz, BAM/PFA’s founding director, included Wiley in his notorious exhibition Funk. (Wiley’s career intersects with the early history of BAM/PFA in other ways as well: Wiley and Robert Hudson presented a “happening” for the museum’s opening in 1970, and in 1971 Brenda Richardson curated Wiley’s first major museum exhibition, Wizdumb, which traveled from Berkeley to several museums across the country.)
What’s It All Mean is organized by The Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it premieres in October 2009. The exhibition includes approximately eighty-five works—paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and video—and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, with essays by the curator Joann Moser, critic John Yau, and film and media curator John Hanhardt.
