"Magic Music!!! Jumps right into the ear, heart, and sound....moves us to love, laughter, and tears, as will good art....or as good art can and does, it can sound and heal....and help us to remember to feel care and appreciate being here now."
William Wiley 2003
Born in Bedford, Indiana, William T. Wiley was already interested in art as a child. After graduating from high school, Wiley went to San Francisco, where he enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. He received his B.F.A. in 1960 and his M.F.A. in 1962. His work was exhibited in group shows in San Francisco and in New York even during his student years, and after the completion of his studies, he joined the art faculty at the University of California at Davis, where he taught for eleven years. He has served as a guest faculty member at many colleges and universities across the United States, but the San Francisco Bay Area has remained his home and primary work site.
Wiley's work exhibits a similar penchant for mordant, witty puns. Intrigued by the connections among seemingly disparate elements, Wiley explores the possibilities of combining varied aesthetics in his art, at times merging sound, words, and visual imagery in a single work. Over the years he has elaborated on these possibilities, using almost every medium, traditional and nontraditional, in works that gently tweak the eye and the mind. Seemingly, his work contains many contradictions: it is both artful and artless, simple and complex, figurative and nonrepresentational, funny and serious, obvious and obscure.
[This is an excerpt from the interactive companion program to the videodisc American Art from the National Gallery of Art. Produced by the Department of Education Resources, this teaching resource is one of the Gallery's free-loan educational programs.]
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