Along with Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis, William Wiley became one of the most prominent Bay Area artists of the 1960s and ’70s. He was a pivotal figure who, like Arneson, created an art of self-conscious humor, autobiography, and social critique that defined Northern Californian art in its time.
Wiley attended the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in the late 1950s and established friendships with fellow students Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, and Alvin Light, among others. Tapping high-spirited musings became the hallmark of Wiley’s eclectic imagery and ceaseless narrative ingenuity. In the 1970s, indulging his urge for stream of consciousness thinking, Wiley began to assemble words and objects in paintings that had “the feeling of a diary written in incomplete phrases.”(1)
Throughout the 1980s he juxtaposed these phrases and ideas expressed in puns, but his content also became more boldly opinionated, even political. With Hing, Wiley moves freely between his passions for painting and drawing. The tidal wave of detail includes a sketch of Mickey Mouse and the lyrics “they took Unk’l Walts body n Froze it,” lyrics the artist wrote in response to reports that Walt Disney was to be preserved cryogenically. This painting has been described as the exemplar of Wiley’s controlled exuberance, and it is also the last of his monumental canvases.(2)
(2) Jonathan Fineberg, Art Since 1940: Strategies of Being, 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000), 282.
(3) Joan Moser, What's it all Mean? William T. Wiley in Retrospect (Berkeley: UC Press, 2009), 120.
