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William T. Wiley Biography

William T. Wiley (American, b.1937) is a Contemporary artist whose work spans a broad range of media, including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, and performance art. Born in Indian and raised in Texas, Wiley studied at the California School of Fine Arts, where he earned his BFA in 1960, and his MFA two years later. His held his first solo show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1960. In 1963, Wiley became a professor in the Art Department at UC Davis, along with with Bay Area Funk Movement artists Robert Arneson and Roy De Forest. During that time Wiley’s students included Bruce Nauman and Deborah Butterfield.

Wiley has been featured in the Venice Biennial (1980) and Whitney Biennial (1983), and has held major exhibitions at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (1996), the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (2005), and the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid (2011), among others.

In 2009, the Smithsonian American Art Museum presented a retrospective of Wiley’s career titled What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect, which was later published as a catalogue by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the University of California Press.

His work can be found in major institutions throughout the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wiley was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.