Addison Gallery of American Art Features William Wegman

Tuesday, 24 July 2007 23:14

Andover, MA - The Addison Gallery of American Art is presenting William Wegman: Funney/Strange, an exhibition exploring forty-years of the artist’s works in all media. The first retrospective of Wegman’s work in over fifteen years, the exhibition includes more than 200 works, among them his signature 20 x 24 Polaroids, as well as early black and white and altered photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, artists books, videos, and film. William Wegman: Funney / Strange will be on view through July 31, 2007.

Underlying all of William Wegman’s work is the light humor of “funny” mediating the darker human comedy of “strange.” His career has never been static or predictable, yet it is woven of enduring threads of interests that engaged him at the beginning and compel him still. Coming of age in the 1960s, Wegman was an early exponent of conceptual art and a pioneering maker of video. He continues to be a video artist and conceptual thinker at the same time that he is an adventurous painter, prolific writer, and masterful photographer who is able to navigate between art that amuses and surprises and art that challenges and transforms.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943, Wegman received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In Illinois and later in Wisconsin, he began to experiment with a wide range of media—film, kinetic sculpture, installation, and performance. While teaching at California State College in Long Beach in the 1970s, Wegman developed what was to be his mature artistic voice expressed in his signature media of photography, video, and text. It was in California that he acquired his canine muse Man Ray and began to include the dog in both photographs and video. By the fall of 1972 he moved to New York where he has remained ever since, applying his quirky and unpredictable imagination and expansive artistic appetite to a career that has been far-ranging, all-embracing, and provocative.

Beloved by the general public and held in critical esteem within the international art world, Wegman fascinates both for much the same reasons: his smart, gently subversive humor that destabilizes the familiar to reveal life’s essential oddity. Throughout his career, he has moved seamlessly among various media, from conceptual works to commissioned magazine shots, from video work to television segments made for Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live; from artist’s books to children’s books, from photographic “landscapes” employing his dogs to his most recent tour de force cycle of paintings that incorporate scenic postcards with drawing, collage, and paint. This exhibition will bring together classic Wegman images with rarely exhibited material and surprising new work to reveal the full range and savvy voice of this remarkable artist’s production.

The exhibition has been guest curated by Trevor Fairbrother, an independent scholar who has worked on wide range of topics, from Andy Warhol to John Singer Sargent. He has served as a curator of American painting and of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and as Deputy Director for Art at the Seattle Art Museum. An extensive catalogue, written by scholar and critic Joan Simon and published by Yale University Press in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art, accompanies the exhibition.

The Addison Gallery of American Art located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Sunday 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. The Gallery is closed on Monday. Admission to all exhibitions and events is free. The Addison Gallery also offers free education programs for teachers and groups.

About the Addison Gallery of American Art

Devoted exclusively to American Art, the mission of the Addison Gallery of American Art is to acquire, preserve, interpret and exhibit works of art for the education and enjoyment of all. Opened in 1931, the Gallery has one of the most important collections of American art in the country that includes approximately 14,000 works by prominent American artists such as George Bellows, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jackson Pollock, as well as photographers Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and many more. The Addison Gallery, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, offers a continually rotating series of exhibitions and programs, all of which are free and open to the public. For more information, call 978-749-4015, or visit the website at ; www.addisongallery.org