The artist William T. Wiley in 1997 Jack Fulton
William T. Wiley, a beloved Bay Area artist and teacher and one of the founders of the Funk Art movement which included Peter Saul, Robert Arneson, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Conner, Jim Nutt and others has died, aged 83. His son Ethan Wiley confirmed to
that Wiley died from complications related to Parkinson’s disease, which the artist had lived with since 2014.
Wiley was born in Bedford, Indiana, in 1937. His father was a construction foreman who frequently moved the family around the country, and they ultimately settled in Washington State. In 1960 Wiley graduated from the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute), with a bachelor of fine arts degree and in 1962 earned his master of fine arts from the same institution.
Featured in Can Artists Use Their Sale Contracts to Game the System?
50 years ago, a manifesto by Seth Siegelaub reimagined what economic justice could look like in the arts
Graphic for KADIST’s new Artist Contract, 2020. Courtesy: KADIST
In March 1971, a broadside boldly labelled
The Artist’s Reserved Rights
Transfer and Sale Agreement rolled off an independent press in New York. Across the poster’s front was a manifesto by Seth Siegelaub, the innovative conceptual art curator-publisher and former dealer, outlining ‘some generally acknowledged inequities in the art world’. Its verso, drafted by the young lawyer Robert Projansky, contained 19 clauses in heavy-handed legalese promising to remedy those ills. Among the terms was the right for artists to refuse exhibitions of their work, the right to know who purchased it and, most controversially, the right to claim 15 percent of any resale profits, giving artists a voice in how their work is used an
‘Cool School’ Artist Ed Moses’s Abstract Paintings Bring Bright California Color to London in a New Gallery Show
The show was organized with help from the artist’s son Andy Moses.
Edward #2(2008). Courtesy of JD Malat.
The quintessentially Californian artist Ed Moses deemed himself “a mutator.” The moniker was intended to describe his ever-evolving style, but it also captures something of the semi-psychedelic spirit Moses brought to his energetic, boldly colorful paintings for decades, until his death in 2018.
Moses was born in Long Beach, California, in 1926, and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, before emerging as one of the most influential artists in the postwar West Coast art scene, which winked at its New York counterpart with a rascally sense of wit and fun.