THE DISTANCE from the Knox-Less service station in Oklahoma City to Bob’s Seaside Service, not so far from the Santa Monica Pier at the terminus of Route 66 both pictured in Ed Ruscha’s 1963 artist’s book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations was about 1,400 miles. It’s a drive Ruscha has taken many times since he traveled it with Mason Williams in Ruscha’s lowered 1950 four-door Ford, with throaty Smitty Glasspack dual muffler, following their graduation from Oklahoma City’s Classen High School in 1956.1The trail from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles via Route 66 holds a mythic place within the lore of the
Sam Whiting April 28, 2021Updated: April 28, 2021, 8:00 pm
Artist William Wiley is interviewed in 1996 at his Woodacre studio in Marin County. Photo: Jerry Telfer, The Chronicle 1996
William T. Wiley a founder of the Bay Area Funk art movement who expanded into every medium and style of creation from watercolor to printmaking to giant sculptures in a career that lasted from 1960 until just a few months ago died Sunday, April 25, at Marin General Hospital.
His death was due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, which he’d suffered from since 2014, said his son, Ethan Wiley. He was 83.
A painter with a unique style developed at an early age, Wiley had exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1960 when he was 23 and still an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, SFMOMA has come to own 50 of his pieces, with eight of them in mediums from ink on felt and leather to etching on paper on display in a designated gallery s