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.
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
Sam Whiting January 25, 2021Updated: January 26, 2021, 7:10 am
Dimitri Grachis in the doorway of Spatsa Gallery. Photo: John Natsoulas Press
Spatsa Gallery lasted only four years in San Francisco, but they were four crucial years, 1957-1961, as the assemblage art associated with the Beats bridged into the abstract expressionism and cubism of the 1960s. Never a commercial gallery, Spatsa was artist-run by its owner, Dimitri Grachis, who lived in the office behind the storefront on Filbert Street at Fillmore.
Grachis, who closed Spatsa to concentrate on his own career as a minimal geometric abstract painter, died Jan. 9 at the VA hospital in Palo Alto. He was 88. Cause of death was deteriorating lung disease, according to his nephew, George Metropulos of Belmont. Grachis had been living in an apartment in downtown San Mateo for the past 25 years.
Sam Whiting December 21, 2020Updated: December 22, 2020, 3:05 pm
Susan Landauer, the curator for the Hassel Smith memorial celebration, talks with people who attended at the San Jose Museum of Art in March, 2008. Photo: Kurt Rogers, The Chronicle
Susan Landauer, an art historian and independent curator dedicated to California art and San Francisco abstract expressionism, died Saturday, Dec. 19, at her home in the Montclair district of Oakland. The cause of death was lung cancer, her husband, Carl Landauer, said. She was 62.
Landauer spent 10 years as the chief curator of the San Jose Museum of Art and wrote three books on art history.
“I see her as the foremost historian of California art, deeply dedicated to bringing artists to public attention who are not well known,” said Carl Landauer, who met his wife in graduate school at Yale University, where they were both earning Ph.D. degrees.