​ARTFORUM feature article

April 2019

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HUMANLY POSSIBLE

Dan Nadel on the art of William T. Wiley

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"Among Wiley's earliest graduate students was Bruce Nauman, who arrived in 1964. Nauman embraced Wiley's use of rough, found materials, wordplay, and life-is-art-art-is-life ethos, while Wiley took in Nauman's cerebral, proto-Conceptual approach to what an art object could be, epitomized in the younger artist's untitled fiberglass-and-polyester-resin sculp­tures."

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NEW YORK MAGAZINE

September 2025

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MAKING THE '60S WEIRD AGAIN

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SIXTIES SURREAL @WHITNEY MUSEUM

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Here, the 1960s are surprising, powerful, and all over the place. The surreal part of the show’s title is a bit of a misnomer. This isn’t Freud-Breton-Dalí but visionary improvisation, erotic caricature, countercultural magic, fevered politics, and psychedelia. The usual suspects are here: Warhol, Ruscha, Oldenburg, and a great visionary painting by Robert Smithson. But this ends up turning the decade inside out, putting half-forgotten works and received histories cheek by jowl. Many of these artists have been sidelined. Chicago Imagists such as Barbara Rossi and Roger Brown are here; Jeremy Anderson, Joan Brown, William T. Wiley, and Mel Casas too. 

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SQUARE CYLINDER

October 2023

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DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD @ MANETTI SHREM MUSEUM

"Appropriately, the show arrives prefaced by two works from her UC Davis mentor, William T. Wiley: a horse sculpture (The Hearings, 2007) and a poem (Re Questrian, 1981) whose final line, “P.S. These are not horses,” urges viewers to look beyond appearances – a challenge given how much there is to see and absorb."

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HYPERALLERGIC

July 2022

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"NOTHING IS TO BE DONE FOR WILLIAM T. WILEY"

@ PARKER GALLERY​

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WILLIAM T. WILEY'S WILD ART LEGACY

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"LOS ANGELES — A well-curated exhibition makes a fantastic art class, and a shining example can be found at Parker Gallery if you hurry over there before the current group show closes on August 6. Nothing Is to Be Done for William T. Wiley is two things at once: a roller derby of irreverent and energetic ideas, and a serious revelation about Northern California’s art historical significance. 

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The Southern California art scene is generally equated with the West Coast’s contribution to American mid to late 20th-century art, which is to say, deftly whipping the rug out from under New York’s high-minded Minimalism with a brew of conceptualism and humor. Familiar names in this arena include John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Ed Ruscha. But there was enormous energy further north in the Bay Area, and a good chunk of it emanated from William T. Wiley, a founder of the funk movement, who taught at UC Davis in the 1960s and died last year."

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MANETTI SHREM MUSEUM

May 2021

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A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM T. WILEY

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By Dan Nadel

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"The Manetti Shrem Museum honors UC Davis Professor Emeritus William T. Wiley, who passed away Sunday, April 25. A beloved artist and teacher to generations of artists in all media, Wiley was born in 1937 in Bedford, Indiana, and grew up in Richland, Washington, alongside his lifelong friends and fellow artists William Allan and Robert Hudson. All three enrolled at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1950s. The pool of teachers, which included Elmer Bischoff and Frank Lobdell, was catholic in taste and rich in talent. There was not a dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, which resulted in a rich mix of ideas and styles. Wiley left SFAI with a master of fine arts degree. In the early 1960s, the University of California, Davis, was assembling a radical art department. He began teaching there in 1962, alongside colleagues including Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud."

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SQUARE CYLINDER

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BEST OF 2021

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"William T. Wiley @ Hosfelt. The first posthumous exhibition of the artist’s work since he died on April 21 “exceeded all expectations,” wrote Mark Van Proyen.  With 13 paintings, mostly monumental in scale, the exhibition felt like a mini-retrospective, “chock-full of polymorphic modalities. In any painting, we might see a fluctuating emphasis between graphic and schematic organizations of space, resting on a precarious balance between imaginary cartography and fanciful description. And if that weren’t enough, the same works also feature a plethora of written notations, many taking the form of puns and phonetic spellings, reflecting on the quagmire of signification.”

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SQUARE CYLINDER review

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September 2021

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"MONUMENTAL" @ HOSFELT GALLERY

Mark Van Proyen on William T. Wiley

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"It exceeds all expectations."

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HYPERALLERGIC review
March 2020
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"REAL EYE ON CHANGE" @ GORDON ROBICHEAUX
Review by John Yao
 

THE POWER OF PUNS

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"He is one of the foremost critics of America’s egotism and unsustainable way of life, expressing his critiques in beautifully and sharply rendered paintings and drawings. He is tenderer and less eruptive than Peter Saul, but his message is just as urgent, disquieting, and necessary to these addled, disjointed, the rich-get-richer times."

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SQUARE CYLINDER review

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February 2020​

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CROWN POINT PRESS IN THE '80s​

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"...the single most stunning work is a 1982 work by William T. Wiley titled Eerie Grotto-Okina, showing a cartographic landscape dissolving into a pictorial one, articulated in an array of bright kaleidoscopic colors, each applied by a separate woodblock."

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SF CHRONICLE article

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May 2019

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William T. Wiley, beloved jester of the

art world at Hosfelt Gallery​

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SQUARE CYLINDER review

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April 2019

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"SCULPTURE, EYES WEAR TUG ODD"

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WILLIAM T WILEY@ HOSFELT GALLERY

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"Few American visual artists can rightly be called soothsayers.  Among those that can, William T. Wiley, 81, stands apart.  From the mid-1960s to the present, his paintings and sculptures have laid bare the lies and deceptions behind war, environmental catastrophes, corporate malfeasance, political misdeeds, hyperbolic punditry and, yes, even the sometimes-opaque machinations of the art world."

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SQUARE CYLINDER review

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January 2016

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"& SO... MAY CUSS GRATE AGAIN?"

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WILLIAM T WILEY@ HOSFELT GALLERY

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Anyone looking for insight into William T. Wiley need only read the title of his current show, & So…May Cuss Grate Again?  To utter the words is to experience the meltdown of last year’s signature piece of political doublespeak — Donald Trump’s.  Clever conflations like these, of sound-alike, opposite-meaning words, have always been the driving force behind Wiley’s “wiz dumb” disabling apparatus.  They’ve made him not just the high priest of wordplay, but also one of America’s most relevant living artists –now more so than ever on account of how the world has devolved in exactly the way Wiley forecast in the late 1960s, when war, racial strife, and environmental issues were shaping his worldview and rearranging the political landscape.  Phenomenal draftsmanship is the other key component of Wiley’s appeal and his stature.  His exquisitely detailed drawings, influenced by Duchamp, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, have long elicited comparisons to Old Masters. Today, at 78, Wiley is one.  His singular achievement was (and continues to be) placing the act of looking and reading on equal footing.  That is, making the sound of language the means by which we engage with his imagery, an experience that demands a back-and-forth two-step, shifting between across-the-room views and up-close, micro-magnified reading. 

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ART FORUM review

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February 2010

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"WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN: WILEY IN RETROSPECT"

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WILLIAM T WILEY@ SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

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If American culture had to be grouped into two camps, what neater divide could there be than between idealists and pragmatists? The Pilgrim fathers, Emersons, and Clyfford Stills of this world would then square off against the Ben Franklins, Hemingways, and Rauschenbergs. Of course, reality can’t be pigeonholed so easily. Indeed, the going gets tough, and most interesting, when such opposites interact. Mergers of this kind are evident throughout William T. Wiley’s art, and their aesthetic consequences may help explain his relative neglect since the 1980s.

 

The current retrospective recuperates Wiley, revealing a visionary, albeit often wayward, figure.

Like many visionaries, he has been both ahead of his time and at odds with it.

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Certainly, it’s easy to unravel Wiley’s touchstones. They have ranged from Edward Kienholz, Jess, R. Crumb and Jasper Johns (not to mention sly swipes at Greenbergian formalists) to Bosch and Ensor—the latter two, like Wiley, were caustic and minutely detailed observers of human folly. However, the final mix feels altogether singular. Not only has the artist’s long-standing concern for ecology predated the intensity of today’s fashions by decades,

but “What’s It All Mean: William Wiley in Retrospect” provides some uncanny parallels with and flashes forward to

European developments—among them, Anselm Kiefer’s convoluted mythological zones, Sigmar Polke’s antic stylistic hybridization, and even Jonas Burgert’s blend of gothic and carnivalesque.

 

Echoing a long tradition of American oddballs who merge the mind’s ludic spaces with reality’s pithy jumble—witness Whitman, Ives, Cornell, Saul Steinberg, Thomas Pynchon, and others—Wiley offers a remarkable artistic exemplar of the kind of metaphysical and moral masquerade epitomized in an earlier century by Herman Melville’s, well, wily Confidence-Man.