William T. Wiley (American, born 1937)

Columbus Rerouted #3, 1962

About

• Along with Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis, William Wiley became one of the most prominent Bay Area artists of the 1960s and ’70s. He was a pivotal figure who, like Arneson, created an art of self-conscious humor, autobiography, and social critique that defined Northern Californian art in its time. Wiley attended the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in the late 1950s and established friendships with fellow students Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, and Alvin Light, among others. Particularly evident in the painting Columbus Rerouted #3 is the influence of instructors Fred Martin and especially Frank Lobdell, from whom Wiley borrows imagery and a dark palette. Many elements in this work notably foreshadow Wiley’s later preoccupation with drawing upon the canvas, hinted at here in the delineation of schematic designs. One in a series of three large paintings so titled, this was the last of the artist’s musings regarding improvements to Columbus Avenue, the main thoroughfare to the CSFA. As Joann Moser explained in a 2009 retrospective of the artist’s career, “Every day he attended the school he coped with the inconveniences of the massive construction project. The idea of Christopher Columbus taking another route, or being rerouted, sprang to mind, and he wondered what would have happened if Columbus had sailed in a different direction . . .”¹ Tapping such high-spirited musings became the hallmark of Wiley’s eclectic imagery and ceaseless narrative ingenuity. In the 1970s, indulging his urge for stream of consciousness thinking, Wiley began to assemble words and objects in paintings that had “the feeling of a diary written in incomplete phrases.”² Throughout the 1980s he juxtaposed these phrases and ideas expressed in puns, but his content also became more boldly opinionated, even political. With Hinge, Wiley moves freely between his passions for painting and drawing. The tidal wave of detail includes a sketch of Mickey Mouse and the lyrics “they took Unk’l Walts body n Froze it,” lyrics the artist wrote in response to reports that the great Walt Disney was to be preserved cryogenically. This painting has been described as the exemplar of Wiley’s controlled exuberance, and it is also the last of his monumental canvases.³