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                                                                                   william t. wiley


                Born in Bedford Indiana, William T. Wiley was already interested in
                art as a child. After graduating from high school, Wiley went to San
                San Francisco, where he enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute. He
                received his B.F.A. in 1960 and his M.F.A. in 1962. His work was
                exhibited in group shows in San Francisco and in New York even during
                his student years, and after the completion of his studies, he joined the
                art faculty at the University of California at Davis, where he taught for
                years. He has served at a guest faculty member at many colleges and
                universities across the United States, but the San Francisco Bay Area has
                remained his home and primary work site.
                As a student, Wiley was greatly interested in the work of twentieth-
                century artists such as Salvador Dali, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Morris
                Graves, and Mark Tobey. Later he graviated toward the art of
                Clyfford Still, Marcel Duchamp, and H.C. Westermann; Wiley's work
                exhibits a similar penchant for mordant, witty puns. Intrigued by the
                connections among seemingly disparate elements, Wiley explores the
                possibilities of combining varied aesthetics in his art, at times merging
                sound, words, and visual imagery in a single work. Over the years he has
                elaborated on these possiblities, using almost every medium, traditional
                and nontraditional, in works that gently tweak the eye and the mind.
                his work contains many contradictions; it is both artful and artless,
                simple and complex, figurative and nonrepresentational, funny and
                serious, obvious and obscure.