© William Wegman
Connector, 1994
Polaroid
24 x 20 in.
Private collection

The Addison Gallery of American Art has organized a comprehensive traveling exhibition of the work of William Wegman. Guest curated by Trevor Fairbrother, William Wegman: Funney/ Strange, explores forty years of Wegman's work in all media. The first retrospective of this artist's work in over fifteen years, the exhibition will tour the country through the end of 2007. Included are more than 200 works, among them the signature 20 x 24 Polaroids, as well as early black and white and altered photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, artists books, videos, and film.

An extensive catalogue, written by scholar and critic Joan Simon and published by Yale University Press in association with the Addison Gallery of American Art accompanies the exhibition.

Underlying all of William Wegman's work is the light humor of "funny" mediating the darker human comedy of "strange." His career, as the exhibition and the catalogue attest, has never been static or predictable, yet it is woven of enduring threads of interests and explorations that engaged him at the beginning and compel him still. Coming of age in the 1960s Wegman was an early exponent of conceptual art and a pioneering maker of video. He continues to be a video artist and conceptual thinker at the same time that he is an adventurous painter, prolific writer, and masterful photographer who is able to navigate between art that amuses and surprises and art that challenges and transforms.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1943, Wegman received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and an MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In Illinois and later in Wisconsin, he began to experiment with a wide range of media-film, kinetic sculpture, installation, and performance. While teaching at California State College in Long Beach in the 1970s, Wegman developed what was to be his mature artistic voice expressed in his signature media of photography, video, and text. It was in California that he acquired his canine muse Man Ray and began to include the dog in both photographs and video. By the fall of 1972 he moved to New York where he has remained ever since, applying his quirky and unpredictable imagination and expansive artistic appetite to a career that has been far-ranging, all-embracing, and provocative.

Beloved by the general public and held in critical esteem within the international art world, Wegman fascinates both for much the same reasons: his smart, gently subversive humor that destabilizes the familiar to reveal life's essential oddity. Throughout his career, he has moved seamlessly among various media, from conceptual works to commissioned magazine shots, from video work to television segments made for Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live; from artist's books to children's books, from photographic "landscapes" employing his dogs to his most recent tour de force cycle of paintings that incorporate scenic postcards with drawing, collage, and paint. This exhibition brings together classic Wegman images with rarely exhibited material and surprising new work to reveal the full range and savvy voice of this remarkable artist's production.

Trevor Fairbrother is an independent scholar who has worked on wide range of topics, from Andy Warhol to John Singer Sargent. He has served as a curator of American painting and of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and as Deputy Director for Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Joan Simon is curator at large for the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on contemporary art, including Ann Hamilton and Susan Rothenberg.

Generous support for this exhibition and publication was provided by The Henry Luce Foundation.

Click here for the exhibition's travelling schedule.