The long-awaited compendium of Wegman's hilarious, ingenious writings
and language-centric art, from the early 1970s to the present
While he's famous the world over for his instantly recognizable images
of Weimaraner dogs, William Wegman has long been one of Conceptual art's
true innovators. Filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining
texts, drawings and early photos, Writing by Artist is the first
collection to focus on Wegman's longstanding and deeply funny
relationship to language.
This career-spanning edition presents a thematically organized selection
of rediscovered writings dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, alongside
landmark early photographs and hilarious drawings from throughout his
career. All of the works brilliantly incorporate words in one form or
another, altering logic and pushing the boundaries of what artist
writing can be. Writing by Artist serves as a genuine epiphany for
those only familiar with his later work, and a welcome reminder of his
madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. What you do or don't
know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely
beguiling book.
William Wegman was born in 1943, in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He
received a BFA in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art,
Boston, in 1965 and an MFA in painting from the University of Illinois,
Champagne-Urbana, in 1967. By the early '70s, Wegman's work was being
exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. In addition to solo
shows with Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York, Situation Gallery in
London and Konrad Fisher Gallery in Düsseldorf, his work was included in
such seminal exhibitions as When Attitudes Become Form and Documenta
V, and was regularly featured in Interfunktionen, Artforum and
Avalanche magazines. Wegman has created film and video works for
Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon, and his video segments for
Sesame Street have appeared regularly since 1989. In 1995, Wegman's
film The Hardly Boys was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and with
Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show and The Colbert Report.
