A few weeks ago, our nation’s capital tilted noticeably to the left when friends, associates and supporters of the Bay Area’s William T. Wiley stormed Washington, D.C. for the opening of What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect, now through January 24, 2010 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A concurrent exhibition of new watercolors and constructions at the Marsha Mateyka Gallery near Dupont Circle meant that fans of Wiley’s art had only to hop the Red Line to catch two stellar exhibitions of this important artist’s work.
On hand for the festivities were about 30 or so members of the Oakland Museum of California’s Art Guild, who were treated to a private tour of the SAAM show by Wiley and his high-school art teacher, James McGrath, who was in town for the occasion. Representing the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, which hosts the show from March 17 to July 18, 2010, was that institution’s chief curator and director of programs and collections, Lucinda Barnes. Even Wiley’s congresswoman, Lynn Woolsey, was in the audience for the artist’s talk and musical performance the night before the show’s opening. It’s not every artist, noted SAAM’s director, Elizabeth Broun, who travels with his own congresswoman.
But then, Wiley is not every artist and never has been. He has always charted his own course, and his artwork has often been the means to make sense of his life’s journey between both physical spaces (growing up in Bedford, Indiana; attending high school in Richland, Washington; raising a family in west Marin) and metaphysical ones (the teachings of various Zen masters).
The 88-piece exhibition began in a room off the main galleries with a selection of early works that suggested the influences of artists from Giorgio di Chirico to Bruce Connor to Marcel Duchamp to H.C. Westermann. If you know Wiley’s work, the room was like a cocktail party with old friends: There’s Mona Lisa Wipe Out from 1967; oh look, it’s Ship’s Log (1969) from SFMOMA’s collection; and hasn’t Wizdumb Bridge (1969) aged well?

Mona Lisa Wipe Out (1967)
Those who were not familiar with the artist’s early work probably had to fight the urge to scoot through this satellite gallery to get to the main event, and who could blame them? What awaited was a trove of Wiley’s most enduring pieces, including watercolors like Lame and Blind in Eden (1969) and Reading the Stains (1971), as well as paintings such as Random Remarks and Digs (1971) and Studio Space (1975). This was the Wiley many visitors were probably most familiar with. Soon we were deep in a world of map-like landscapes ringed with tattered edges; of seemingly endless layers of mottled surfaces percolating through watercolor wash; of the same effect rendered even more dizzyingly in monotone via charcoal and graphite; of storytelling and musings about current events documented directly onto the artworks; and of the cohabitation of disparate imagery that is at once formal and playful, serious and careless, respectful and irreverent. I could look at this work forever.