Writing by Artist is the first collection to focus on William Wegman’s lengthy and deeply funny relationship to language and is filled with previously unknown and wildly entertaining texts, drawings, and early photographs spanning the early 1970s to the present.
Not your standard book of writing, the publication was meticulously edited by Andrew Lampert to feature works incorporating words in one form or another. As such, the publication alters the logic and pushes the boundaries of what artist writing can be—shedding new light for those only familiar with Wegman’s later work, while serving as a welcome reminder of the artist’s madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. In short, what you do or don’t know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling collection.
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 1970s, 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 Dusseldorf, 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.
352 pages, 20 x 29cm, softcover, Primary Information (New York).
Not your standard book of writing, the publication was meticulously edited by Andrew Lampert to feature works incorporating words in one form or another. As such, the publication alters the logic and pushes the boundaries of what artist writing can be—shedding new light for those only familiar with Wegman’s later work, while serving as a welcome reminder of the artist’s madcap inventiveness for the already enlightened. In short, what you do or don’t know about William Wegman now conveniently fits into this strangely beguiling collection.
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 1970s, 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 Dusseldorf, 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.
352 pages, 20 x 29cm, softcover, Primary Information (New York).