University Place

William Weege's Collaboration with Sam Gilliam

– I’m Sheri Castelnuovo, the curator of education and on behalf of MMoCA’s staff and board of trustees, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the Stephen Fleischman Lectureship featuring Bill Weege on his long-standing friendship and artistic collaboration with Sam Gilliam. The lectureship honors the 25th anniversary of Stephen Fleischman’s tenure as museum director. Members of MMoCA’s board of trustees who served during that time funded an endowment to provide for an annual lecture by individuals who have made exceptional contributions to art and culture. Talks organized for the Stephen Fleischman Lectureship are held each year in April and have free admission in recognition of the museum’s dedication to providing access to opportunities for learning and enrichment. We’d like to thank Wisconsin Public Television for their permission to screen excerpts from a story originally aired on Prime Time Wisconsin that brings Sam Gilliam’s voice into this conversation. Tandem Press generously provided photographs from their image library, and Gregory Conniff and Bill Weege shared photographs from their personal archives for tonight’s presentation.

Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, Sam Gilliam is internationally renowned for innovations that led the way toward a new vocabulary for abstract painting. Among his most celebrated contributions are his drape paintings, including Carousel, painted in 1970 and seen here on the right on-screen as it is installed in Big, an exhibition of large-scale works from MMoCA’s permanent collection on view in the second-floor galleries. Prolific in his production, Sam Gilliam is known for always pushing the boundaries of his medium and for more than four decades, he has found a kindred spirit in Bill Weege. Bill Weege is professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison art department, proprietor of the Jones Road Print Shop, and founding artistic director of Tandem Press. He has been described as a consummate toolmaker whose ingenuity in applying various technologies to the making of art allowed the artists with whom he has collaborated to break new ground in their artistic production. Bill also is celebrated as an artist in his own right for his landmark work in print media and handmade paper. Born in Wisconsin in 1935, he studied printmaking, collage, and sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison prior to joining the art department faculty in 1971. By that time, he had already become well-known for his works made in the protest to the Vietnam War and appointment as director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts Experimental Printmaking Workshop at the 1970 Venice Biennale.

Throughout his career, he has energetically pursued new artistic territory through continual experimentation and innovation. To the left of Carousel is a work by Bill from 1977 made of cast paper on string that is also featured in Big, and along with Carousel, is among the most important works in MMoCA’s collection. Bill is joined onstage by MMoCA curator emeritus, Richard H. Axsom. Rick joined MMoCA’s staff in 2006 and in his role as curator, organized numerous exhibitions drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. He has also curated exhibitions on the graphic work of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Rick is professor emeritus of art history at the University of Michigan, where he taught courses on modern and contemporary art for 28 years. He is a nationally recognized art writer who has published extensively in the area of the modern and contemporary print, including definitive texts on Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Terry Winters, and Ellsworth Kelly. Rick is currently at work on a print catalog resume for Terry Winters. Now, please welcome Bill Weege and Rick Axsom. [applause]

– Thank you, Sheri, very much. It’s a pleasure to sit down with Bill and chat about his friendship and collaboration with Sam Gilliam. Let’s just get right to it. Sam… I mean, Bill, you first met Sam through the Visiting Artist program in the a
– Okay, I can do that. [laughter] I was a student here, obviously, at the university and I built my own empire as a student. [laughter] They hired me here, much to their dismay, I think. Anyhow, I would rather talk a little bit about the museum here because I was involved very early on with the museum. A very good friend of mine, who was a collaborator with Sam and I, Joe Wilfur, when I met him was the janitor and he worked his way up to be the director. [laughter] Well anyhow, he was involved in the purchase of Big Carousel downstairs and he and Don Eiler went out to Washington to pick it up. The cost of the piece at the time was $3500, so Steve, I’ll give you 7 grand for it right now. [laughter] Shoot. [laughter] Well, I’ll give you 21,000. Half a mil? [laughter] Well, it’s probably worth a million, you’re right. Well, anyhow, uh, I after that program shutting down, the art center, I went off to Venice Italy to show my work there and to be the director of the Venice Bienalle print shop at the American Pavilion. I did get into a bit of trouble there because I was doing Impeach Nixon posters at the time and being a government employee, especially for the state department, you were not allowed to give away government property and so what I did was, I started selling the prints for 50 lire, which was 8 cents, you know, and… they didn’t like that either, so… I kind of got into trouble, but you know, the Smithsonian interviewing me about the whole 70’s Bienalle because not much was written about it. At the time, the artists around the world were pulling their art out of public museums and institutions in protest of Vietnam. And the only reason I went there was because I did social comment. I’ve done it, and I’m doing it again. I recently had a show in Chicago that showed my old work, which I was very pleased with. There was a big catalog. By the way, these catalogs are available for sale, forty bucks a piece, and all of the proceeds go to the museum. I guess you can go on.
– Okay. [laughter]
– Sorry.
– No, no, no.

– Well if I do this, with my luck, in fifteen minutes, you know, I figured it out, if we go the full hour, I can talk for each year that Sam and I worked together I had one minute and seven and a half seconds. But if I do this fifteen-minute monologue, I only have one second. So, what I’ve decided we should probably do, we should have another group of things that happened after things, like a forum or something, and I would spend an hour on each year I spent with Sam. No I’m not doing that, I’m just kidding. Okay, go. [laughter]

– You mentioned Joe Willford, obviously very important to this institution, he was the assistant director of the Madison Arts center from 68 – 76, and then director until 1980, and in the early 70’s he opened up the upper US paper mill, which was a handmade paper facility.
– Yes, in an old bar.
– In an old bar, right. And you were telling me that he was an important influence on what you were doing. Can you talk about that? – Well, certainly he, I would have nothing to do with paper. I thought it was a crafty thing happening, of course, me being an artist. But Joe was really into it, he loved doing it, he could do it really well, and he worked with Ellen Shields, and he worked with me, he worked with Sam a lot. I mean he could make the lumpiest paper you could ever imagine, and that’s what we liked. Texture, lots of texture. Look at Sam’s new work, it’s amazing. Well, anyhow– And then I was invited to teach in Davis in California and I was also invited to work at the experimental print shop with Garner Tullis. So, on the way out, I had a revelation while driving through the great Salt Lake flats, there was a tremendous snow storm, and snow was sticking on everything and I thought this is what I’m going to do. Ellen Shields would work with Joe and he’d take a single string of paper, put it in a bath, hold it up, put it down, try it. I thought, I’m going to make a frame and then I can do all kinds of things. So I did that, and I started making paper in San Francisco where I started I finally gave up and joined the crafty people, you know. So… then of course, working with Sam, meeting him in 1972, he came out to my studio which happened to be in Barneville at the time in an old cow barn and, what should we do? I didn’t know Sam very well at that point. But, he said, “What can we do?” I said, “Well, what do you want to do?” He says, “I want to paint.” I say, “Okay, there’s an offset proving press with paint on the bed over there and I’ll run over the ink that you paint and I’ll transfer it over to the paper on the other side, and that was our first edition that we did. I think we’re all sold out of those now, so sorry. [laughter]
– There we go.
– Oh, and he’s signing them with a BB gun. [laughter]
– It’s a pencil tied to a shotgun.

– Well, Sam and I, you know, he thought working with me was like a vacation and he would come out in the summer for forty-five years and initially he brought his children along and so they worked with my children, and we had horses and stuff like that, so it was a great time for them to come out and at first Sam kind of thought prints were just, “It’s entertainment” or something like that and eventually he found out that wasn’t the case that they had some value. It’s hard to convince people that prints have value even myself, I wonder once in a while, so it just continued to happen. He did a lot of painting while I was figuring out how to produce what he was suggesting, and so we had a number of very innovative moments that happened. We have a fellow right here, second row back, Paul Douglas who came up for one of our more adventurous episodes. We tried making paper with Styrofoam, as a receptacle to make this thing, and we tried to print with the Styrofoam and I thought they were the worst things I’d ever seen in my life, but what did I know? They’re really hot items. It’s like, okay, sometimes I don’t understand what he’s doing, but, and sometimes I don’t think he did either, but we continued, we marched on, and when Sam came out, I’d pick him up in the airport. “Do you want to go through town or in the country?” He says, “In the country.” So when he got to my studio, he had some ideas about color about rhythm and about all kinds of things that would happen with the production that year. The interesting thing about Sam is that he’s very generous. He also– Well, I had all these grad students around working with us, and he would hold impromptu seminars with them, and I had to sometimes had to break it up to get a little production going. That happened quite a bit. And I just kind of sat down and thought how many pieces, how many pieces did we do together? Well, Madison Art Center has a catalog too that they put together of my Jones Road print shop and stable and they, uh– In there, I see that we did fifty editions during that ten-year period. And then I tried to figure out how many monotypes did we do, how many single pieces? We did series, but they were all different, pretty much different. And I came up with a number like 1,500 pieces over the span of time, and probably it was more. So, we produced a lot of stuff. And, it was always fun. Sam worked at Picnic Point press. He was the first artist to go to Picnic Point press, and I don’t see any students. Any students here? No, no collaborators? Wow. Anyhow, uh, well so, they were there, and Picnic Point Press was run through about 350 grad students in the program, so–
– That’s Sam’s bookshop.
– Yeah, okay.

– You did the poster, right, by him?
– Yeah, the first poster I did– The first poster I did before I ever met him, I just knew what he did and made a poster that was kind of successful. I think he taught here too during that time. This press that I– Oh, yeah. It’s a regular old etching or woodcut press, and I created a web press. The US government, Sam would, he lives in Washington, he’s been in Washington, he knows people in the government, he knew people in the arts program, so Sam said, “Where do you want to go?” He says, “I think we can get a gig in Korea.” He said, “Would you go?” I said, “Sure, that’d be fun.” He said, “What should we do?” I said, “Well, why don’t we make the world’s largest print?” And so, he said, “Yeah, okay.” He’s known for taking the paintings off the stretcher. Well, he’s also known now, from me, taking the print out of the frame. These things turned out, we probably printed over the years, I don’t know, probably about twenty football fields lined-up back to back. We actually, we did a number of pieces, we did the one in Seoul Korea and that was an interesting process where we went in with a piece and we got it kind of– The curator was upset with me running the cables around and moving big blocks of display walls, so I was reprimanded, of course, for my behavior. And… So he took over, and we had a lot of this stuff draped over these big walls and stuff like this, and he took over and dumped a whole thing of it and it went like a bunch of dominoes, all these big walls fell down. And it was like a–
– Here it comes. Here it is.
– There it is. And so, at that point Sam said, “Leave it!” [laughter] He says, now we’ve got to have strobe lights [laughter] because the piece is titled Ferris wheels and fireflies.
– Fireflies and Ferris Wheels.
– Yeah, something like that. And, so we went to downtown Seoul, we found this shop where there are blinking lights, so we stop in there. It’s about this wide. And we say we want two hundred strobe lights, and it’s like this job doesn’t have two hundred, but this guy runs off on his bicycle and comes back there’s two hundred of them. So we take them back to the museum, and wired them together, and our curator friend helped us, and we went to plug it in and half of them blew out because he didn’t know how to do electricity. But the children came, and the children had just a ball. They had never seen anything like it. It was so fantastic. These people, these children who are normally so well behaved just lost it, you know, and families, families couldn’t get them out of there. It’s one of the most beautiful things.

– It’s funny, you mentioned they got lost in the work?
– Yeah, they could crawl around in it, out of it, down, I mean everything was secured, I didn’t think those walls were going to fall anymore. [laughter]
– I’m sure you’re probably following this that Bill worked with Sam in creating new editions and prints and works on paper, but also there’s this crossover in Bill’s collaboration with Sam on the draped paintings, so they sort of run in together. Firefiles and Ferris Wheels was first presented in South Korea in 1991 and the following year in Finland, and so there’s another clip here, a clip from Primetime Wisconsin which also gives you further visual insight into what their process was, their working process.

– [Video] : Artists often have a childlike sense of wonder and discovery that fuels their work. Most artists work alone, but sometimes artists work together as collaborators. Sam Gilliam is a well-known abstract artist and teacher from Washington D.C. Bill Weege is a professor printmaker and director of Tandem Press for the UW-Madison. They’ve been working on projects together for the last seventeen years. We talked to them about their long-time collaboration, their ongoing project, and their ideas on art.
– [Video] : Every year that Sam comes out, okay, it’s like what are we gonna do this year? And it’s a whole new ballgame and it’s fun. It’s not like we continue to churn out the same thing year after year, it’s always a new sport, a new game.

– I used to play at being in the circus. In fact, I played at being in the circus so much that I was a fulltime acrobat. But here, I think that someone once said is that how are you able to do things in art as a man? He said because I defined them when I was a child. So I think that both processes sort of close up and go together. There is a lot here, there is a lot that a feeling of survival away from being in cities, away from being in the closeness of cities, and a great deal of openness, and a great deal of refurbishing things that are in you that you don’t know about, you know, and I’ve sort of liked it for about eighteen years, I think, and that’s been very very good. It’s been kind.

– [Video] : I’ve always liked Sam’s work, I like his use of color, his use of forms, on all of those things, you can just go on and on, but again, it’s his willingness to try new things, and a willingness to go ahead, and I offer up some ideas and usually takes them and they don’t come out at all like I would have just guessed, you know. So that’s very exciting for me.
– [Video] : I became an abstract painter because I wanted to get further out than anyone else, and one night is that we were talking about those of us who were far out, and someone said, “You aren’t far out at all!” Told me, so that I became involved in a process that will show you how far out I can actually get so that and with encouragement is that I started to make these paintings that were extensions, drapes that were an extension of painting.
– [Video] : Sam Gilliam’s strange paintings made quite an impact on the art world twenty years ago. Since then, he has been commissioned to create works for various galleries and museums. Gilliam is in the first phase of working his installation, Ferris Wheels and Fireflies, a colorful and theatrical piece that will tour Japan and Korea in 1991 as part of the Arts America cultural exchange. The work began last December at Tandem Press.
– [Video] : You know, that’s the exciting part of collaborations, is that you never, you can put more things in the pot, you’re going to get a better stew, than you do if you have a couple of things, and it boils down to the thing that two heads are better than one, you know, in the end.
– [Video] : Greg Kaniff is a photographer and writer who has known Sam Gilliam and Bill Wegee for seventeen years.

– I became involved with Bill at the time he was setting up at Jones Road Print Shop. I tore the dairy barn apart that became the print shop, I wound up as his first apprentice and Sam was, I think the second artist that came to work at Jones Road, and that how I got together, and I just stood there. I knew nothing about printmaking, and that’s why I wanted to work with Bill. I hadn’t gone to school to study this sort of thing and basically learn from working with Bill and his open way of dealing with things and working with Sam learned about how you make art in there.

– [Video] : What I’ve researched is that in most Oriental countries, I don’t think they are as abstract, what they sense is more the obvious, they are more formal, they sort of put up with less. Maybe they want to know sort of the exact meaning. So first of all, I’ve only started to work with exact symbols like Ferris wheel, fireflies, and things like this. This is what I’ll be building in paper in neon and also sort of in quasi-signage. Big prints and painting. Then I thought this morning as I was on the plane, “Why not the word peace?” and to make that very obvious and that, um, I’ll see where that gets me.

– Well, the people who actually watch the collaboration what they get out of it is the enormous sense of possibility in the world. Try anything, try anything, even if it doesn’t work, you’ve gotten off the dime, you’ve started.

– The printing part of it is very simple. We actually made relief plates. We carved away at areas that didn’t print. [wood router buzzing] We applied ink to the surface that did print, the remaining surface printed. These were repeated on the boards, but in random patterns using varying colors.

– Normally when a person makes something they like to look at it, and it’s very difficult to look at something that is a hundred yards long in a fifty-foot studio.
– [Video] : At the end of January on a day when the temperature was minus six below, the printed work was taken outdoors and spread on frozen Lake Monona. The frigid air didn’t seem to put a chill in the enthusiasm for the work.
– [Video] : It gives you another perspective, it gives you some ideas and I think taking it out on the lake was just kind of maybe a childish kind of thing, and at the same time, everybody enjoyed it a lot. Everybody was happy, we were freezing to death, and everybody’s excited, so what’s wrong with that, you know. [chuckles]
– [Video] : By April, the weather has improved and Gilliam returns to Wegee’s farm in Arena, about forty miles west of Madison. They continue painting the work outdoors, gaining new energy.
– [Video] : Then here, on the outside, Bill had provided the proper environment for it. I think I’ve grown up a lot, I’ve grown up a lot. And I’ve come back to doing things that I hadn’t since I was a child. And I’ve had a lot of fun at it, and a lot of success. I mean, I know what I’m doing. I have had a lot of success at it. I think there is that real false sense of what art is, one, in terms of cities, one doesn’t define a real sense of openness. Probably most of the art in this country is made somewhere in a rural area. It’s really defining art in the way that I think of it.

– [Video] : We’ve also painted other things. We’ve used a number of techniques of painting. We’ve used spraying the paint on, we’ve thrown the paint on, we’ve rolled the paint on. Oh, we used a broom to push the paint around with. We drug it across the field so it picked up a few grains of sand and speckled some of the paint. All these things are just the very beginnings of this piece. Sam is also working on other elements of the piece in Washington. It will be very interesting to see these two things come together in two different sources.
– [Video] : One of the unknown factors in producing this piece is the reaction the work will have on an Asian audience.
– [Video] : That’s the hardest thing the people have said that I’m going to be able to deal with, because the Japanese don’t want to deal with Afro Americans, so to speak. Some people say worry about it, some people say don’t. I know that when I was in Japan for eighteen months, it was the most interesting thing, it was exciting for the two of us, so maybe in an art situation, rather than in a public situation, things perhaps will be different.
– [Video] : And I think by taking things out of conventional patterns, like, objects out of the ordinary world and incorporating them into art, or in turning ordinary art processes on their head, you increase the sense people have that there are possibilities in life that you can try anything, what the heck. All you can do is fail, no big deal.

– What do you think, Sam?
– What are you talking about?
– Eight months or so, we don’t even know when we’re going. Like we don’t know where we’re going, now. Where are we going to put this, or where we’re going to do it. But that’s the way we plan. We have other things to do too.

– [Video] : You find out in the woods it’s a tree that’s just absolutely a straight pole. It’s probably not very interesting unless it’s in a minimal artist’s work. You find a tree that’s crooked and curved and you’ve often seen them in artwork, attach a few feathers on it or something and you’ve got a beautiful piece of art so to speak.

– In 1997, Sam and Bill restaged of Fireflies and Ferris Wheels in Germany, Magdeburg, at the Monastery of our Lady and here you see that installation in which you may see easily here is that the works are site specific. They’re draped one place a certain way, the next place they take on a new configuration as a function of the spaces they’re working with.
– Yes.
– Just like Carousel upstairs, Sam’s piece in the big show, you might remember that it was in the icon several years ago and it came down like a chandelier through the staircase and then when it was decided to put it in Big, Sam had notions about how to reconfigure it, sort of circular, sort of carousel-like pattern. So, tell us about the installation here in this monastery.

– Well, you can see the big steel beam that holds the place together. Well, first of all it’s a beautiful building, because it had a Roman bottom that somehow or other. It lost– The church collapsed down to the foundations kind of, so then they put a gothic top on it, so the architecture was very unusual, it was beautiful, really, for us, it was fantastic. While installing the piece, there was a fellow– They had a big organ in there, too. There was a fellow who was going to do a recital on Bach, and he was practicing, so while we were putting this stuff up we had this music in the background that was just like, “Oh, my God.” It was fantastic. And we had this squeaky thing that– Well, first of all, to get those things up there we didn’t know how that would happen and I had my slingshot I brought along with a rope on it, I could just shoot it, a bolt over top of the rod, and then I would keep pulling up heavier ropes so that we could pull this stuff up. Well, we were struggling so hard that the Germans finally gave in and brought us a machine that we could do that with. [laughter]

The whole process of this is amazing because we had probably about six women sewing for us with very heavy duty sewing machines and very precise sewing I must admit, and, uh, so that was kind of fun, there was so much noise, and the organ music, it was just like a John Cage recital or something, I don’t know. (chuckles] Anyhow, it was so much fun to put up. And the fact that Sam brought a– He would always find stuff in the neighborhood. In this case we ordered, I don’t know how many different mirrors. He had whole boxes full of mirrors showed up. He had brought along a lot of metal things that we had bolted together in various shapes that he had fabricated in Washington. There was a lot of interplay and the funny thing about– I mean the great thing about Sam Gilliam is that a lot of the stuff that we produced, or I helped produce, I’d go, “This is not gonna make it.” And he would always have a way of staging it that became beautiful. So it was just such a treat to have that happen with things that you thought you never going to be able to save this one. And it always turned out well.

– Just to back up a little bit, both of the clips that you saw, and also what is being said about Sam visiting Bill out in Arena, in the country, is that he speaks very fondly about how important the natural setting was to his work.
– He came from Washington. [laughter] That’s not natural. [laughter]
– Well, I suppose in addition to that, any other aspects? I mean he talks about–
– He’s a color field painter, and he comes out to beautiful colored fields, right.
– Exactly.
– I don’t know about that word, but I’ll go with it. Sam would approve of it.
– You told me the barn story where he was sleeping out in the barn and there was an owl or something that flew.
– Oh, no, that was Peter Plagence.
– Oh.
– That was another artist.
– Oh.
– Oh, yeah.

– Okay, well I got that wrong.
– Well, maybe, whatever, there were certainly owls there, there’s no question of that, and they would take care of the whatever, the mice, and they were just transient owls, they wouldn’t stay once they cleaned out all the varmint, they’d be gone.
– Well, I suppose, speaking of nature, we can speak about water here in this particular instance with the work that you saw in the lobby when you came in, it’s Phelps 8, and it’s one of around two dozen mixed media collages that you did with Sam in 2016, and that summer Sam and Bill followed the Olympics in Rio, and I think you can now get to the title and what it’s referring to, and can you tell us about this project’s particular series and the subject was obviously Michael Phelps, but was there something that was connected in other ways to that subject?

– We were listening to the TV or something and they were announcing that he had just won all these things, and Sam comes up with the titles and it’s just bang that’s the title. You know, that’s it.

– Mel was involved with the Phelps 8, and I like what she said, that you had mentioned to her, said to her that there was Sam and Bill watching the television, watching and making, watching and making, watching and making, and I really like that particular rhythm you had to create this particular work.
– Well, there were a lot of grad students around helping. We had a lot of them there. So, did you have pictures of the piece itself? Is that on somewhere? Of the piece we were making while we were making these for the Biennale?
– Oh, that’s–
– That’s coming up. Am I jumping ahead?
– There you go, that was a great. Speaking of which, it was a great segue. Concurrently to the making of the Phelps series, Sam and Bill were working on a project that was aimed for the Venice Biennale in 2017. – Yeah, the French pavilion. Sam had so many shows in Venice, ah, not in Venice, but in Paris, so that the French must have adopted him and so they asked him to do the piece in front of their pavilion. – And “Yves Klein Blue” would be the title of it, and some of you may be familiar with that, but Yves Klein was an important artist in the sixties, and he was well known for being identified by a single color international Klein blue, which you see here. It’s a specially prepared ultramarine, that has its own particular identity. And I recall in the early sixties when this came to light and we were watching things going on, I recall in a gallery in Paris, nude women rolling around in international Klein blue on canvases, and I thought, boy that’s contemporary. [laughter] – Oh golly. – But, here you were. – What’s after contemporary, do you know?
– Pardon?
– What’s gonna be after contemporary?
– Um, post-contemporary.
– Oh. [laughter] Gee, I never thought of that.

– So, the two of you worked out at Arena to make the materials for it, right, to move it together.
– Yeah. I was gonna bring his shoes along. I called him, I talked to him yesterday. I said Sam, I want to take your shoes along and auction them off. He said, “No, no, I’m coming back.” [laughter]

– Well here, the nature of the preparations, I don’t know if you’ve seen the completed work, it’s quite extraordinary. It’s draped across the portico to the Giardini’s entrance to the central pavilion and here is Yves Klein blue. Quite something. This pavilion entrance for the various Biennales will change in color, like they will redo the coloration of the facade. I thought, how perfect to have it painted all white for this particular Biennale for his work.

– Well, there’s a lot of work that goes into it. Apparently there’s some guy who brought in some big object into some building, I’m not sure of the artist, but, you know, apparently it cost them six million dollars to get that piece through the roof and down in there. So, they do some work on them. But those were the Italians, you know, a little more showy than the rest. [laughter]

– Well… here we go. Sam, as you know, couldn’t be here with us this evening, but he certainly is in spirit, and in his own words, last week Sam sent Bill a statement about their collaborations over the years. In fact, Bill said he can’t read it because he’d start tearing up, so, I’m happy to do it. “I have loved and prospered for fifty years of my engagement with Bill Wegee. His willingness to be experimental, to bring the love and labors of the land into the workshop nourished my art and my soul. Nothing was precious, everything was up for grabs.” That says so much doesn’t it? “Nothing precious, anything to make art this beautiful and wonderful. Working with Bill is like driving fast in a sports car through winding and uncharted territory. While Bill was doing this for me, he was also doing it fulltime for many other artists. We all took the collective inventions of the print shop back to our studios. We are richer for it.” A wonderful celebration of an extraordinary collaboration. [applause]

Bill has described his collaborations with other artists as an interpreter, okay, and to this end, it reminds me of the master printer artist model of say Frank Stella and Ken Tyler. However, in addition to being a superb technical facilitator, an idea man, Bill Wegee is also a fine artist in his own right. [applause] Now we can ask him to speak towards his own art, I mean it’s an extraordinary work on paper on the screen.

– Well, I’m very eclectic, so I do a lot of different things. I basically– Recently the show in Chicago kind of put me back on the map as a social commentator, and you know, I did things, I did a piece in here in this book called “Peace is Patriotic.” It was portfolio I did when I was a grad student. And, I went to New York with this portfolio. I took three of my books, they had twenty-five pages. That’s why my shoulder’s out of joint. Wenton Colscott took his people, took his students there. I sold a copy to the Museum of Modern Art, to Brooklyn Museum, and the New York Public library. That was my first outing as a student, so, uh, friends of mine who were blue chip guys they hadn’t sold a piece to the Modern Art, so it’s like, “Whoa!” I didn’t realize that I had accomplished something early on and this whole thing is in part of why I got sent to the Venice Bienalle. My big thing there was impeach Nixon posters and the second biggest thing was working with Ed Ruscha we didn’t have any money, it was like almost gone. The kind of mentality that the government has, these people work that work for the government in these positions where they can’t say anything about the government. They gotta keep their mouth shut about everything. I wasn’t doing that and I got in trouble for it, obviously, but I continued to do it.

I mean we gotta speak up, we gotta say something about what’s going on and that’s where– I’ve done a whole other series of things. I’ve been told by my psychiatrist that I’ve got to slow down, you know, slow down, and that’s almost impossible for somebody like myself to slow down. The only thing that makes me really slow down is that physically, I just have to. My body ain’t working like it used to, so I slow down a little bit, but I haven’t stopped thinking at all. And I think that I have to do another whole body of work that is a social comment again. And I’ve started it, so Valerie is going to hand out matchbooks and if anybody wants more of them, let me know, I could do it. If you want a poster about some particular thing that would be environmental or whatever, guns, or whatever, I can help you with that. You can commission me. [laughter] So the last commission that Sam and I did, actually had a third party and one of the reasons I met Sam in the first place is this third party, and he’s sitting in the second row with my wife right there. When Sam came to town, talk about how generous he was, he suggested to Don because Don had bought a lot of his work in New York, he couldn’t afford Morris Lewis, he couldn’t afford a number of artists of that period, Kenneth Nolan, so he bought Sam’s work. And, ah… Sam said, “Don, you really should buy some work from some local people.” “You should really do that.” Ah, it was right on scene there. And Don over the years has commissioned me to do quite a few pieces for him.

I’ve done large pieces, I’ve done small pieces, so it was Sam talking to his collector friend and his collector friend was good to me. So, my work is very eclectic. I like to experiment, I hate printmaking. I absolutely hate it. It’s boring, you know, I tell my students– You know, when I was a student, I got in there, I got into the printmaking area and you had to make twelve pieces, you had to do an edition of twelve that all looked alike. Well the first one should never have been made in the first place. I mean it was so ugly or bad or whatever, so I kind of turned that around in the department. I thought, you know, if you’re an artist, and you’re doing the work, do what you want. Don’t make a lot of them when you’re just wasting paper and ink, you know. So that the whole philosophy kind of changed in the department after that and people became instead of printers, they became artists, because there’s a fine line. And the ego thing, being a printer is difficult too, because when you have someone important like Sam working with you, you’ve gotta, you could have an ego, a big ego, but it’s not gonna work out really well, because then you’re not going to be friends for forty-five years. And so – What I find fascinating is many things with Bill’s art is this fluidity between lyrical abstraction and one of the great colorists in Sam too, which I think, we haven’t talked about that, but your color sensibilities are just so, so vividly–
– I worked in the dark. [laughter]
– And his political points of view. It was like two years ago I went out to visit you to choose your work, you were just about to have your Pace Editions show, which was very exciting and I’m looking at the new work, which is abstract and, I went off to the bathroom and it was full of art, and while I’m in the bathroom, over the toilet was what I thought was a reproduction of Henri Matisse’s Harmony in Red and it was really very, very beautiful. It was sort of low, so I had to get down to see it, because I really wanted to know what that was. Well, it was a woodcut, and the inscription in it was a very fine emulation of Matisse’s Harmony in Red, but the caption below it, all of a sudden I saw Acid Rain. And I came out and said Bill, “That’s extraordinary.” You see, I didn’t know the political side of his work. And he said, “Oh, I got more of that stuff.” So he comes back with a box full of framed woodcuts from a series called “mother nature never loses,” and it was all about climate change, all about the destruction of the environment and I thought this is another side, and I said, “Gee.” We were doing a show on the political artist. I said, “I would love these in that show!” He was, “Oh, take ’em all!” [laughter] You were very, very generous and so that suite of woodcuts was some of you may recall in that exhibition is in our permanent collection and it is that other side of what you see on the screen, which I think reflects an extremely rich and extraordinary life as an artist.
– I’m one lucky rascal that’s all.
– You certainly are. And we’re lucky to know you. Thank you very much for coming this evening, of course thanks to Bill, and of course thanks to Sam. I hope you enjoyed the evening. [applause]