Exhibitions: William Wegman: Funney/Strange

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  January 2006: The Brooklyn Museum will be the first venue of William Wegman: Funney/Strange, an exhibition exploring forty years of Wegman’s work in all media. The first retrospective of this artist’s work in more than fifteen years, the exhibition will be on view from March 10 through May 28. Included will be more than 200 works, among them the signature 20 x 24 Polaroids, early black-and-white and altered photographs, as well as paintings, drawings, collages, artist books, videos, and film.
  
  The exhibition has been organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, and curated by the independent curator Trevor Fairbrother. Generous support for this exhibition and publication was provided by The Henry Luce Foundation.
  
  After its premiere at Brooklyn, William Wegman:Funney/Strange will travel to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; and the Addison Gallery of American Art. 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, will accompany the exhibition.
  
  William Wegman:Funney/Strange is sponsored at the Brooklyn Museum by Commerce Bank. Additional support is provided by the Brooklyn Museum’s Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund. AM New York is media sponsor.
  
  Underlying all of William Wegman’s work is a light humor that mediates a darker strangeness. The exhibition examines a career that has never been static or predictable yet is woven of interests and explorations that engaged the artist at the start 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 as well as an adventurous painter, prolific writer, and masterful photographer who is able to create art that amuses and surprises while it 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 and provocative.
  
  Beloved by the general public and held in critical esteem internationally, Wegman fascinates both audiences for much the same reason: a smart, gently subversive humor that destabilizes the familiar to reveal life’s essential oddity. Throughout his career, he has moved seamlessly from conceptual works to commissioned magazine shoots, 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 series of paintings that incorporate scenic postcards with drawing, collage, and painting. This exhibition will bring classic Wegman images together 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 curator and scholar who has worked on a 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. Marilyn Kushner, Chair of the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Brooklyn Museum, is the coordinating curator for the Brooklyn presentation.

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Press Coverage of this Exhibition

• ART REVIEW; Beyond Dogs: Wegman UnleashedMarch 10, 2006 By ROBERTA SMITHRoberta Smith reviews exhibition William Wegman: Funney/Strange at Brooklyn Museum; photos (M)
• ART: CLOSE READING; Now Open: A Museum Of One Mind's AtticMarch 12, 2006 By TED LOOS"AT one time or another, most serious artists fantasize about what they would put on display if they were in charge of a museum -- the aesthete's version of Dr. Seuss' ''If I Ran the Zoo.'' Leave it to William Wegman, best known for dressing up and photographing his Weimaraner dogs, to have a surreal take on this idea: ''Museum,'' a 2005 oil..."
• Spare Times; For ChildrenMarch 17, 2006 "Theater 'SARAH, PLAIN AND TALL,' a musical based on the book, by Theaterworks/NYC at the Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, West Village. Sunday at 2 and 5 p.m. Through April 30. Full schedule: www.twusa.org. Tickets: $35 ($25 before March 26 -- mention Code SPT1 -- or if buying four or more). (212) 279-4200. 'AS YOU LIKE IT,' a..."
• The Listings: March 17 - March 23March 17, 2006 "Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional..."
• The Listings: March 24 - March 30March 24, 2006 "Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional..."
• The Listings: March 31 - April 6March 31, 2006 "Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional..."
• The Listings: April 7 - April 13April 7, 2006 "Selective listings by critics of The New York Times of new and noteworthy cultural events in the New York metropolitan region this week. * denotes a highly recommended film, concert, show or exhibition. Theater Approximate running times are in parentheses. Theaters are in Manhattan unless otherwise noted. Full reviews of current shows, additional..."