Artist Spotlight
William Wegman: Portrait of Pure Artistic Joy
There is a moment, somewhere between the first glance and the slow smile, when a William Wegman photograph does something few works of contemporary art manage: it disarms you completely. In recent years, major institutions have continued to affirm what devoted collectors have long understood. The Smithsonian, MoMA, and the Centre Pompidou all hold Wegman's work in their permanent collections, and retrospective interest in his practice has only deepened as scholars and curators reckon more seriously with the role of humor, conceptualism, and the human and animal bond in postwar American art.… Continue reading
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Artists in conversation
Cindy Sherman
Sherman shares Wegman's interest in conceptual photography involving elaborate costuming and deadpan humor, using staged personas to explore identity and artifice within a formally composed photographic frame.
Elliott Erwitt
Erwitt was celebrated for witty, humanistic photography that frequently featured dogs as subjects with comedic timing and formal elegance, closely paralleling Wegman's approach to animal portraiture and dry humor.
Duane Michals
Michals combines conceptual storytelling with photographic sequences and a whimsical sensibility, sharing Wegman's tendency to treat photography as a vehicle for playful yet intellectually serious ideas.
Artists who inspired them
John Baldessari
Baldessari was a pioneering figure in West Coast Conceptual Art who mentored a generation of artists to embrace wit and everyday imagery as legitimate conceptual strategies, directly informing Wegman's early video and photo work.
Bruce Nauman
Nauman's early video performances using his own body and studio space as subject matter were a key model for Wegman's own deadpan video pieces made in the early 1970s at the outset of his career.
Ed Ruscha
Ruscha's dry wit, graphic clarity, and blending of popular culture with conceptual rigor provided an important aesthetic and attitudinal touchstone for Wegman's approach to combining humor with formal precision.
