William T. Wiley

William T. Wiley (1937–2021) was an American artist whose paintings, drawings, prints, and installations combined wordplay, visual puns, Zen philosophy, countercultural humour, and a deliberately eccentric approach to materials and meaning. Associated with the Bay Area Funk movement and the broader California eccentric tradition, Wiley's work resisted the dominant modes of both Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, favouring instead an art of accumulation, wit, and oblique personal mythology.

Publications collected here document Wiley's practice and its institutional reception, including exhibition catalogues and printed matter through which his work entered museum collections and private hands.

  • Original 1973 Robert Doty, Extraordinary Realities, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Square softcover divided horizontally into two equal bands — upper half in warm amber-orange, lower half in deep cobalt blue — with 'EXTRAORDINARY' in white outlined rounded sans-serif type on the orange field and 'REALITIES' in the same type on the blue field. Spine wear, edge rubbing, and corner creasing consistent with period." nterior title page from 1973 Robert Doty, Extraordinary Realities, Whitney Museum of American Art. Cream page with 'EXTRAORDINARY REALITIES' in large black outlined rounded sans-serif type at top, followed by 'by Robert Doty / with a preface by Edward Gorey / Whitney Museum of American Art, New York' in smaller serif type below.

    Extraordinary Realities — Robert Doty, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973

    Extraordinary Realities — Robert Doty, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1973