Bill Beckley (born February 11, 1946) is an American
narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travel literature, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller (ge ...
/
conceptual art
Conceptual art, also referred to as conceptualism, is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic, technical, and material concerns. Some works of conceptual art, sometimes called insta ...
ist.
Early life
Born in
Hamburg, Pennsylvania
Hamburg (Pennsylvania Dutch language, Pennsylvania German: ''Hambarig'') is a Borough (Pennsylvania), borough in Berks County, Pennsylvania, Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 4,270 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 ...
, a small farming town in the
Amish
The Amish (; pdc, Amisch; german: link=no, Amische), formally the Old Order Amish, are a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christian church fellowships with Swiss German and Alsatian origins. They are closely related to Mennonite churches ...
countryside, Bill Beckley attended college at
Kutztown University
Kutztown University of Pennsylvania (Kutztown University or KU) is a public university in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. It is part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) and is accredited by the Middle States Commission on High ...
from 1964 to 1968 and in 1970 received a
Master of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.)
is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts admini ...
from
Tyler School of Art
The Tyler School of Art and Architecture is based at Temple University, a large, urban, public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tyler currently enrolls about 1,350 undergraduate students and about 200 graduate students in a wid ...
,
Temple University
Temple University (Temple or TU) is a public state-related research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1884 by the Baptist minister Russell Conwell and his congregation Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia then called Ba ...
. There he studied with
Italo Scanga
Italo Scanga (June 6, 1932 - July 7, 2001), an Italy, Italian-born List of American artists, American artist, was known for his sculptures, prints and, paintings, mostly created from found objects.
Career
Italo Scanga was an innovative neo-Dadais ...
, who introduced him to former students and friends, including
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
Life and work ...
,
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933 – November 29, 1996) was an American Minimalism, minimalist artist famous for creating sculpture, sculptural objects and installations from commercially available Fluorescent lamp, fluorescent light fixtures.
Earl ...
,
Sol LeWitt
Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including conceptual art and minimalism.
LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he pref ...
, and
Marcia Tucker
Marcia Tucker (born Marcia Silverman; April 11, 1940 – October 17, 2006)Smith, Roberta ''The New York Times'' (October 19, 2006), Retrieved 23 November 2014. was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New M ...
, then a curator at the
Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...
. Marcia Tucker introduced his work to Athena Spear, a curator at the
Allen Memorial Art Museum
The Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is an art museum located in Oberlin, Ohio, and it is run by Oberlin College. Founded in 1917, the collection contains over 15,000 works of art.
Overview
The AMAM is primarily a teaching museum and is aimed at ...
in
Oberlin, Ohio
Oberlin is a city in Lorain County, Ohio, United States, 31 miles southwest of Cleveland. Oberlin is the home of Oberlin College, a liberal arts college and music conservatory with approximately 3,000 students.
The town is the birthplace of the ...
, who included his work in “Art in the Mind” (1970), the first conceptual art exhibition in the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
.
He moved from
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
to
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
in the summer of 1970 and lived for a time on a sailboat off
City Island. He was one of the artists (along with
Gordon Matta Clark, Rafi Ferrer, Barry Le Va, Jeffery Lew, Bill Bollinger, and
Alan Saret
Alan Saret (born 1944, New York City) is an American sculptor, draftsman, and installation artist, best known for his Postminimalism wire sculptures and drawings. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Education
Saret graduated from Cornell Universi ...
) who organized the first exhibition of the legendary gallery 112 Greene Street Workshop in
SoHo
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century.
The area was develop ...
in October 1970. In the fall of 1970 he met
Louise Bourgeois
Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (; 25 December 191131 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a varie ...
, who was also working at 112 Greene Street;
Vito Acconci
Vito Acconci (, ; January 24, 1940 – April 27, 2017) was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational p ...
; and
Dennis Oppenheim
Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer. Dennis Oppenheim's early artistic practice is an epistemological questioning about the natu ...
, who became a lifelong friend. He married Deirdre Williams, a costume designer for films in 1980. They divorced in 1981. He married Laurie Johenning, a sculptor, in 1986. They have two sons, Tristan and Liam, and live in New York City.
Work
![Oscar 2010 cibachrome-photograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Oscar_2010_cibachrome-photograph.jpg)
Beckley went on to exhibit with several European and American Galleries that showed conceptual art, photography, and texts. These included an exhibition with
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary Germa ...
at the
Rudolf Zwirner Gallery (
Cologne
Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western States of Germany, state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the List of cities in Germany by population, fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 m ...
, 1972), the
Konrad Fischer Gallery (
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf ( , , ; often in English sources; Low Franconian and Ripuarian: ''Düsseldörp'' ; archaic nl, Dusseldorp ) is the capital city of North Rhine-Westphalia, the most populous state of Germany. It is the second-largest city in th ...
, 1972), the Nigel Greenwood Gallery (
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, 1972), the John Gibson Gallery (New York, 1973), the
Yvon Lambert Gallery
Yvon Lambert Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in Paris founded by Yvon Lambert in 1966.
History
In 1966, Yvon Lambert opened his first gallery on the rue de L'Échaudé in Paris, France where he began to exhibit American artists. He showed fo ...
(
Paris
Paris () is the capital and most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), making it the 30th most densely populated city in the world in 2020. S ...
, 1974), and Galerie Hans Mayer, which has represented his work in Europe since 1975. He exhibited at the
Paris Biennale
The ''Biennale de Paris'' (English: Paris Biennale) is a noted French art festival.
History
The 'Biennale de Paris' was launched by Raymond Cogniat in 1959 and set up by André Malraux as he was Minister of Culture to present an overview of young ...
in 1973; the
Venice Biennale
The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...
in 1975; at
Documenta
''documenta'' is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
The ''documenta'' was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultura ...
in
Kassel
Kassel (; in Germany, spelled Cassel until 1926) is a city on the Fulda River in northern Hesse, Germany. It is the administrative seat of the Regierungsbezirk Kassel and the district of the same name and had 201,048 inhabitants in December 2020 ...
, Germany, in 1976; and in the
Whitney Biennial
The Whitney Biennial is a biennial exhibition of contemporary American art, typically by young and lesser known artists, on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, United States. The event began as an annual exhibition in ...
in 1979. The
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
showed his works in its Projects Room in 1979.
During the early seventies Beckley was part of a loose-knit group of conceptual artists that used images and fictional texts in a form that came to be known as Narrative Art. The art dealer John Gibson organized the first group exhibition of these artists in 1973. It included David Askevald,
John Baldessari
John Anthony Baldessari (June 17, 1931 – January 2, 2020) was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Initially a painter, ...
,
Peter Hutchinson
Peter Hutchinson (born December 17, 1949) is an Politics of the United States, American politician, businessperson, businessman and philanthropy, philanthropy executive from the U.S. state of Minnesota. He ran as the Independence Party of Minnes ...
, Jean Le Gac, Italo Scanga,
David Tremlett
David Tremlett (born 13 February 1945 in St Austell, Cornwall) is an English/Swiss sculptor, installation artist and photographer. He lives and works in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, England. He is married to Laure Genillard who runs an art space in Lo ...
,
Ger van Elk, and
William Wegman. Several Museum shows of this narrative work followed, including “Narrational Imagery: Beckley, Ruscha, Warhol” organized by
Sam Hunter Sam Hunter may refer to:
People
*Sam Hunter (art historian) (1923–2014), American historian of modern art
* Sam Hunter (cartoonist) (1858–1939), Canadian cartoonist
* Samuel Hunter (gymnast) (born 1988), British male artistic gymnast
* Samuel D ...
, at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
; and “American Narrative/Story Art: 1967–1977” at the
Contemporary Arts Museum
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston is a not-for-profit institution in the Museum District, Houston, Texas, founded in 1948,
dedicated to presenting contemporary art to the public.
As a non-collecting museum, it strives to provide a forum for visual ...
in Houston.
In the early seventies Beckley escaped from the black, white, and gray tonalities of early conceptualism. With his color photographs and references to advertising images, he influenced artists of the so-called Picture Generation like
Richard Prince
Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer. In the mid-1970s, Prince made drawings and painterly collages that he has since disowned. His image, ''Untitled (Cowboy)'', a rephotographing of a photograph by Sam Abell and ...
and
Jeff Koons
Jeffrey Lynn Koons (; born January 21, 1955) is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror- finish su ...
, whom he met at the above-mentioned Projects Room exhibition of color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. From glimpses of himself and his obsessions, he assembled enigmatic works in which modular form and its permutations sometimes read as the story of a sexual relationship or as a baffling involuted image of sexuality itself.
[Carter Ratcliff, Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965–1975, Allworth Press and the School of Visual Arts, 2000.]
Recent exhibitions include a 2008 show of works from 1971–73, among them his Silent Ping Pong Tables and Short Stories for Popsicles (both 1971), at Chelsea Space (London) in conjunction with the Tate gallery; a 2010 retrospective exhibition titled “Etcetera” at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York; and an exhibition of abstract color photographs at Galerie Hans Mayer, Düsseldorf, in September 2010, and 2014, and exhibitions at Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, 2014, 2016 and 2018; Studio Trisorio, Naples, 2016; Studio G7, Bologna; 2018; The University of the Arts, Philadelphia, 2018; and a solo show at Frieze, New York, 2018.
Collections
His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum; the
Guggenheim Museum
The Guggenheim Museums are a group of museums in different parts of the world established (or proposed to be established) by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.
Museums in this group include:
Locations
Americas
* The Solomon R. Guggenhei ...
, New York; the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...
,
Washington D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
; the Tate Modern, London; the Daimler Collection in
Stuttgart
Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the ...
; Sammlung Hoffman in Berlin; and in the private collections of the Morton Neumann Family, Jeff Koons, and Sol LeWitt.
Academe
In the nineties Beckley edited ''Aesthetics Today'', a series of books for the School of Visual Arts and Allworth Press. This included, among other books, Thomas McEvilliey’s ''Shape of Ancient Thought'', Robert C. Morgan’s ''The End of the Art World'', and Beckley’s anthologies ''Uncontrollable Beauty'' and ''Sticky Sublime''. In 2018 he spoke on his work at The University of Bologna, and he wrote a chapter for Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime, published by Routledge Press in 2018. He has taught semiotics at the School of Visual Arts since 1970. Former students include
John von Bergen
John von Bergen is an American visual artist. His work has been exhibited and collected widely in Europe, South America and in The United States.
Personal background
While he was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, von Bergen moved to New York Ci ...
,
Mark Dion
Mark Dion (born August 28, 1961) is an American conceptual artist best known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. His work examines the manner in which prevalent ideologies and institutions influence our understanding ...
and
Keith Haring
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his wor ...
.
References
External links
Official site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beckley, Bill
1946 births
Living people
American conceptual artists
Artists from Pennsylvania
Temple University Tyler School of Art alumni
People from Hamburg, Pennsylvania