William Wegman

American, b. 1943

Birth-PlaceHolyoke, MA

BiographyWilliam Wegman earned his BFA in painting at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1965 and graduated from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1967 with an MFA in painting and printmaking. After teaching at various universities, Wegman took a keen interest in areas other than painting, including photography and video art. In the early 1970s, Wegman acquired Man Ray, the dog with whom he developed a twelve-year collaboration and who served as a model in his photographs and videos. From that point on, dogs became the central figures of Wegman's works and today comprise a major portion of his photography.

EXTENDED BIO
William Wegman (born December 2, 1943) is an artist best known for creating series of compositions involving dogs, primarily his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses.[1] Wegman reportedly originally intended to pursue a career as a painter. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Massachusetts College of Art in 1965 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1967.

While teaching at California State University, Long Beach, he acquired the first and most famous of the dogs he photographed, a Weimaraner he named Man Ray (after the artist and photographer). Man Ray later became so popular that the Village Voice named him "Man of the Year" in 1982. He named a subsequent dog Fay Ray (a play on the name of actress Fay Wray).

On January 29, 1992, Wegman appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and showed a video clip of Dog Duet, a short which he made in 1975 featuring Man Ray and another dog slowly and mysteriously peering around. Wegman explained that he had created the video by moving a tennis ball around, off-camera, thus capturing the dogs' attention [1]. The same year, he did 3 network ID's for Nickelodeon starring the dogs on pedestals.

William Wegman was artist-in-residence at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in spring 2007 where his work featured on campus in the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Wegman has also been an artist in residence at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts where his Circus series was created with the College's 20x24 inch Polaroid camera. He received the College's Distinguished Alumni Award in 1987.

Wegman appeared on The Colbert Report in 2010.

Wegman is the author of numerous books for children, including the New York Times bestseller 'Puppies.' His latest children's book, 'Flo & Wendell,' is published with Dial Books for Young Readers. Wegman's photos are well respected in the art world, are held in permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His photos and videos have also been a popular success, and have appeared in books, advertisements, films, as well as on television programs like Sesame Street and Saturday Night Live. In 2006, Wegman's work was featured in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, and the Addison Gallery of American Art. The Brooklyn Museum explored 40 years of Wegman’s work in all media in the 2006 retrospective William Wegman: Funny/Strange.[2] The exhibition also ran at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2007.

William Wegman is represented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles, CA and Sperone/Westwater in New York, NY

REFERENCES
Henry Bond, "Wegman's Ritual: William Wegman in London," Creative Camera, Issue 307, December–January 1991, p. 44.
Jump up ^ William Wegman Retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, ARTINFO, May 28, 2006, retrieved 2008-04-23
Jump up ^ Kristen Baldwin "Dressed to the Canines" Entertainment Weekly 23 Feb, 1996.

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