Wegman x Hurley Medical
Hurley Medical Center
Pediatric Trauma Center and Burn Unit
About The Project
RxArt is proud to have just completed the installation of 22 photographs by William Wegman at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, MI, our first project in Michigan and second project with the artist. Wegman’s joyful photographs of his Weimaraner dogs and puppies have been installed in the corridors and waiting room of the region’s only Level II Pediatric Trauma Center and Burn Unit. This vital department annually serves over 1,500 individuals – infants to adults – providing full-spectrum care from injury to recovery. These portraits display wit, humor, and tenderness from his first dog, Fay Ray, to her puppies to his current collaborators, Flo and Topper. Puppies follow you down the hallway, while adult dogs atop Eames chairs keep you company in the waiting room. Others perched on cubes wait patiently by your side for the elevator.
RxArt is grateful to Betsee Isenberg and Tom Atencio for their lead support of the Wegman installation at Hurley.
All images courtesy of William Wegman, 1991-2015; Archival dye sublimation onto aluminum produced by Blazing Editions
Videos
About The Artist
William Wegman was born in 1943 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. He received a B.F.A. in painting from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, in 1965 and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Illinois, Champagne-Urbana, in 1967. From 1968 to 1970, he taught at the University of Wisconsin. In the fall of 1970, he moved to Southern California, where he taught for one year at California State College, Long Beach. In 1971, He moved to Santa Monica. By the early 70s, Wegman’s work was exhibited internationally in museums and galleries. In addition to solo shows with Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York, Situation Gallery in London, and Konrad Fisher Gallery in Dusseldorf, his work was included in such seminal exhibitions as “When Attitudes Become Form” and “Documenta V” and regularly featured in Interfunktionen, Artforum and Avalanche magazines.
While he was in Long Beach, Wegman got his dog, a Weimaraner he named Man Ray, and began a long and fruitful collaboration. Man Ray, known in art and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman’s photographs and videotapes. When Man Ray died in 1982, he was named “Man of the Year” by the Village Voice. It was not until 1986 that Wegman got a new dog, Fay Ray and another collaboration began, marked by Wegman’s extensive use of the Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. With the birth of Fay’s litter in 1989, Wegman’s cast grew to include Fay’s offspring — Battina, Crooky, and Chundo — and later, their offspring: Battina’s son Chip in 1995, Chip’s son Bobbin in 1999 and Candy and Bobbin’s daughter Penny in 2004. Out of Wegman’s involvement with this cast of characters grew a series of children’s books inspired by the dogs’ various acting abilities: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, A.B.C., Mother Goose, Farm Days, My Town, Surprise Party, and Chip Wants a Dog. Wegman has also published several books for adults, including Man’s Best Friend, Fashion Photographs, William Wegman 20 x 24, The New York Times Bestseller Puppies, Fay, William Wegman: Paintings and the upcoming Being Human, edited by William Ewing and published by Thames and Hudson fall 2017.
Wegman created film and video works for Saturday Night Live and Nickelodeon, and his video segments for Sesame Street have appeared regularly since 1989. In 1995, Wegman’s film The Hardly Boys was screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Wegman has been commissioned to create images for a wide range of projects, including a fashion campaign for Acne, banners for the Metropolitan Opera, and covers for numerous publications, including The New Yorker and, most recently, Wallpaper. Wegman has appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, The David Letterman Show, and The Colbert Report.
Numerous retrospectives of Wegman’s work have toured Europe, Asia and the United States including: “Wegman’s World,” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis in 1981; “William Wegman: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs, Videotapes,” which opened at the Kunstmuseum, Lucerne in 1990 and traveled to venues across Europe and the United States including the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; “Funny/Strange” which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006 and made its final stop at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus in the fall of 2007 and “Hello Nature” which opened at the Bowdoin Museum of Art in 2012 and traveled to Artipelag in Stockholm, Sweden. Recent museum exhibitions have included touring retrospectives in Japan, Korea, and Spain and numerous gallery exhibitions, including, in 2016, “William Wegman: New and Used Furniture” at Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles; “Good Dogs on Nice Furniture” at Texas Gallery, Houston and “William Wegman: Paintings” at Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York. Being Human is a large-scale survey of over thirty years of Wegman’s photographic work published in the fall of 2017 (Chronicle/Thames and Hudson). The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography is organizing a traveling exhibition inspired by the book. It will open at the “Rencontres d’Arles” this summer, the start of a four-year tour that will include stops in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Dressed and Undressed at Sperone Westwater Gallery and Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
William Wegman lives in New York and Maine, where he continues to paint, draw, make videos, and take photographs with his dogs Flo and Topper.
