The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) is delighted to share Unexpected Wegman with the community, an exhibition of forty-five William Wegman works from SMoCA’s collection. Curated by associate curator Cassandra Coblentz, the exhibition builds on the artist’s wide recognition for his photographic portraits of Weimaraner dogs and reveals an array of many other whimsically portrayed subjects in a diverse range of media and forms—from prints, to flipbooks, to video.

The majority of the show is comprised of facile prints Wegman made with the Segura Publishing Company beginning in 1985 and continuing through their most recent collaboration in 2002. Though the artist has been showing with Lisa Sette Gallery since 1986, Unexpected Wegman will be the first museum exhibition to focus on Wegman’s work in the Valley. The works included in SMoCA’s exhibition feature unexpected, light-hearted renderings of the artist’s studio, quirky narratives and an array of animals that offer an unusual window into this important conceptual artist’s playful and questioning thinking. Wegman’s clever sense of word play is abundant in these pieces as well as his interest in sports and nature.

Unexpected Wegman will include some of the more familiar portraits of Wegman’s beloved Weimaraners, his drawings on photographs, as well as a selection of the artist’s work in video. There will be a special resource lounge area of the gallery with interactive educational activities. In addition,

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. By the early 70s, Wegman began using his first Weimaraner subject named Man Ray in his work, which propelled Wegman’s art into museums and galleries internationally. In more recent times, several Wegman retrospectives have been created, including the major touring exhibition "Funney/Strange," which opened at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2006. The artist currently lives in New York and Maine where he continues to work in a wide variety of media.

July 18, 2009-
January 24, 2010

Virginia Ullman Gallery, SMoCA