William Wareham
William Wareham creates series of works with a strong common thread. From his earliest years as a fine art student at UC Berkeley in the late sixties, where Wareham used military surplus material in his sculpture, his concern with the medium and the technique is apparent. Through that search, he achieves some of the most consistently accomplished compositions in contemporary sculpture.
Wareham was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts in 1974 and the Eisner Prize for sculpture at UC Berkeley in 1968 and 1969. In 1999, he was awarded an artist residency at Djerassi. He was an assistant to Peter Volkos for five years and Mark Di Suvero for six. His other influences can be traced to Anthony Caro and David Smith.
Since his stint as the first Artist in Residence at the Norcal Solid Waste Systems facility in 1990, where he set up the studio and wrote the safety manual, Wareham has been using recycled steel as the primary source for his sculpture, but he goes far beyond what most artists do with recycled materials these days. It is the "pre-used history that the material inherently holds", he says, that inspires him. "These worn-out metal things will continue to have a life by gathering, refocusing and rejoining into a collective other life". Wareham has full control of the new compositions, but they also appear to have an uncanny life of their own, a power as new objects that hold the key to the life of the old: it seems that the scrap metal was always meant to be an element of the new sculpture in the hands of the artist.
He has exhibited widely throughout California, including solo exhibits at the Oakland Museum Sculpture Court and the Pacific Heritage Museum in San Francisco, and in Nevada, Hawaii, Illinois and New Jersey. Whether creating massive works for corporate or estate collections or human scale sculpture, unique tables, benches and chairs, or even pedestal size- often
kinetic- pieces, Wareham remains true to his inner drive to capture the viewer's consciousness through his powerful abstract sculpture.
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