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William Conger (born 1937) is a Chicago-based, American painter and educator, known for a dynamic, subjective style of abstraction descended from Kandinsky, which consciously employs illogical, illusionistic space and light and ambiguous forms that evoke metaphorical associations.Ostrow, Saul, "William Conger's Metaphysics," catalog essay, New York: Vendome Gallery, 2014.Karabenick, Julie. "An Interview with Artist William Conger," William Conger: Paintings 1958–2008, Chicago: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 2009, p.24–45. He is a member of the "Allusive Abstractionists," an informal group of Chicago painters self-named in 1981, whose paradoxical styles countered the reductive minimalism that dominated post-1960s art.Farr, Margaret. "William Conger," Art in Chicago 1945-1995. Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 247. Retrieved May 1, 2018. In 1982, critic Mary Mathews Gedo hailed them as "prescient prophets of the new style of abstraction" that flowered in the 1980s.Gedo, Mary Mathews. "Abstraction as Metaphor: The Evocative Imagery of William Conger, Richard Loving, Frank Piatek, Miyoko Ito", Arts Magazine, p. 112-117, 1982. In his essay for Conger's fifty-year career retrospective, Donald Kuspit called Conger art-historically daring for forging a path of subjective abstraction after minimalism had allegedly purged painting of an inner life.Kuspit, Donald. "Always Abstractly True to Himself: William Conger's Paintings," William Conger: Paintings 1958–2008, Chicago: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 2009, p.6–23. Despite being abstract, his work has a strong connection to Chicago's urban, lakeside geography and displays idiosyncratic variations of tendencies identified with Chicago Imagists art.Brunetti, John. "William Conger: Iron Heart City," catalogue essay, Chicago: Roy Boyd Gallery, September, 2002, p. 3–9. A hallmark of Conger's career has been his enduring capacity for improvisation and discovery within self-prescribed stylistic limits.Brooke-Schliefer, Kristin. "William Conger," ARTNews, December 2000, p. 163.Bonesteel, Michael. "William Conger," Art in America, November 1985, p, 169-71.
Conger has shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), the Krannert Art Museum, and Jonson Museum, and in numerous solo exhibitions in Chicago and beyond. His work has been discussed in national publications such as Artforum,Morrison, C.L. "William Conger," ArtForum, Summer, 1978, p. 79. Art in America,Nance, Kevin. "William Conger at Roy Boyd Gallery," Art in America, December 2007, p, 164. Arts Magazine,Gedo, Mary. "The Secret Idol...," Arts Magazine, December 1981, p. 116-24. and ARTnews,Moser, Charlotte. "William Conger," ArtNews, September, 1985, p. 119-120. and major dailiesSchulze, Franz. "William Conger," Chicago Sun-Times, April 7, 1978, p. 76. including the Chicago TribuneArtner, Alan. "William Conger," Chicago Tribune, Dec. 21, 1975.Artner, Alan. "William Conger keeps it fresh," Chicago Tribune, March 23, 2001, Section C, p. 32. and Los Angeles Times.Wilson, W. "Chicago Connection," Los Angeles Times, Feb. 20, 1977, p. 78. He has been recognized by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, City of Chicago Public Commissions, inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and purchases by public and private collections.Smithsonian Archives of American Art. William F. Conger papers, Retrieved May 1, 2018. In addition to his art career, Conger has taught and chaired art departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University, and written about art.
At UNM, Conger studied under Raymond Jonson—founder of the Transcendental Painting Group—Elaine de Kooning, and sculptor Robert Mallary. Jonson and de Kooning were key influences, as were the romantic southwestern landscape and imagery, including Native American pottery. After earning a BFA in 1960, Conger returned to Chicago, painted in a shared studio with artist Robert Lewis, and found advertising work with Montgomery Ward and Skil Power Tools. He soon met his future wife, Kathleen—they married in 1964—and returned to school to pursue art full time, choosing the University of Chicago. He studied with professor Seymour Rosofsky, returned to figurative work for a time, and earned an MFA in 1966.
After graduating, Conger began a distinguished education career, initially at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Illinois, and later as professor and chair of art departments at DePaul University and Northwestern University.Conger, William. William Conger official website, CV. Retrieved May 1, 2018. He exhibited steadily in the Midwest and in solo shows at the Douglas Kenyon (1974–6), Zaks (1978–1983), and Roy Boyd (1985–2012) galleries in Chicago. He has since been represented by Zolla/Lieberman (Chicago) and Bruno David (St. Louis). Key shows he was in include: AIC's "Chicago and Vicinity" surveys (several, 1963–1985),The Art Institute of Chicago. Sixty-sixth Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, catalogue, 1963. Retrieved May 1, 2018. the MCA's "Abstract Art in Chicago" (1976) and "Art in Chicago 1945-95" (1996–7), "Chicago, Some Other Traditions" (traveling, 1983–6), and "The Chicago Connection" (traveling, 1976–7). Conger continues to work and live in Chicago, with his wife Kathleen. They have two daughters, Sarah and Clarisa, and five grandchildren.
Critic Saul Ostrow described Conger's method as "fluctuating between the rational, the associative, and the subjective." Although non-representational, his work connects to the everyday world through signifiers and titles he lets emerge during the painting process, which evoke what he calls "'as if' places and stories" without depicting any specific one.Heinz, Jack. "Conger's Intuition," William Conger: This/That, catalogue essay, St. Louis: Bruno David Gallery, 2017. He does so based on his contention that abstract work can never be completely non-referential—that intentionally or not, all art generates meaning beyond itself. For Donald Kuspit, the process yields an aesthetically resonant, "spontaneous means of introspection, even self-analysis" that invites psychological unpacking.
In Chicago, however, all of this placed Conger on the "wrong" side of two largely critic-fueled battles. First, local identification with the increasingly famous, representational Chicago Imagists often relegated abstract work to comparative obscurity.Adrian, Dennis. "Private Treasures, Public Spirit,". Art in Chicago 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Warren, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996, p. 78. Retrieved May 1, 2018.Gedo, Mary Mathews. "Interconnections: A Study of Chicago Style Relationships in Painting," Arts Magazine, September 1983, p. 92-97. Secondly, minimalism—represented by the ideas of Clement Greenberg and work of Frank Stella—dominated post-1960s abstraction. Characterized by formal regularity, geometricity, flat space and non-referentiality, minimalism had, in Kuspit's words, purged the subjective roots of abstraction and reduced it "to an emotional vacuum uninhabited by any self."
Conger resisted. Although an abstractionist, he felt a personal kinship with the Imagists, and little affinity for the limiting strictures of Greenbergian minimalism. His blend of ambiguous forms and atmosphere, oblique referentiality, and metaphorical allusions to art, history and geography occupied a unique place where abstraction and representation coalesced, bridging the groups.Noell, Denise. "William Conger: The Gouache Paintings," catalogue essay, Charleston, Illinois: Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, July, 2014.Silverman, Lanny. "Introduction," William Conger: Paintings 1958–2008, Chicago: City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, 2009, p.3. With like-minded, but visually diverse Chicago painters Miyoko Ito, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek, Conger formed the informal "Allusive Abstractionists" in 1981, to spark dialogue and make space for a wider conception of abstraction. Critics have identified elements in their art—idiosyncratic "languages," graduated light, organic forms, contradictory space and meticulously crafted surfaces—relating them to the Imagists, formally, if not in tone.
Conger's work of the 1980s more overtly referenced the natural and urban worlds. Passages of brushwork and modeling suggested lake, sky, and horizons behind quasi-floral forms that clashed and overlapped in illusionistic space. He explained, "My aim was to suggest a furious condition of nature, something swift, terrifying, and yet beautiful."Conger, William. Artist statement, Abstract/Symbol/Image, catalogue essay, Illinois Arts Council Travel Exhibition, 1984. In works like the large-scale Broadway—referring not to Manhattan, but to the bustling Chicago thoroughfare Conger grew up near—or South Beach (both 1985), he evoked, in his words, "Chicago's jazzy materialism, sensuality, and tension." In the 1990s, Conger pushed naturalistic and geometric elements—like modeled asteroid-like shapes or inexplicable rectangles, circles and orbs—further to create otherworldly, sometimes metallic-colored landscapes glimpsed in fragments between shapes.Holg, Garrett. "William Conger at Roy Boyd", ArtNews, January, 1995, p. 169.
With his "Circus" (1997–8), "Childhood" (2000), and "Iron Heart City" (2002) series came a new dynamism, a formal playfulness, and a lighter mood. He captured the vitality, visual clutter and shifting emotional flux of spectacle, schoolyard and early city in exuberantly colored paintings like City on the Make (2001) or Trolley (2007), whose puzzle-like compositions of geometric and sinuous shapes, are enlivened and held together by bold, undulating lines. Critics, and Conger, likened these works to a circus act, juggling unresolved tensions between flat and illusory space, compositional thrust and counter-thrust, and off-key color relationships that ARTnews said came together with an "uncanny sense of balance."
Intermittently, throughout his career, Conger has made and exhibited small paper and wood collages and gouache paintings. In 2010, he began showing very small gouache paintings—looser, immediate works that feature vital, cross-hatched strokes and serve as a form of experimentation. These works, and later paintings like Say When (2017), display a shift toward slightly shallower space and more geometric forms.
His essay in Linguistic Sciences, "Abstract Painting and Integrationist Linguistics" (2011), proposed the idea that visual form and language are inherently interdependent and have been artificially and wrongly separated by art practice and discourse. He applies linguist Roy Harris's integrationism to abstract art, noting his inclusion of (extra-linguistic) biomechanical, macrosocial and circumstantial features in the communication process.Conger, William. "Abstract Painting and Integrationist Linguistics", Linguistic Sciences, Vol. 23, Issue 4, 2011, p. 654–661. July.
Greenberg's brilliant criticism may have led to the truth of what painting is, but that flat truth turned out to be less interesting than the lies of illusionism. ... The most fundamental feature of painting is not flatness, but what flatness allows—a presentation of pictorial space and its capacity to present filled or void images as being on the same plane and in the same place, all at once, and to show time passing without motion. The paradoxical nature of pictorial space is the subject of abstract painting; its content is our feeling and experience.Conger, William. "Abstract Painting: Fact, Fiction, Paradox," Chicago/Art/Write, Vol 1, No. 2, August, 1987.
Chicago/Art/Write ran into trouble with its 1991 "Difficult Art" issue, which provided a forum for discussing two controversial local shows: a graphic performance by artist Joy Poe and an SAIC exhibition featuring an American flag on the floor, which viewers stepped on to participate.Schmidt, William E. “Disputed exhibit of flag is ended,” New York Times, March 17, 1989. Retrieved May 1, 2018.Isaacs, Deanna. “Women on the Edge/Location, Location, Location,” Chicago Reader, January 30, 2003. Retrieved May 1, 2018. Both sparked scandal—the city shut the latter show down—and SAIC, wishing to avoid reigniting controversy, shut down the publication. All issues were confiscated, and few still exist.
Conger retired as Professor Emeritus in 2006. His legacy includes the appointments of artists Judy Ledgerwood and Jean Dunning as professors, and accomplished former students Michelle Grabner, Anna Kunz, John Sabraw, Joan Backes, Maria Tomasula, Chris Cosnowski and Chris Kahler. Conger's teaching approach was open, but traditional in terms of his belief in studio practice. He also encouraged artists to be literate, well-informed readers, writers and thinkers, and initiated use of the GRE standardized exam as part of the studio admissions process, seeking students who took scholarship seriously.
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