1. William Conger was born on 1937 and 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.
William Conger 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.
William Conger has shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Krannert Art Museum, and Jonson Museum, and in numerous solo exhibitions in Chicago and beyond.
William Conger's work has been discussed in national publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, and ARTnews, and major dailies including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.
William Conger 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.
William Conger was born in Dixon, Illinois and raised in Evanston and Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood.
William Conger was exposed to art early in life, including trips with his mother, an amateur painter, to the Art Institute of Chicago and studies at its junior school.
William Conger studied with professor Seymour Rosofsky, returned to figurative work for a time, and earned an MFA in 1966.
William Conger exhibited steadily in the Midwest and in solo shows at the Douglas Kenyon, Zaks, and Roy Boyd galleries in Chicago.
William Conger continues to work and live in Chicago, with his wife Kathleen.
William Conger's work is rooted in the figural abstraction of artists like Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, and pre-war Americans Jonson and Arthur Dove.
Morrison soon noted William Conger's growing assurance with color and composition, and an architectural turn employing frame-like apertures to contain his fractured, lively forms in a state of stained-glass-window equilibrium.
William Conger captured the vitality, visual clutter and shifting emotional flux of spectacle, schoolyard and early city in exuberantly colored paintings like City on the Make or Trolley, whose puzzle-like compositions of geometric and sinuous shapes, are enlivened and held together by bold, undulating lines.
Intermittently, throughout his career, William Conger has made and exhibited small paper and wood collages and gouache paintings.
William Conger has written about abstract painting, drawing, art theory, education, and the work of Delacroix, Manet, Monet, and Louise Nevelson.
William Conger applies linguist Roy Harris's integrationism to abstract art, noting his inclusion of biomechanical, macrosocial and circumstantial features in the communication process.
William Conger was a contributor and editor until it ceased in 1991.
William Conger began a forty-year career in education at Rock Valley College.
In 1971, William Conger was appointed as chair of the Department of Art and Art History at DePaul University.
William Conger served there until 1984, when Northwestern University's Department of Art Theory and Practice hired him on the recommendation of Imagist painter Ed Paschke.
When Paschke died in 2004, William Conger eulogized him at the Art Institute and Northwestern.
William Conger's 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.
William Conger's teaching approach was open, but traditional in terms of his belief in studio practice.
William Conger 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.
William Conger's art is represented in numerous public and private collections, including those of the: Art Institute of Chicago, Georgia Museum of Art, MCA, Illinois State Museum, McCormick Place, Art Museum of West Virginia University, Smart Museum of Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Mitchell Museum, and Eli and Edythe Broad, among many.
William Conger has been recognized with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, City of Chicago Public Commissions, inclusion in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and Illinois Arts Council grants.