William Weege
Birth Date: November 28, 1935
Death Date: November 2, 2020
Artist Gallery
William Weege was a groundbreaking printmaker who explored unconventional printmaking processes, adding paint, collage, handmade paper, and sewn elements to his printed surfaces. He continually pushed the technical limits of printmaking through working and reworking its layers. Weege was born in Milwaukee in 1935 and grew up in Port Washington, where his father was a mechanical engineer. This influenced Weege to study engineering and city planning, first at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and then at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Later employed at a commercial printing firm, he found he was increasingly adept at advanced photo printing, which inspired him to return to UW–Madison for his MFA in printmaking. During the late 1960s, protests against the Vietnam War at the UW–Madison campus prompted Weege to create political posters in support, which became so popular that they were frequently stolen as soon as he put them up. Weege decided to further explore this theme through a series of 25 provocative prints titled “Peace is Patriotic” for his MFA thesis. On a class trip to New York with his professor, satirical printmaker Warrington Colescott, Weege sold the entire “Peace Is Patriotic” series to the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Museum of Modern Art, a major accomplishment for an artist just at the start of his career. In 1970, Weege was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy, where he headed an experimental printmaking workshop. When he returned a year later, he was offered a position in UW–Madison’s Art Department, where he taught until his retirement in 1999. In 1971, the same year he began teaching, Weege founded Off Jones Road Press at his Wisconsin studio. He invited nationally recognized artists, including Alan Shields and Sam Gilliam, to collaborate on prints every summer, employing graduate students to assist in the process. Off Jones Road Press was irreverent and uniquely experimental — the studio was located in a barn, and occasionally ink was applied to prints with shotguns instead of rollers. The 1970s were a time of significant artistic change for Weege, when his style shifted from provocative and graphic to abstract as a result of criticism over his use of nude photos of women and bold, confrontational titles. He began making his own paper and utilized abstraction for provocative themes so they couldn’t readily be identified. Weege was an early practitioner in the revival of handmade paper, which started in the 1960s, and the natural elements became part of his papermaking process. He would set his homemade paper outside to dry, where it was exposed to elements like rain and the happenstance of his dogs trampling it. He also worked outdoors, again inviting the elements to participate in his art. He was an active supporter of natural conservation, spending over thirty years restoring the native prairie and rare oak barrens at his property in Wisconsin — Rattlesnake Ridge, even donating 50 acres of land to a nature preserve. Weege’s career pinnacled in 1970 and 1971, when his art was exhibited at the World’s Fair in Japan, the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Throughout his career, his close working relationship with artists Sam Gilliam and Alan Fields spanned over fifty years. In the spirit of collaboration, in 1987, Weege founded Tandem Press at UW-Madison, a printmaking studio and fine art press meant to provide students with access to creative opportunities and visiting artists. At Tandem Press, Weege and his collaborators pushed American printmaking into new realms. Today, the press brings artists from all over the world to Wisconsin to push the boundaries of printmaking alongside its students and has produced prints by renowned artists such as Jim Dine, Mickalene Thomas, and Juane Quick-to-See Smith, continuing Weege’s legacy and vision by establishing itself as a leader of experimentation and new developments in the field of printmaking. Weege's work can be found in many museum collections throughout the United States, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.