Now Showing

William T. Wiley. The fall opener at the Center for Visual Art in LoDo is William T. Wiley: 60 Works for 60 Years.The exhibit was organized by Wiley himself, who selected sixty prints from the collection of the Belger Arts Center in Kansas City to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Obviously the show's been kicking around for a while, because Wiley's actually close to seventy (he turned sixty in 1997). Wiley came of artistic age in the early 1960s and was part of a generation of San Francisco-area artists who embraced what is today called "funk," an offshoot of pop art. He almost immediately found fame, and his pieces were acquired by many American museums over the years, including the Denver Art Museum, which owns, among other things, a major installation. Like the rest of that Bay Area crowd, many of whom also got famous, Wiley combined an array of seemingly contradictory influences, including expressionism, figural abstraction, pop and conceptualism. His work, which has greatly influenced younger artists, is almost always clever -- and sometimes even downright funny, as revealed by this very large show. Through October 16 at the Center for Visual Art, 1734 Wazee Street, 303-294-5207.