NCWC News: Wiili’s Loose Pages on View at North Carolina Wesleyan College’s Four Sisters Gallery

Current News News Archive Contact: publicrelations@ncwc.edu (252) 985-5141

December 8, 2005

Wiili’s Loose Pages on View at North Carolina Wesleyan College’s

Four Sisters Gallery

Rocky Mount, N.C.—On view in North Carolina Wesleyan College’s Four Sisters Gallery of Self-Taught Visionary Art is an exhibition titled "Wiili’s Loose Pages." The exhibit will continue through March 2006.

William H. Armstrong a.k.a. Wiili was a prolific artist and writer until the day he died at age 47 on December 23, 2003. Over a brief few years, 1993-1996, his Raleigh art dealer collected nearly one thousand odd pages of sketches, correspondence, poems, musings, and cartoons from Wiili. The exhibition at Wesleyan is a selection of drawings and hand- written pages that reveal the breadth of his God-given genius, his shifting outlook from the inside looking out, and an outrageous sense of humor from the outside looking in…and the alienation he experienced as an "outsider."

A gifted poet, an experienced observer, and an often bizarre visionary, Armstrong drew pictures in a wide variety of media and wrote his commentaries on life in verse and rambling narratives. Diagnosed manic–depressive, clinically called bi-polar, Wiili’s uncontrollable ups and downs were his constant companions, his demons and angels, as he wrestled what life he could from his mental states. Occasionally hospitalized at Dix, he drew for therapy and to recover from unmanageable and alienating depression. When medicated and on the fringe of coping with the world, Wiili’s most soul-searching creativity produced artworks and verse from the sublime to the ridiculous. The pain expressed in his Dix Hospital drawings is haunting. His cartoons can be deceptively simple and hilarious.

The Four Sisters Gallery at Wesleyan specializes in the art of self-taught visionary artists. The gallery is home to the Robert Lynch Collection of Outsider Art with a permanent collection from the greater Coastal Plain. Gallery hours are 9-5 daily and 9-noon Saturdays. Tours are welcome; phone 252-985-5268.

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