William Charles Harrington was an American painter, sculptor and collage artist whose muscular, potent and often soaring work embodies the myriad contradictions, ironies and perennial hopefulness of life in the modern world.
A Vietnam-era army veteran having served in the renown Combat Artist Team, Harrington witnessed first-hand the horror and tragedy of war, and upon his return as a young man to the United States dedicated his life to challenging and illuminating the raw pursuit of political power and money through his art.
Using structures of wood, iron steel and found objects, Harrington’s sometimes massive sculptures elicit the skeletons of gigantic unknown beasts or winged seraphim that capture a sense of awe and uneasiness and a strictly American quality of wildness and unpredictability.
Interweaving symbols and motifs of American power and politics with sometimes mysterious, even mystical shapes and structures gives the artist’s materially grounded sculptures an often unearthly or dreamlike quality that is interpretive, prophetic and profound. Additionally, Harrington’s colorful political wall-art utilizes print, paint and black humor to upend the commercialism and political narcissism of our time.
In the spirit of Diego Rivera, Max Ernst and Hannah Hoch, the artist’s riveting, sometimes grotesque, but always unflinching work embodies a deeply emotional and compositionally exquisite insight into both the darkness and hope of the human experience, giving viewers a visual connection to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.
William Harrington was born June 20, 1942 on the Southside of Chicago to an Italian mother and Irish father. His childhood in these working-class neighborhoods gave him a sense of the contradictions of the American Dream. A gifted artist, he received a scholarship to the University of Illinois where he graduated with a BFA, and later earned a MFA at the University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School.
Working in the summers for kinetic artist George Rickey to help construct the kinetic “useless machines” Rickey was known for, Harrington recognized and embraced the new directions and possibilities of American Art.
Shortly after his graduation from the Hartford Art School and his marriage to his wife Diana, Harrington was drafted into the US Army.
Upon graduation from Officers Candidate School and serving in a logistics command in Germany, in 1967 Harrington was chosen to lead the U.S. Army Combat Artist Team VII in Vietnam documenting through art the many bloody and sometimes horrific deployments of US soldiers throughout regions of Vietnam. His experience in the jungles and rice fields of Vietnam profoundly influenced his life’s work.
Stateside, Harrington made and taught art at Iowa State and the University of Indiana, never flinching to the day of his death in speaking truth to power and showing that even amidst brutality and destruction, beauty can still find a foothold.
Harrington has published several books of his collage art and has been shown in galleries throughout New England, the Southern United States and Chicago. His highly praised work is found in collections internationally and in Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
