Born in 1930 in Council Bluffs, Iowa, William Bailey received his BFA in 1955 and his MFA in 1957 from Yale University School of Art. Later on, he became a Kingman Brewster Professor of Art at Yale from 1979 to 1995. His numerous awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965 and an invitation in 1992 to serve on the National Council on the Arts -- making him a part of a group of artists, arts administrators, and patrons appointed by the President to advise the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. He has shown internationally, including at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco, Galerie Claude Bernard in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Kaoshiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan. His work is in the collections of many university museums, including Michigan, Duke, and Yale, and other museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen, West Germany, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is represented in New York by the Robert Miller Gallery.
