Untitled

This untitled oil on paper belongs to a series of paintings and drawings William Wiley produced in 1961-62 called Columbus Rerouted. Created when Wiley was completing his MFA degree at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco, the series of works resulted from Wiley’s personal musings about Columbus Avenue, a major city thoroughfare then undergoing reconstruction, which had forced him to find an alternate route to school. He began to consider what would have happened if the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus had been similarly rerouted during his voyage to the New World (Western Hemisphere) and had not landed on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola in 1492.