I was extremely fortunate, lucky and blessed to have studied with Bill Daley when I was a student at Philadelphia College of Art in the mid-seventies and early eighties. Bill passed about a year ago.

Repost from Nov 10, 2015

William Daley

William Daley is a quintessential artist exemplar of the Contemporary Studio Craft Movement. His experiences reflect the influences of World War II, the rise of university art programs, and the drive to combine tradition, meaning and new technology. The movement was forged out of World War II; Daley served, was shot down and held in a German prisoner of war camp. The first wave of the Movement saw hundreds of new teaching positions created in university craft, art and design programs across the country; Daley spent four decades teaching in a combination of these programs, including industrial design, drawing and ceramics. A common characteristic of the Movement has been a focus on combining traditional crafts, modern art concepts and new techniques; Daley is a master of forming clay skillfully, infusing his forms with meaning and developing new techniques to achieve his vision.

William Daley was born in 1925 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. A strong and supportive family and community encouraged his artistic talent from an early age.

He was intensely affected by school trips to the museums in New York City. At the Museum of Modern Art he communed with works by Calder, Picasso and Brancusi.

Like many young men of his generation he joined the military as the United States entered the conflicts of World War II. Very early in his service he was shot down and spent time in a prisoner of war camp. While he doesn’t speak much of the physical discomforts of his imprisonment, he does note the intense boredom and ensuing mental exhaustion. To escape from that psychological distress Daley read and reread a few philosophy books with a fellow prisoner. The books included the Oxford Guide to Classical Literature and a collection of philosophical essays by William Hazlitt. Being held as a prisoner of war had a major impact on Daley’s philosophy of life, his positive outlook was amplified, rather than quashed by the intense experience. As Ruth Fine quotes in her excellent essay “Whacked Geometry,” the experience helped to form and strengthen his “belief in overcoming resistance with verve and belief in possibility becoming.”1

Upon his return he studied Art Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Art. As was the case during his imprisonment, books and philosophical writings served to open his receptive mind even further, He went on to teach in several art schools but spent the bulk of his teaching career at the Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), where he had a powerful impact on the art world of the region and beyond. A self-described Mud Man, Daley’s pots resonate with references to ancient cultures, philosophy and originality. The words wizard, philosopher, and guru are brought to mind by his presence and his musings on the essential nature of clay as part of earth, and therefore its special ability to convey deep human emotion and meaning. This seriousness is matched by his impish nature and the sparkle in his eye.

Daley’s monumental stoneware vessels are complex, he creates them using combinations of carved forms he has shaped over the years. The pots are not glazed, he wants to celebrate the earthiness of clay. The surfaces have texture from inclusions as well a smooth sheen from oil finish. The viewer yearns to reach out to caress the sensual surfaces. Touching helps connect the viewer to the artist’s ideas, you are drawn into the vessels, through tunnels, into corners, around labyrinths and spirals. Eternal concepts are connected to the present moment through ancient shapes that allow the viewer a moment of peace and meditation as they gaze into the vessel.

Like Rudolf Staffel, Daley has always pushed the boundaries of his material, experimenting to find the perfect clay body and the most effective method to create his large-scale vessels. His work seems at once to be ephemeral and as old as the cosmos. He explores the geometry of ancient architecture, symbology, and the joy of possibilities. Daley himself contains multitudes; he is spiritual and even spritely, while being deeply grounded in the earth: a “Mud Man.”

The facts of Daley’s life line up with many important concepts of Studio Craft and the art world in the mid-to-late 20th century, but it is the spark of his artist’s soul that makes him rise to the forefront of the Studio Craft Movement. William Daley’s skill, concept and spirit of openness characterize the Contemporary Studio Craft Movement from 1946 to the present. He is a towering figure and an exemplar of the Movement.

—Jennifer Zwilling

NOTES

1 Ruth Fine, “Whacked Geometry,” William Daley Ceramic Artist. Schiffer Publications (2013), p. 8.

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by DAN DAILEY

In Memory of William P. Daley, 1925 – 2022

January 21, 2022

William P. Daley was my teacher, my boss, my mentor and friend.

I met Bill in 1964 at the Philadelphia College of Art, where he taught basic design and color to my freshman class section. He was the most challenging, encouraging, entertaining – and confounding – of all teachers I had ever known, or have known since.

Bill’s weekly assignments generated intense work as we competed to impress him, while at the same time exploring concepts of design and color theory that most of us aspiring artists had never considered.

He had a way of presenting his assignments that jolted us into responses that stretched our imaginations and caused us to try all kinds of image-making, materials use, conceptual articulation, art history researching, word puzzling, and rituals of process aimed at bringing ideas to reality. His classes were always stimulating; far beyond the basic assignment-and-critique format.

I remained a student of Bill’s for my entire time at PCA, graduating in 1969. He was my primary teacher as a major in the ceramics program, as one of hundreds of students Bill taught in his span of time there – more than 32 years. We were all profoundly influenced by his attention to us and his ways of conveying a myriad of concepts, while demanding the best professional practice. In the years since, I have spoken with numerous artists who have similar memories of their time as Bill’s students, and he remained endeared to them for waking a creative spark that has sustained us in our work as professional artists.

Once during the late 1970s, I asked Bill to join me as a visiting artist to address a sculpture class I taught at Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Bill sat on a tall stool in the front of the classroom wearing a folded newspaper “printer’s hat” he had made before the students arrived. When the class had assembled, I introduced Bill. He looked around silently for a minute or so, which puzzled us all. Then he said, “Thank you for inviting me, I’ve just been released.” With a demonic smile on his face, he stared at one or two of the students, then me, then jumped off the stool and retrieved a stack of opened newspapers he had placed on the floor. He gave each student a sheet, then began to instruct them on the craft of making their own hats.

He had completely disarmed them, ridding them of preconceived notions of routine teaching. When they were all wearing their new paper hats, he continued by showing slides of ancient objects and discussed symbols common to diverse cultures, explaining why he found them fascinating. He showed and discussed his own art for about 45 minutes, then asked them to begin drawing, and had each develop a symbol, or multiple symbols, that represented some aspect of their upbringing and their own cultural background. He went from student to student and enthusiastically encouraged them to push further, to try things they hadn’t yet considered, and to explore their imaginations. Eventually the class was working with corrugated cardboard and tape to build larger 3-D versions of their drawn forms. Everyone was deeply engaged in the work. The Bill Daley visit became a memorable highlight of the semester. Bill had many such presentation quirks, gaining attention by odd actions, and brought his audience into more focused listening to the thoughts he wanted to convey.

While Bill Daley was a professor who dedicated many years of his life to PCA, and traveling for workshops and lectures to hundreds of other schools and summer programs, he was also a professional artist who maintained his own studio. While I was still a student, Bill asked me to assist him. This began a period of close work with him on larger objects and commissioned works. Quiet days of building clay forms, conversing about experiences, human nature, primitive societies, materials and processes and many other things led to a mutual understanding of the intellectual basis for creative work. He had a unique way of seeing situations; seeking deeper connections while knowing the origins of the obvious. With him, I learned about the development of a thought toward the building of large and complex works. We traveled to industrial kiln works, with 100 foot-kilns, to fire dozens of large components in one firing, and to job sites in Philadelphia and New York to install his sculptures and murals; all of which gave me perspectives that I still employ in my own commissioned art 55 years later.

Bill was a maverick in his art within the group of clay artists usually associated with him. He maintained form exploration that was completely his own, unconnected to popular trends or market demands. His curiosity for inside/outside, male/female, and other symbolic opposites led him to develop a highly personal form language. His art has no parallel. Considering Voulkos or Autio or Woodman or Mason, or any of his contemporaries, Bill Daley was equally articulate in his thoughts through sculptural form, but aesthetically apart from them in his pursuit of pure dynamism. He was very aware of Abstract Expressionist rationale toward image-making, and he held deep respect for the serious endeavors and created works of fellow artists in many mediums, even while his own path was quite different. There is a distinctly modernist sensibility to the clay structures he imagined and built, while at the same time, an homage to ancient art, architecture, and symbolism that can be found throughout his works.

Bill Daley was raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, north of Manhattan, and remembered visiting New York City museums with his art teachers. His father was a house painter, and Bill assisted him, learning a working man’s methods. During World War II, he was recruited as a 17-year-old to join the Army Air Corp and became a B-17 ball turret gun operator. Shot down over eastern Europe, Bill parachuted into a frozen potato field, and became a prisoner of war. Many years later, memories from those experiences still made him cry. Though he never talked about this time in detail with me, I think the trauma of his time led him, and many fellow art students attending college on the GI Bill in the 1950s, to work seriously and hard to establish a meaningful life.

Bill was married to Catherine Stennes for 70 years, until her death last year. They were truly life partners, establishing their family of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and even making some art together. Ethical behavior was at the core of Bill Daley’s thought and action. He was committed to Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, Elkins Park, Pa., where he made the baptismal font and was a member for more than fifty years.

His dedication and his attitude toward very personal self-expression resulted in the production of hundreds of sculptures in the course of his professional life, and he has left a significant body of work that is among the best of his time in the art world he engaged so passionately.

—Dan Dailey

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