William Monaghan (b. 1944) is a New Orleans-based artist who uses industrial forms and fabrication methods to create large-scale canvases, sculpture, and works on paper.
Monaghan engages materials and processes for their formal, conceptual, and political potential, establishing a call-and-response between material and art object, illusion and reality, labor and artistic production, and our industrial past and the future of our planet. In challenging the perception of light and materiality, Monaghan’s sculptural canvases flicker between two and three dimensions.
Instructed in the Bauhaus tradition at Yale University in the 1960s, Monaghan trained in the studios of Buckminster Fuller and William Wainwright. He began to incorporate industrial fabrication methods into his practice in the 1970s, when he established a studio in a sheet metal shop in Somerville, MA. It remains a critical part of his practice today.
Monaghan’s work has been exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Aldrich Museum; Boston Architectural Center; Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; and Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He holds degrees from Yale and Harvard Universities.