Faculty Profile
Author, Painter, Sculptor, Printmaker, Critic, Teacher
William Hemmerdinger
Design Media
The BAC is a unique and wonderful place. To work with so many talented people, especially during an early phase in their career, is a pleasure. My real joy is the process of encouraging growth. Our classroom is the laboratory where each person discovers a capacity to draw well, sharpens existing abilities or experiments with alternative ways of solving drawing problems. It is my genuine privilege to induce, inspire, monitor, guide and interpret these proceedings. When combined with humor and patience something truly worthwhile is achieved.
Begun in 1967, the artistic career of William Hemmerdinger is distinguished by near forty years of production in a variety of styles and materials. His paintings are in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Mobil Oil Corporation, New York and the Federal Reserve Bank, San Francisco. His prints and handmade books are in the permanent collections of Via Novelli, Italy, Barbara Hepworth Museum, England, National Library of Canada and the Art Institute of Chicago. Paintings, sculpture, collage, assemblage, prints and handmade books have been exhibited at the National Academy of Design; American Watercolor Society, New York, California National Water Color Society, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea, the Olympic Arts Festivals, (Los Angeles and Seoul) and galleries in New York, London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, Seoul and New Delhi. The artist has completed mural commissions and architectural collaborations for the Shelburne Hotel, New York, Plaza 50 Hotel, New York, Hilton Hotel, Pasadena and the Le Merigot, Santa Monica. His stone and bronze sculptural and environmental designs have been included in A.I.A., A.S.I.D. and A.S.L.A. award-winning projects. He is the recipient of many awards, including California National Water Color Society, (1971, 1974), National Watercolor Society, (1979), American Watercolor Society, (1971) City of Los Angeles, (1969, 1988, 1989); The Julia and David White Artists' Colony Fellowship to Costa Rica (1999). Since starting his teaching career in 1973, he has taught at several fine universities, art institutes and colleges including Pomona, Claremont, CalArts, Otis/Parsons and Boston Architectural College. The artist is listed in: Pate-Havlice, Fielding (Opitz edition) and Perine. See also: Who's Who in American Art (1980 - present); The California Art Review and The New York Art Review. His professional archive profiling modernist art, artists and designers of California and the Pacific Rim has become part of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
