William Mead Artist

Bio for William Mead

Mead earned his BFA at Parsons School of Design in 1989. He completed a lifetime certification in secondary art education at Massachusetts College of Art in 1992. In 1999 he completed a Master’s degree in Education (MEd) At Leslie University.

While at Parsons, Mead majored in fine arts and focused on sculpture, but continued to work in other traditional media, including painting, drawing and printmaking. Much of his work at that time was constructed from wood and metal, and made use of found objects, playing materials off each other in ways that were surprising, while working to achieve a kind of balance and harmony that felt natural and calming.

With the advent of the personal computer revolution, Mead became obsessed with digital image making, design, typography, user interfaces, user experience and programming.

Today, Mead’s work employs a variety of media and techniques and is driven by conceptual themes, while remaining personal and expressive.

Current and Recent Projects

1. 

   Meditations on Light, Pattern, Change & Time

   These pieces were included in a show at Axis Gallery in June of 2022 called memory.unshift(). The show included work by Alexa Bonomo, Glenda Drew and Jessie Drew. These pieces randomly layer video and apply random blend modes and poetry to create a meditative experience. Find out more and see these pieces.

2. 

   Trains and Cars of Los Angeles

   Slow motion video of the art piece Metropolis II by Chris Burden on view at LACMA museum in Los Angeles. Original music composed by a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous. Find out more and watch the video.

3. 

   Bamboo And Light

   This slow motion video with original music composed by a colleague who wishes to remain anonymous is inspired by the global pandemic caused by the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus. Find out more and watch the video.

4. 

   423 and Friction at Axis Gallery

   This project started in the spring of 2020 with the devlelopment of a website for an event that took place while it was April 23rd, 2020 somewhere in the world.The website evolved over the course of the day and viewers could send in work to be inlcuded in a zine. The zine was then made, and pages from it were printed and displayed at Axis Gallery in August of 2020. Find out more.

5. 

   QWERTY Generative Art Project

   This piece was part of my solo show at Axis Gallery, also called QWERTY from 2019. There was a lot in this show, but this piece in particular works well on the web, so I have included it here in its entirty. The video file is quite large and may stutter, depending on your internet connection. That is ok, eventually the whole video will get downloaded and play smoothly in the background. Find out more.

6. 

   Random JS Generative Art Project

   This site shows work I was working on in 2016 up through 2018. I have continued to work with generative art based on the experimentations with JavaScript seen here on this site, and continue to mine this work for additional ideas and visual inspiration for my work. Find out more.

Selected Exhibitions

Below are recent exhibitions Mead has participated in. If you are interested in older work, or work from previous exhibitions, please contact the artist.

1. 2022 memory.unshift() Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA (with Alexa Bonomo, Glenda Drew & Jessie Drew)
2. 2020 Friction Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA (with Steve Mehallo an Jacob Lewis)
3. 2020 Studio CoWorking, Creekside, Roseville, CA
4. 2019 316 Vernon Street, Art at Work Program, Blue Line Arts, Roseville, CA
5. 2019 QWERTY Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA
6. 2019 American River College Art Faculty Show, SMUD, Sacramento, CA
7. 2018 Axis Exchange, Gearbox Gallery, Oakland, CA
8. 2018 Recent Work, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA
9. 2017 Under Construction, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA

Contact William Mead

Please send me your thoughts through the form above, or you can email me directly at bill@meaddesign.net