I love art. I love books. Those two passions have defined my life experiences and career <www.linkedin.com/in/billharroff/> as a successful book artist for thirty years, working primarily in digital formats for the last two decades.
My life and art career changed forever on November 22, 1989, simply getting into a car for a family visit. For the next six years, I spent most of my days flat on my back in severe, chronic, unrelenting pain. Little did I realize that the new technologies would become the perfect tools for me to uniquely combine words and images. Though my condition and physical limitations remain to a degree, my once desperate choice has blossomed into a healing and invigorating artistic journey.
My professional life of putting words and pictures together has taken me on adventures around the world. I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship by Arts Midwest in 1991 for my snowglobe bookworks. In addition, I am included in the Smithsonian Institution's Visual Artists Fellowship Archive at the National Museum of American Art. I have studied and taught with some of the best book artists, including Ed Hutchins, Richard Minsky, Gary Frost, Robert Smith, Susan King, Audrey Niffenegger, Julie Chen and Hedi Kyle.
As co-founder of the (r)Evolutionary (e)Books Press, I keynoted at the Guadalajara Book Fair, the 1st Illinois Ebook Conference and CAMEX, the American College Bookstore Association’s Expo. In addition, I received the Frank B. Sessa Scholarship, the Governor’s International Exchange Program Grant (along with other Illinois Arts Council and NEA awards), Art Matters and Women’s Studio Workshop grants, a Ragdale Foundation residency and top honors in several international art competitions.
I hold degrees with Highest Distinction from Purdue University, Indiana University and the Internationale Sommerakademie fur Bildende Kunst in Austria. My bookworks are in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Experimental Arts Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the New York Public Library, among many others. I have held faculty positions at Southern Illinois, Oklahoma State and McKendree Universities.
Comics are the operas of our modern era; over the top, cosmological, romantic, imaginative and garish with their own language easily understood by today's popular culture. I have spent the last few years developing an original body of work known collectively as the Wascally Wee Willys. I tell my comic stories with quilt-like narratives composed of interwoven patterns, color, graphics and word balloons inspired by 1950s comics.
