William “Bill” King (1925-2015) was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and grew up in Coconut Grove, Miami. After attending the University of Florida between 1942 and 1944, he came to New York in 1945, enrolling at Cooper Union that year and graduating in 1948. That summer, he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. The following year, he went to Rome on a Fulbright scholarship. He also spent time in Athens, Greece, and at the Central School in London. In 1952, he co-founded the influential Tanager Gallery on Tenth Street in New York. Beginning in 1953, he taught for three years at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. He later taught at UC Berkeley and elsewhere. He served as President of the National Academy of Design from 1994 to 1998. In 2003, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

King’s earliest one-person shows were with the Alan Gallery in New York, beginning in 1954, and he continued to show there through 2014. The majority of his New York exhibitions were with the Terry Dintenfass Gallery from 1962 to 1997. Renowned for his witty and incisive depictions of the human figure, King received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and Honorary Doctorates from the San Francisco Art Institute, the California College of Arts and Crafts, and the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. In 2007, he received the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award, affirming his lasting impact on postwar American sculpture.