William "Wiili" Armstrong (1956 - 2003) 

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William H. Armstrong a.k.a. Wiili was a prolific artist and writer until the day he died at age 47 on December 23, 2003. Over a brief few years, 1993-1996, his Raleigh art dealer collected nearly one thousand odd pages of sketches, correspondence, poems, musings, and cartoons from Wiili. The exhibition at Wesleyan is a selection of drawings and hand- written pages that reveal the breadth of his God-given genius, his shifting outlook from the inside looking out, and an outrageous sense of humor from the outside looking in…and the alienation he experienced as an "outsider."

A gifted poet, an experienced observer, and an often bizarre visionary, Armstrong drew pictures in a wide variety of media and wrote his commentaries on life in verse and rambling narratives. Diagnosed manic–depressive, clinically called bi-polar, Wiili’s uncontrollable ups and downs were his constant companions, his demons and angels, as he wrestled what life he could from his mental states. Occasionally hospitalized at Dix, he drew for therapy and to recover from unmanageable and alienating depression. When medicated and on the fringe of coping with the world, Wiili’s most soul-searching creativity produced artworks and verse from the sublime to the ridiculous. The pain expressed in his Dix Hospital drawings is haunting. His cartoons can be deceptively simple and hilarious.

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