William Greiner is a photographer who took up painting. His subject for most of his working life has been the American South in saturated color, and since 2014 his practice has also included painting, collage, and printmaking. In the summer of 2020, in Santa Fe, he began handing finished photographs to the painter Matt Clark and letting him work on them.
Biography
Greiner was born in New Orleans on September 8, 1957, and lives in Santa Fe. He began as a sports photographer in the National Football League at nineteen, covered the Tour de France for Bicycling and The New York Times, then returned to school for a B.F.A. at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an M.B.A. at Suffolk University. His photographs are held in more than sixty public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, which acquired his work in 1991, the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His monographs include The Reposed and Neutral Ground: New Orleans 1990–2005.
In the collection’s words
Webster Collection has shown him twice. The Space Between, his collaboration with Matt Clark, hung at the gallery in 2024. ON COURT, an exhibition of his paintings, collages, and photograph on the single subject of the tennis court, opened at the Forked Lightning Racquet Club on Friday, March 20, 2026, in collaboration with us. He is not represented here, and there is no work of his in the collection. He has been exhibited here, which is a different relationship and an older one.
A photographer’s instinct is to protect the print. By 2020 Greiner had been painting for six years, so when he handed the prints over he knew better than most what he was authorizing. The photographs underneath are still legible. That is the part we would not have predicted.
Continue exploring
- The Space Between, the collaboration, shown here
- Matt Clark, the painter who worked on the prints
- Alex Harris, another photographer of the American vernacular in color
- Photographs in the collection and all artists at Webster Collection
- Webster Collection
