With sadness, we share the news of the passing of our friend, contributor, and supporter: Professor Emeritus William “Bill” Itter. Artist, award-winning teacher, art collector, and philanthropist, Bill Itter shaped the course of thousands of emerging artists’ paths over thirty-five years of teaching at Indiana University.
Bill was a devoted husband to his late wife, Diane Itter, a premier twentieth-century American textile artist, accomplished teacher, and equally avid collector. After her death, Bill oversaw major retrospective exhibitions of Diane’s work at the American Craft Museum in New York City and the Textile Museum in Washington, DC. Bill exhibited his own work at the Sonia Zak Gallery and the Douglas Dawson Gallery, both in Chicago.
Activating his spirit of philanthropy, Bill donated his collections to the Eskenazi Museum of Art to further the study of global art at IU. He had been collecting since the 1970s, and over time his collecting interests included ceramics, textiles, baskets, sculptures, and masks. Bill’s extensive collecting practices were an integral part of his creative and pedagogical process, providing a “library of visual forms and ideas”—in particular, his distinguished collection of African ceramics—that inspired his art and teaching. Bill collected a lot of things—planks of curly maple, folk art match boxes, gourds, glass beads, vintage neck ties, crinoids, and even the whiskers that his cats occasionally dropped. Each category presented abundant similarities and variations that could be studied in ways that drove his imagination. There was gentleness in how he cared for these things, wisdom in how he absorbed what they had to offer, and joyfulness in his appreciation of their beauty.
Bill established the William and Diane Itter Objects Study at the museum, giving students the opportunity to engage closely with works of art from our collection. His painting Axis: Home at Four Corners is in the collection of the Eskenazi Museum of Art and on view in the Eskenazi Gallery. In 2023, the museum published Form and Surface: African Ceramics from the Collection of William M. Itter. Bill contributed to the publication by sharing his collection as well as his expertise and reflections on ceramics and collecting. In an essay he shared,
“I concede that among other things I am a collector. How else can I explain a house full of objects I consider curious, ambitious, inventive, and revelatory–objects made to last by skilled hands that accomplished artistry. Textiles, baskets, and pottery have a lasting integrity founded on each object through what I call truth of readability: visible marks of making and their transformative actions to form. I do enjoy traveling my home’s floors and walls, greeting fantastic objects and ideas from different times and cultures.”
