This is a recording of a webinar from Friday, January 29th at 3:00pm with Professor Robert Bailey discussing musician Mason Williams.

Musician and comedy writer Mason Williams attended Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City, where he became lifelong friends with artist Ed Ruscha. After majoring in music at Oklahoma City University, Mason relocated to Los Angeles where he joined Ruscha, who had moved to Los Angeles previously. Soon after Williams gained fame as an author, comedian, composer, musician, and poet. Perhaps best known for his three-time Grammy Award-winning instrumental composition, “Classical Gas” (1968), Williams became an influential figure in music and television in the late 1960s. In addition to writing and performing as a musician, he has published twenty humorous books, and was a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and Saturday Night Live, among others.

Robert Bailey is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Oklahoma, where he also has affiliate faculty status in Environmental Studies and in Film and Media Studies. At OU, Bailey teaches the history, criticism, and theory of modern and contemporary art as well as the historiography and methodology of art history. His research and creative activity explore how artists and art historians configure relations of theory and practice amid societal, environmental, and technological changes. He is the author of "Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds," and he edited and introduced Terry Smith’s "One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism." Together with Todd Stewart, Bailey participates in Fieldworks, an artist-and-writer-run initiative encompassing a mobile residency program that conducts interdisciplinary field research in arid regions of the western United States.