Bill Walton was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1931, and spent most of his life in Philadelphia, where he moved in the 1960s following a brief period of study at the Institute of Design in Chicago. A commercial printer by trade, Walton developed a self-taught minimalist practice in sculpture and painting, one often realized with organic materials and imbued with a subtle human touch and sentimentality. He considered many of his works to be “portraits” of friends or of places, limned through titles or materials, and often complemented by a playful confounding of expectations with respect to surfaces and details. The vast majority of Walton’s works were purposefully left undated, hinting that his assemblages are at once both ephemeral and everlasting, never finished, but also never unfinished.

Walton realized more than twenty solo exhibitions during his lifetime, primarily in Philadelphia; posthumous solo exhibitions have taken place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Drexel University, Fleisher/Ollman, JTT, James Fuentes, Adams and Ollman, and Frith Street. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and the Yale University Gallery.