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01/23/2019 07:30 AMAt 91 years old, Bill Bendig is facing down cancer with courage, and celebrating the legacy he leaves behind: a passion for the arts.
You might recognize Bill’s work as you drive or stroll through downtown Madison or other towns along the shoreline as he’s most recently known for his work on the Madison Mile, part of a larger project dubbed simply The Mile. The idea is to display outdoor sculpture to give passersby the opportunity to not only view contemporary art, but to also engage with it. To that end, Bill founded the Hollycroft Foundation, a non-profit which provides financial and administrative support to the now-decades-old exhibit of rotating works of art.
But Bill’s experience and contributions in the arts goes beyond even the 50-mile reach of The Mile. He has also engaged with writing, music, theater, and all visual arts for over seventy years.
Early on, Bill founded a newspaper, the Erie Tribune, which he sold to pay for his post-secondary education at Trinity College in Hartford. In 1953, he graduated with honors. From there, Bill traveled to England to study painting under Ceri Richards at the University of London. Ceri Richards is known for his paintings, prints, and reliefs, but he and Bill share something else in common: stained glass.
“I designed the stained glass window in the [All Saints’] Church in Ivoryton,” Bill says, “the rose.” Known as The Pentecost Rose, the window was designed and co-fabricated by Bill in 1987.
In the world of music, Bill was a program manager for Fritz Mahler, conductor of the Erie Philharmonic Orchestra in Pennsylvania; he was also a singer and managed the Trinity College Glee Club during his time there as a student.
Bill combined his love of the arts and of writing when he founded theARTgallery, a magazine that “was rivaled only by ARTNews,” Bill says. He founded his magazine in 1957, and worked as an editor and art critic.
In theater, Bill was a founding trustee of the Ivoryton Playhouse Foundation. He was also Milton Stiefel’s biographer; Stiefel was the founder of the foundation.
Bill has also served on historical, art, library, and cultural associations in Essex, his hometown. All of these experiences combined to give him the expertise that made the Hollycroft Foundation a success.
After twenty-five years of working to bring contemporary sculpture into public spaces, Bill is being honored as the King of Mardi Gras in a gala hosted by the Shoreline Arts Alliance on Saturday, Feb. 2.
Shoreline Arts Alliance Chief Executive Officer Eric Dillner shared some of the kudos he’s received on Bill’s behalf. Dr. Frederick Hockla is “...celebrating all those wonderful years, and most of all, the legacy [Bill will] leave. What, besides the schools, landed me here? Of course, it was The Mile.”
Other comments have been along similar lines. “The loss of your personal outreach is sad for us who well know [Bill’s] years of successful effort keeping The Mile alive…[Bill’s] years of devotion to The Mile and loyalty to preserving its future are within the focus of us who will keep the effort financially going.”
One couple, Bill said, “drove up to Connecticut just to see The Mile. They were visiting New York from Honolulu, Hawaii, but they made a special trip here just to see the sculptures.”
Imagining what it must be like to live over 90 years is difficult for anyone who hasn’t had the opportunity. Imagining the ultimate result of a cancer prognosis is even more impossible, but Bill’s legacy, along with his determination to devote every last drop of energy to the causes he cares for speak to his dignity.
“I’ll keep plugging [away] until St. Peter takes over and sends me to the reject pile,” Bill says. He’s approaching his prognosis with the humor one would expect of a true editor.
On Groundhog Day, his legacy will be honored at the gala, adding another accolade to a lifetime of achievements, including his Arts Outstanding Award from the New Haven Arts Council, which Bill received in 2002.
Bill has been a teacher, a writer, an editor, an artist, a musician, and more to many people over his nine decades thus far, and he’s not stopping until he has to. “After a quarter century, we’ve made Connecticut ‘the sculpture state.’ No other state rivals us in such extended support of serious outdoor public sculpture…” Bill wrote recently in a letter to friends, which he shared with The Source.
Bill has lived all over the world: Botswana, South Africa, Denmark, Great Britain, Greece, and Portugal. “I was happiest in Athens,” Bill says of the countries he’s lived in. He jokes about a picture of him standing before the Parthenon, “it’s a photo of two ancient, crumbling structures.”
Though he’s passing the torch for The Mile onto his successor and two-year tutee Brian Wendler, none can deny the impact his 25 years at the helm have had on Madison’s downtown spirit. None can deny Bill Bendig’s legacy on the shoreline communities, nor his devotion to the preservation and promotion of the arts over the course of his life.
To nominate a person of the week in Madison or Killingworth, email m.mcnellis@shorepublishing.com.