William Michael Schindler's career as a sculptor is a testament to the persistence of the sculptural impulse. His early interest in art was developed by classes he took as a youngster at the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. While attending Oberlin College, he made his first mature metal sculpture from scrapped  wrought iron and motorcycle parts that he found in the snow on campus. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Oberlin in 1968. After a year of graduate school, however, he decided to switch to law. He received his J.D. from Stanford in 1972, and practiced law in San Diego through 1985, specializing in tax litigation. Despite a successful law practice, the sculptural impulse reasserted itself, as Schindler found himself in metal scrap yards on Saturday mornings, looking for industrial metal to create small sculptures. He began seeking out local sculptors and experimenting with cast paper sculpture and small cast bronzes. Invigorated by his rediscovered interest in sculpture, and realizing that he could no longer deny the urge to be a full-time sculptor, Schindler resigned as a partner in the law firm in 1985 and went back to school at San Diego State. There he explored a full range of materials and techniques, including welding, casting, carving, fabricating and modeling.  He opened a studio in the warehouse district of San Diego, where he worked for twenty years, before moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2007.

Schindler's early works were wall reliefs, combining marble and granite fragments  with industrial copper and aluminum.  However, the discovery of a damaged airplane propeller, on one of his weekly trips to the scrap yard, sent Schindler in an entirely new direction.  He began experimenting with cutting and drilling the blades.  Damaged propellers from small,  private aircraft were abundant in Southern California, and he found their unique shapes and properties endlessly fascinating.  He began a series of propeller sculptures that he titled "Tarmac," which he continues to augment to this day.  Industrial aluminum in all forms soon became his preferred medium, as San Diego's aircraft industry and military surplus provided an abundant supply of interesting shapes. Moving to Santa Fe provided  new sources of fascinating aluminum materials from local manufacturing, as well as the National Laboratory at Los Alamos.

Schindler's art is materials driven, relying on what he discovers on his  weekly trips to the scrap yard.  A self-described "junk yard dog," he believes in the transformative power of art, turning industrial cast-offs into elegant sculpture.  His aesthetic tends  toward the geometric and minimal. He also enjoys working with multiples and in series.  There is nothing more satisfying for him  than finding hundreds of anodized aluminum tubes or  aluminum rings from dismantled computer memory discs and exploring how many different permutations of sculptural form he can create with them.  The genesis  for his most ambitious series, a group of larger than human-size geometric sculptures, was the acquisition of welded aluminum microwave focusers at a US Navy surplus auction.  Inspired by the stainless steel "Cubi" series of renowned sculptor David Smith, Schindler used the focusers as pedestals for a dance of geometric forms, which he titled "Geodyn."