William T. Williams is a geometric abstract painter who utilises overlapping decorative shapes based on memories of his family's quilt-making activities and their colourful patterned designs.
Read MoreWilliams spent his early childhood in North Carolina in a large African Methodist Episcopal family, where women made functional geometric quilts from recycled clothing using foot-driven sewing machines. Williams' family moved to New York when he was an adolescent, where his artistic talent was recognised at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan.
Williams entered the Pratt Institute to study painting in 1962 and graduated with a BFA in 1966, during which he also got a summer scholarship to study at the Skowhegan School of Art. He then went to Yale University School of Art and Architecture, where he gained an MFA in 1968 and where he was taught by the geometric abstractionist Al Held.
Apart from being inspired by sweeping geometric form, flat saturated colour, and the overlapping elements that he is known for, William T. Williams greatly values listening to jazz as an inspiration in the studio for producing paintings.
Examples of his large imposing paintings include Elbert Jackson L.A.M.F. Part II (1969), Truckin (1969), 1940 (1970), Trane Meets Jug (1970–1971), Up Balls (1971), and Eastern Star (1971).
Williams works in studios in both Connecticut and New York, and has several styles of painting. In his Connecticut studio, the paintings tend to be more industrial, with curved geometry and diamond shapes as described above; in New York, the works are more arboreal, organic, and manual. They are less chromatically intense and more tonally subdued, using thick vertical bands compositionally and emphasising rows of pictographic doodles—patterned 'expressive' textures in a shallow space. An example is Tale for Shango (1978). In many others, like Blues Labyrinth (1991), Harlem Nights (1999), or Spring Lake (1988–2008), the wider tactile marks look like cracked bark.
Some works, like Indian Summer (1973), Redfern (1973–1974), or Batman (1979), are very delicate, being rigorously monochromatic, with tonally manipulated, bush-daubing patterns.
Much later paintings, like Last Voice (2007), Let Me Know (2017), and Evidence (2016), emphasise the pictographic not multiplied in rows or grids, but rather as dominant solo motifs.
Williams is the recipient of many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium, Howard University, Washington, D.C. (2019); the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2018); the Skowhegan Governors Award for Outstanding Service to Artists (2017); and the National Academician Award, National Academy Museum, New York (2017).
William T. Williams has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include William T. Williams: Recent Paintings, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York (2019) and William T. Williams: Things Unknown: Paintings 1968–2017, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York (2017).
Group exhibitions include The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2021); Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2020); With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, Museum Of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2020); and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Studio Museum, New York (2019).
Williams' work is held in major collections across the United States, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; The Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022
