William T. Williams (American, b. 1942)
Untitled, 1970
Screenprint, one of a series of 4, ed. 59/144
16 x 13 3/4 in.
Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, St. Petersburg College, gift of James G. Sweeny in memory of Martha M. Sweeny, 2020.4.24
Published by HKL, Ltd., Boston, MA
Born in 1942, in Cross Creek, North Carolina, William T. Williams is a New York-based abstract painter, printmaker, educator and founder of the Artist-in-Residence program at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Since the 1960s, Williams has been investigating the science of color and its physical boundaries through compositions that explore his personal and cultural history. His work is inspired by the abstract “themes” and “variations” found in jazz music and the geometry of traditional African American quilting. He says, “the diamond shape is a stabilizing force, a form that interacts compositionally with what’s around it. But it goes back to the quilts of my childhood, the patterns and forms I grew up with.”
Williams’ talent was recognized at a young age, attending high school at School of Industrial Art in Manhattan. He studied at The Skowhegan School of Art with a National Endowment for the Arts grant and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute in 1966. Earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art and Architecture in 1968, Williams quickly became a rising star when the Museum of Modern (MoMA) acquired his work and he had exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fondation Maeght in France. Williams has exhibited and is included in collections worldwide. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the James Van Dee Zee Lifetime Achievement Award from Brandywine Workshop and the 2006 North Carolina Governors Award for Fine Arts. He has been a Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, since 1971.
As a printmaker, Williams published 19 editions at Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop from 1975 to 1997. He produced four editions at the Brandywine Workshop, among other projects, and was a visiting scholar at Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute. Published by HKL, Ltd., in Boston, an impression of Untitled is also in the collection of MoMA.
Williams was quoted from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery: One of the things I remember most is … people asking me … ‘Why are you making abstraction? It’s not African American art.’ And I would always say, ‘Well … you tell me what it should look like. Jazz is the most abstract of all music. Music is totally abstract. How can you not say there’s a tradition of abstraction?’ I would talk about quilts, point out that the geometry of quilts is certainly coming out of abstraction. There is this rich tradition; all you have to do is see it and to use it.