William T. Williams

One of the foremost abstract painters of the last century, William T. Williams (b. 1942) is known for his bold color and daring compositions. He has cultivated a process-based approach to painting that synthesizes autobiographical reference, social narrative, and formal motifs sourced from specific cultural histories of the South as well as New York. The recipient of numerous awards of distinction, Williams has garnered critical and institutional attention throughout his career. He has continually sought to engage his communities in dialogues about art through a variety of undertakings, including a 40-year teaching career, initiating the artist-in-residence program at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and founding the muralist collective Smokehouse Associates.

Williams was born and raised in Cross Creek, North Carolina before his family moved to New York City. After graduating from the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan, Williams attended New York Community College (now City Tech), where he earned an associate’s degree in 1962. Later that year he enrolled in Pratt Institute, where some of the most prominent figurative painters of the day, including Richard Lindner, Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz were on staff and often participated in studio critiques. However, it was the semi-abstract painter Richard Bove who encouraged Williams to work from intuition and memory rather than observation; Bove also encouraged Williams to study the paintings of Hans Hoffmann, whose work left a formative impression on the young artist. In the summer of 1965, Williams attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture at Bove’s behest, where he continued to hone his nascent abstract painting practice. The work Williams produced as an undergraduate garnered the attention of his professors, and their encouragement led Williams to pursue graduate studies at Yale University after receiving his BFA from Pratt in 1966. The graduate department faculty at Yale included George Wardlaw, Jack Tworkov, Al Held, Lester Johnson, and others who provided a rigorous theoretical education and foundational studio practice for the artist. Held took a special interest in Williams and encouraged the development of his vocabulary of geometric abstraction and later introduced him to sculptor Mel Edwards, who has been a lifelong friend.

The year 1968 was a momentous one for Williams; after graduating from Yale in May, he returned to New York and leased a high-ceilinged loft on Broadway and Bond Street, at the nexus of SoHo’s booming art scene. While at Yale, Williams had written a proposal for a program that would provide aspiring artists with the space and the financial support needed to develop their practice; in 1968, an institution in the early states of formation now known as The Studio Museum in Harlem adopted Williams’ proposal, initiating the residency that remains one of their core mission objectives and has since launched the careers of a generation of eminent contemporary artists. Williams also formed the artist collective Smokehouse Associates that summer; comprising Williams, Mel Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose, the group completed several public wall paintings in blighted areas of Harlem between 1968 and 1970, sourcing assistance and creative input from the community for each project.

Williams’ first major institutional acquisition came the following year, when the Museum of Modern Art purchased his painting Elbert Jackson, L.A.M.F. Part II (1969) and the Whitney Museum of American Art included him in their annual exhibition of contemporary painting (now the Whitney Biennial). In 1971, Reese Palley Gallery mounted Williams’ first solo exhibition, which garnered critical acclaim and respect from established painters in the downtown New York scene. That same year, he embarked on what would become a 40-year teaching career at Brooklyn College (CUNY), inspiring the practices of hundreds of art students. In 1971, 1974, and 1978, Williams taught at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture’s celebrated summer residency program—which he had attended as a student in 1965—and also served as pro tem director in 1979. While the artist has largely remained in the United States, brief but formative trips abroad have shaped his artistic trajectory. In 1970, Williams traveled to France, where the Fauvist paintings of Henri Matisse augmented the young artist’s understanding of color and influenced the palette of his early “diamond-in-a-box” paintings. Then, in 1977, he traveled to Africa for the first time to participate in the Second World Festival of Black Art and African Culture (Festac ’77) in Lagos, Nigeria.

From the outset of his career, Williams’ art has been characterized by bold color and dynamic, meticulously balanced compositions that simultaneously pay homage to and challenge the Western tradition of abstract painting. Coming into artistic maturity at a time when abstract expressionism was in decline and pop art and minimalism were ascendant, Williams forged his unique voice through a process-based approach to non-objective abstraction. Though the artist believed that abstraction offered him greater creative freedom than figural or representational imagery, he was also wary of the tendency for abstract art to become coldly impersonal or inscrutably self-referential. Through a unique synthesis of personal memory, cultural narrative, and formal abstraction, Williams developed his own language of referential abstraction, incorporating formal motifs lifted from his biography and bestowing his works with titles grounded in specific places or concepts. Primary among these influences is jazz, which Williams recognizes as a site where memory, history, and a Black American abstract medium converge. Quilting has also been a rich source of inspiration for Williams, who found the medium a key site of personal and cultural tradition replete with geometric visual motifs. The diamond-in-a-box, in particular, has been a recurrent form in Williams’ images, functioning, as he puts it, “as a stabilizing force, a form that interacts compositionally with what's around it… [It] goes back to the quilts of my childhood, the patterns and forms I grew up with.” Williams has also authored a prolific body of works on paper independent from his painting practice since the late 1960s. Comprising drawings, collages, watercolors and prints these works are the result of Williams’ relentless exploration of manifold themes and variations, revealing the uncommon breadth of the artist’s continually evolving style. The artist has continued to revise, adapt, and transform his approach over the years, testifying to his assertion that painting is an “open-ended practice,” an attitude that has imbued his oeuvre with a rich diversity structured by a set of recurrent formal and thematic concerns.

Williams has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships throughout his career, including three Individual Artist Awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1965, 1970 and 1994), a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), The Studio Museum in Harlem Artist’s Award (1992), a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship (1994), a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1996), the Brandywine Workshop’s James Van Der Zee Award for lifetime achievement in the arts (2005), the North Carolina Governors Award for the Fine Arts (2006), the Alain Locke International Award from the Detroit Institute of Arts (2011), and the Skowhegan Governors Award for Outstanding Service to Artists from the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2017). In 1986, Williams was the first African American contemporary artist to be included in H.W. Janson’s The History of Art (with Batman, 1979); in the same edition that Henry Ossawa Tanner, was included. In recent years, Williams was inducted into the 2017 class of National Academician members at the National Academy Museum & School in New York and he is the recipient of the 2018 Pratt Institute Legends Award and the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium, Howard University, Washington, DC. In 2018, BOMB magazine published an oral history of Williams’ career conducted by art historian Mona Hadler and, in 2022, LeRonn Brooks and Shanna Farrell interviewed Williams for the Oral History Project, a partnership between the UC Berkeley Oral History Center and the Getty Research Institute.

For over forty years, Williams’ work has consistently been included in major group and solo exhibitions at home and abroad, including: L'Art Vivant Aux Etats-Unis (Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1970); The Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971); To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Addison Gallery of American Art, 1999); What is Painting? (MoMA, 2007); William T. Williams: Theme and Variations (Morris R. Williams Center for the Arts, 2009); William T. Williams: Variations on Themes (The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, 2010); Blues for Smoke (Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, 2012); Witness: Art and Civil Rights in The Sixties (Brooklyn Museum, 2014); and Generations: A History of Black Abstract Art (The Baltimore Museum of Art, 2019).

In 2016, Williams was featured in the inaugural exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC), Visual Art and The American Experience, and in 2017, his work was included in the landmark exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which organized by the Tate Modern, London, and traveled to six major institutions across the United States through 2020. For this exhibition, the Tate Modern produced a short documentary film about the artist—one of an ongoing series of artist documentaries—providing a rare and intimate glimpse into his creative process. In recent years, Williams’ work has been included in the critically acclaimed historical exhibitions Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, which traveled to six other venues across the country between 2019 and 2021; With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972–1985, which was organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles and traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY) between 2019 and 2020; and The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, which was organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, CO) throughout 2021–2022.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery began representing Williams in 2016, mounting its first solo exhibition on the artist’s work, William T. Williams: Things Unknown, Paintings 1968–2017, the following year. Celebrating five decades of work and featuring an overview of the artist’s major painting series, the exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with interviews between the artist and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Courtney J. Martin, then the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Dia Art Foundation. At Frieze 2019, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery presented William T. Williams: 1970, an exhibition that focused on the pivotal year 1970 and highlighted a selection of seminal paintings and never-before-exhibited works on paper from the artist’s first mature series, Diamond in a Box. The gallery presented a second solo show, William T. Williams: Recent Paintings, in September 2019, which was also accompanied by an exhibition catalogue featuring a contribution by art historian Jonathan P. Binstock and an interview conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist. In the fall of 2022, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery will open William T. Williams: Tension to the Edge, an exhibition focusing on the artist’s large-scale geometric paintings dating from 1968-1970; the exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue publishing a new interview with the artist. Tension to the Edge coincided with the release of the publication Smokehouse Associates, co-published by The Studio Museum in Harlem and Yale University Press and featuring contributions from Eric Booker, Charles Davis II, Ashley James, and James Trainor. In 2024, Williams’ painting was shown for the first time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY as part of the group exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now. That same year, Williams received the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award from The New York Foundation for the Arts, which recognizes mature and established artists with a long history of creative practice.

Williams is represented in over thirty museum collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, New York State Office of General Services, Albany, NY; Fisk University Galleries, Fisk University, Nashville, TN; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Hampton University Museum, Hampton University, Hampton, VA; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; The Jewish Museum, New York, NY; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC is the exclusive representative of William T. Williams.