William T. Williams 1942—

Abstract, expressionist painter

The fact that he is an African American excelling in his profession is of little concern to William T. Williams, an abstract expressionist painter. As the soft-spoken, mustachioed artist told Contemporary Black Biography (CBB), “My job is to make as much art as I can as well as I can.” Still, Williams’s own emphasis does not stop others from focusing on the fact that he is the first black artist included in H. W. Janson’s widely used textbook, History of Art.His works hang in such prestigious New York City galleries as the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum, and Harlem’s Studio Museum. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Williams has been awarded a trio of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and he has exhibited and lectured all over the world.

William’s ethnic heritage is part of the cumulative experience of his life that is reflected in his large, heavily encrusted, acrylic canvasses. Abstract yet in many instances autobiographical, Williams’s works reveal much of his personal history and his interest in his ancestry. For example, the diamond shapes and earth tones of his earlier geometric works are reminiscent of the tribal art of the Kuba Kingdom in what is now Zaire, Africa. More recent lyrical works suggest a tonal interplay evocative of the flicker of sunlight off the tree leaves of Williams’s rural North Carolina childhood. Summarizing the source of his motivation, Williams toldCBB, “When you’re living an aesthetic as opposed to experiencing an external idea, some things become part and parcel of you. It’s impossible for me,” he added by way of example, “to take quilts out of my consciousness.”

The quilts were made by his grandmother and aunts in Cross Creek, North Carolina, where William Thomas Williams was born July 17, 1942, the second son of William Thomas and Hazel Davis Williams. His father was a federal employee who worked at nearby Fort Bragg; his mother was a domestic worker and telephone operator. Home was a tight-knit group of small tobacco and cotton farms operated by relatives. Life there was poor-the homes had no electricity or running water-but it was also loving and insulated from the worst of Southern racism.

Seeing family members construct and craft everything from furniture to household goods like quilts was an early artistic influence on Williams. All the patterns and

At a Glance…

Born William Thomas Williams, July 17, 1942, in Cross Creek, North Carolina; son of William Thomas (a federal employee) and Hazel Williams (a telephone operator; maiden name, Davis); married Patricia Ayr DeWeese (Williams’s studio manager); children, Aaron and Nila, Education: New York City Community College, AAS, 1962; Skowhegan School of Paintingand Sculpture, 1965; Pratt Institute of Art, BFA, 1966; Yale University School of Art and Architecture, MFA, 1968.

Professor of Art, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, 1971~; visiting professor, Virginia Common wealth University, Richmond, 1984-85; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, director pro tern, 1979, and resident summer faculty, 1971,1974, and 1978.

Exhibitions include: Newark Museum, N.J., 1995; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1994,1993,1992, 1983, 1979, 1969; Montciair Museum of Art, NJ., 1991; Museo des Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela, 1991; California Afro-American Museum, los Angeles, 1989, 1984; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, 1988; Anacostra Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, 1987; Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, 1986; Museum of Modern Art, New York 1972, 1969; Whitney Museum, New York, 1971, 1969; Fondation Maeght, St Paul, France, 1970.

Collections include: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; North Carolina State Museum; Library of Congress; Yale University; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; New Orleans Museum of Art; Chase Manhattan Bank Collection; American Telephone and Telegraph Corp.; Columbia Museum, S.C

Awards and Honors: Mid-Atlantic/NEA Regional Fellowship, 1994; Studio Museum in Harlem Artist’s Award, 1992;)ohn Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1987; NEA Individual Artist Award, 1970. Artist-in-residence at Virginia Common wealth University, University of Wisconsin, Fisk University and other institutions; lectures and symposia at MOMA, Detroit Institute of Art, N.C, Museum of Art and many others.

Addresses: Home–654 Broadway, New York, NY 10012; Office –CUNY, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY 11210.

textures stayed in young William’s consciousness--the diamond shapes his grandmother included in her quilts, a motif passed down from her ancestral African roots, continue to appear in Williams’s work. The clay bank where he and his friends fashioned childish pottery and the farmyard where his grandmother encouraged him to draw in the dust remain strong influences as well.

Williams’s rural upbringing quickly became urban, however. He was four years old when his father moved the family to New York City to find better employment. Growing up in Queens and a housing project in Far Rockaway, Williams showed artistic talent which his teachers encouraged. The beginnings of a lifelong love affair with color compelled Williams to draw endlessly and pick up the paper scraps tossed out by a printing firm near his home in order to experiment with form.

Committed Himself to Art

At age 14 Williams was admitted to New York’s High School of Industrial Arts (now the High School of Art and Design). Despite the two-hour commute, he relished the daily trip into the city. “The advantage of it was it was three-and-a-half blocks from the Museum of Modern Art, so MOMA became an extension of the classroom,” he explained to CBB.The Metropolitan Museum was another alternate classroom, and expressionists Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem DeKooning became his heroes. Although steered toward a commercial art career as were most minority students in those days, Williams soaked up all the art history and technique he could. An African American role model was Jacob Lawrence, who helped guide the teenage artist.

Graduating in 1960, Williams attended New York City Community College for two years on a scholarship, then took his first and last commercial art job, as a production assistant on a trade magazine. He worked there for only two-and-a-half months. The fine arts kept calling him, and Williams responded, first enrolling in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where he finally found his true niche. “That was the turning point where I decided I wanted to be a painter, he informedCBB. The following year he gained admittance to the prestigious Pratt Institute; there he joyfully immersed himself in the classical art program, trying out different media.

Committed now, Williams attended Yale for his Masters in Fine Arts, then returned to New York City in 1968. With money from his parents, he purchased the Soho loft that remained his home and studio in the mid-1990s. Around that time he married Patricia DeWeese, now manager of his studio; the couple had two children, Aaron and Nila. By 1970, Williams found financial security in the form of a teaching career. First he earned a place on staff at Pratt’s School of Visual Arts, then a long-term position as professor of art at Brooklyn College, beginning in 1971. These developments allowed Williams to pursue his art without hindrance. Not long afterward, Williams’s years of preparation paid off in a big way.

Shimmering Canvasses

In 1971 Williams had his first show, at the Reese Paley Gallery where, remarkably, he sold out his entire stock. The art world sat up and took notice. As writer Valerie Mercer indicated in a catalogue accompanying a show at the Montclair Art Museum, Williams’s work during the 1960s related to his “interest in the prevailing minimal formalist aesthetic, with its mechanistic sensibility and insistence that painting avoid reference to an object or event beyond the painting itself.”

Williams avoided rigid adherence to minimalism, though. “By allowing color to do more than emphasize flat surfaces, through an almost violent emission of light produced by the clashing of juxtaposed planes of contrasting high-key color, [Williams] imbued the work with a tension that was indicative of a need to refer to the drama of urban life outside his New York studio,” Mercer noted. Williams’s huge canvasses-generally 5’ x 7’--depicted large geometric forms in fuchsias, chartreuses, and other bold colors. What resulted were his “shimmering paintings” such asEquinox andRedfern, in which a pearlescent base added to his paint allowed his geometric forms to shimmer when touched by light.

During Williams’s interview with CBB, he described his mid-1970s works: “It was a drastic break from the prevailing aesthetic. On one hand it seemed to be an allegiance to minimalism, but the surface is implying a physicality and implied illusion that is drastically different.” In short, Williams was displaying his trademark fascination with the tactile. Using only paint and brush in Equinox, he built borders around his geometric shapes, creating almost a satiny, collage effect. Though his geometric shapes echoed his grandmother’s diamonds and the African art in which he was immersed intellectually, Williams yearned in his art to get closer still to personal experience.

As always, Williams turned his back on the commercial. “In 1972 curators wouldn’t look at paintings with tactile surfaces,” Williams told the Raleigh, N.C., News and Observer.Nonetheless, he pushed on in his own direction. What resulted was a series of paintings in the 1980s that were far more lyrical than his previous works. Speaking of his paintingSt range Fruit (1982), Williams described “a landscape-sense, a horizon, a division between parts,” seemingly between earth and a sky. “It’s a lot more lyrical,” Williams said, than his shimmering minimalist works. “There’s a sense of tonal relationships.” The difference, Williams explained, “is a trip to Africa.”

Williams was invited to be a member of the American delegation to a world gathering, in Lagos, Nigeria, of people of African descent from the international fine arts and performing arts communities. While there, he was struck by the uniting connections he found in Africa. “It was a turning point not so much in terms of what my art had been about, but an attitude in how to make it,” Williams said. He was seeing “the relationship between what I had experienced as a child and the way things were made.”

Williams began dividing his paintings into sections, favoring raw colors such as those in Savannah in 1979 and Roseville in 1982. Reminiscences of rural North Carolina and African textile patterns emerged. Because layers can be built quickly with acrylics, Williams incorporated the cracks in the surface of his paintings into his art. A painstaking process, some paintings have taken as long as two or three years to complete. “That encrustation has a great deal to do with embedding a life into the painting,” Williams explained to CBB.”It’s a result of time involvement rather than just producing an image.”

En route, Williams does with a brush what a musician does with a favorite instrument. “The thing that has been a hallmark,” the artist said of his work during his CBB interview, is “a sense of musicality and a sense of structure underneath.” Historian William Janson has likened this to jazz improvisation, and Williams agreed. Even his earlier paintings showed this influence : “Though geometric abstraction, it was never based upon formalism. It was all done on the spot, intuitively and with a great deal of improvising.”

Reflected His Heritage

“Williams marries the language of the abstract expressionist tradition with the collective beliefs and response of his Southern heritage, “Mercer concluded. Early in his career Williams painted works in homage to his grandparents, Elbert and Sophie Jackson. In the 1980s the artist began another autobiographical series, 111-and-a-half, the Harlem address of a favorite aunt and uncle of his. A deep blue in these works recalls the light in the apartment hallway.

One painting-still in his living room, unfinished-features panels of blue superimposed with symbols-hearts and birds, for Charlie “Bird” Parker, a musician beloved by the family. Titles such as Carolina Shout and Harlem Sunday reflect Williams’s origins. A work called Winter Roses includes a collage of actual quilt batting. When asked by CBB to comment on how the observer can recognize this reflection of his African American heritage, Williams demurred: “It’s kind of like “how do we recognize the difference between [bandleaders] Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman?’ They’re both playing jazz, but there’s a difference between the two and the difference is the sum total of their experiences.”

For Williams, the experiences of the artist determine what can be created in the work of art. “What I try to do is be very focused on my own history, my own experience. I don’t consciously try to make “ethnic art.’ What I’m assuming is the sum total of my experience will come to bear on my art.” This focus on the individual artist’s life does not prevent art from communicating across social boundaries such as race or upbringing, however, because, as he emphasized in his CBB interview, “anything that hits a resonant note for other people means they have had the same cumulative experience that I have had.”

As a teacher, Williams told CBB he tells his students that “every time you walk into the studio, you have to start with your first experiences all over again, to relearn every time you go to that painting.” For himself, he said that creating one’s own experience incorporates all experience. “My experience is the American experience and you can’t talk about America without talking about both black and white. To linger on that is to misunderstand the accomplishments of all of its artists. “Williams continued along those lines in summing up the value of learning about others’ experiences: “If you’re going to [write my biography and educate], then what one has to focus on are the accomplishments as opposed to the discipline. That’s the issue, not my reaction to racism. The issues are my accomplishments in spite of that.”

Sources

Books

History of Art, Fourth Edition, edited by H.W. Janson, Harry N. Abrams Inc., p. 746.

Periodicals

American Visions, April 1991, pp. 15-19.

Detroit Free Press, July 3, 1994, p. 3G.

Metro Times (Detroit, MI), July 8-12, 1994, p. 18.

New York Times, November 17,1991, p. 20; Aug. 28, 1992.

Raleigh News and Observer, July 18, 1993.

Others

Mercer, Valerie, William T. Williams (catalogue essay for the Montclair Art Museum exhibition), 1991.

Additional information for this profile was obtained by a personal interview with Williams on March 10, 1994.

—Joan Oleck

Williams, William T. 1942—

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