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The artist has worked extensively with the College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute
As part of Black History Month, an exhibit featuring art from painter and printmaker William T. Williams will run in the Williams Center for the Arts Gallery through March 7.
Lafayette Celebrates Black History Month
The exhibit, William T. Williams: Theme and Variations, pulls from Williams’ 40 years as an artist and includes a painting and 17 serigraphs which demonstrate his desire to integrate the content of his personal experiences with his knowledge of the modern aesthetic.
Williams will give an artist’s talk at noon Monday, Feb. 9 in room 108, and a reception will be held from 3-5 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 8. An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Robert S. Mattison, Marshall R. Metzgar Professor of Art History, will be available. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursdays. For more information, contact Michiko Okaya, director of Lafayette art galleries, at x5361 or email.
As a painter, Williams has relied on layering both as a method of integrating structure and as a metaphor for levels of experience. His interest in layering was exposed to new opportunities and challenges when he served as the 2006 David L. Temple and Helen J. Temple Visiting Artist at the College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute (EPI). EPI offers an open studio concept where students work together with professional artists to investigate and experiment with a wide variety of approaches to the print medium.
At EPI, Williams became involved over two years in a series of experiments with silkscreen printmaking, a process which relies on the successive printing of screens, allowing the reuse of screens—each of which embodies a set of visual discoveries—in a wide variety of combinations.
Williams first worked on Monk’s Tale and Ron’s Tale (named for jazz musicians Thelonius Monk and Ron Carter), graphically powerful images printed using single inks on different toned paper. This was followed in 2008 by Karen’s Tale and Bee’s Quest—complex, mutli-screen print editions commissioned by the David C. Driskell Center, University of Maryland.
Williams has received numerous honors including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts awards, and the 2006 North Carolina Governors Award for Fine Arts, the highest civilian honor the state can bestow. His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, The Library of Congress, and Yale University Art Gallery.
The Williams Center Gallery is presented under provisions of the Detwiller Endowment. The Williams Center and Grossman Galleries are funded in part through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.