Walter H. Williams

The subjects of his artwork evolved from urban street scenes straight out of his New York upbringing to the metaphorical images of rural Black children playing in fields of sunflowers, butterflies and shacks.

He was born on August 11, 1920, to Walter and Louise Williams in Brooklyn, New York, one of two children. His mother was a domestic worker who also painted and encouraged his interest in art. His sister Dorothy, a year younger, would herself become an artist. His mother died of pneumonia a year after she separated from his father. The children were raised by a strict father and stepmother, and William's dream of becoming an artist faded. He escaped into a childhood dream world that would reappear later in his woodcuts. After high school, he was drafted into the Army in 1942, serving in France during World War II. He got married, had two children and worked blue-collar jobs to make a living. In 1948, he decided to pursue art and joined a group of artists and musicians, including Charlie "Bird" Parke r, in Greenwich Village in New York. He shared a studio with several of the artists, some of whom like himself would eventually emigrate to Europe. They pushed him to use the GI Bill to take classes at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art. He attended the school from 1951 to 1955. Williams received a scholarship to spend a summer at the Skowegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1953. He roomed with artist David Driskell, the only other African American student there, who would become a lifelong friend. Driskell, who became a well-known art historian, teacher and curator, included Williams in many of the art exhibitions he organized over the years. Williams won a first-place award for painting at Skowegan. In a 1976 newspaper essay chronicling the history of African American artists, renowned artist Romare Bearden described Williams as “gifted.”

Williams participated in several exhibits in the early 1950s. In 1953, he won a third prize gold medal for his painting “On the Railing” in the fourth annual exhibit for artists and students of New York City at the Harlem Branch of the YWCA. He was 32 years old, lived in Englewood, New Jersey, and was a student at the Brooklyn Museum school. The speaker at the event was artist Charles White. That same year, he participated in a group show at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 21st annual exhibition of contemporary artists. He submitted a painting titled “Store Front Christ.” The next year, he had a solo exhibit at the Roko Gallery in New York. It would be the first of three shows over the ensuing years. Williams’ early paintings depicted the life of Black people in the neighborhoods and in the jazz clubs around Brooklyn and Harlem where he grew up. The titles he chose represented the life he saw: “By The El (1955),” “Store Front Christ (1953),” “Poultry Market (1953), “Untitled (Seated Man with Bowed Head) (1951),” “Untitled (Cityscape) (1954),” “Untitled (Girl on a Fire Escape) (1954)” and “Quick Nap (1952),” (girl napping on a metal apartment railing). His use of color, his style and his subjects were influenced by Gregorio Prestopino, one of his teachers at the Brooklyn Museum school, and Williams used what he learned to illustrate the children in his colorful paintings of urban life. In 1955, he was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship that he used to travel to Denmark. He chose the country because his mother's father was from the Danish West Indies, a former colony of Denmark, and had spoken to him about the country. He left for Denmark in 1956 and often visited its island of Bornholm where he saw landscapes for the first time, his second wife Marlena, a ceramicist and Danish citizen, noted. The trip changed the trajectory of his works, shifting the subjects from city streets to country fields with symbolic elements that denoted rebirth and freedom. These new images of children in fields, sunflowers, butterflies, blackbirds and a bright sun appeared often in William's subsequent works, each taking on the theme of a southern landscape, the title of one of his paintings. Driskell noted that these new works held a deeper meaning: “A boy chases after a butterfly, he is a black boy but the color of his skin does not hinder him from being every boy in the world who seeks to know the freedom of flight. A girl picks flowers and she witnesses the sumptuous smells of a thousand perfumes and colorful dreams … In all these visionary happenings, Walter Williams makes the joy of life unending.” Williams also painted several versions of Madonna – a woodcut in 1965 and a colored pencil drawing in 1967. He returned to the United States in 1957.

In 1964, he married Marlena Jacobsen and they had a son. Williams died of liver cancer on June 13, 1998.

YWCA, Harlem Branch, 1953 Whitney Museum of American Art, 1953, 1955, 1958, 1963 Oklahoma Art Center, 1958 Roko Gallery, 1954, 1962, 1963 Instituto Nacional de Dellas Artes, Mexico, 1958 Texas Southern University, 1962 Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1963 Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1964 Musee d’art et d’histoire, Geneva 1965 Golden Door Gallery, New Hope, PA, 1966 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1966 College of Mount St. Joseph's, 1967 Fisk University, 1967, 1968, 1975, 2019 Cornell University, 1967 The Parthenon, Nashville, 1967 Louisville Art Workshop, 1969 Studio 22, Chicago, 1969 American Wind Symphony Orchestra Barge, Pittsburgh, 1969 Lee Nordness Galleries, NY, 1969 Mount Holyoke College, 1969 Brooks Memorial Arts Gallery, Memphis Jackson (MS) State College, 1969 Stephens College, Missouri, 1968 Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1969, 2014 Hudson River Museum, 1970 Davenport Municipal Art Gallery, 1970 Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, Nashville, 1971 National Armory, Wilmington, DE, 1971 Art Consortium, Cincinnati, 1979 Studio Museum of Harlem, 1982 New Orleans Museum of Art, 1984 Kenkeleba House, 1986 Glatt House Gallery, Salem, OR, 1991 M. Hanks Gallery, 2004 Baltimore Museum of Art, 2015

Metropolitan Museum of Art Brooklyn Museum of Art Whitney Museum of American Art National Gallery of Art Cincinnati Art Museum Riverside Museum of Art, NY Philadelphia Museum of Art The Studio Museum in Harlem Georgia Museum of Art Smithsonian American Art Museum David C. Driskell Center The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art Baltimore Museum of Art The White House, National Collection of Fine Arts Mexican American Institute, Mexico City Howard University Gallery of Art Fisk University Galleries Middlebury College Museum of Art