Providence, RI, August 27, 2024 | The esteemed David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University proudly announces the upcoming exhibition Franklin Williams: It’s About Love, which will be on display from September 19 to December 8, 2024. This exhibition signifies the first East Coast institutional retrospective of the distinguished octogenarian artist Franklin Williams (b. 1940). It’s About Love delves deeply into Williams’ vibrant, intricately textured multimedia works, created through a disciplined studio practice spanning six decades. The exhibition will feature 40 pieces, including sculptures, complex multimedia canvases, and works on paper, each teeming with color, texture, and organic forms. Often considered a precursor to and contemporary of the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s and various West Coast schools such as California Funk and Nut Art, Williams’ work resists simple categorization. His painting and drawing, which incorporate needlework, crochet, and other fiber arts learned during his childhood in rural Utah, are highly personal and use motifs rich in symbolism. His work sustains a delicate balance between figuration and abstraction, rigor and whimsy, while exploring themes of familial and romantic love, death, sorrow, and lust, with both humor and tenderness.
The retrospective is anchored by an exploration of the sixty years Williams has dedicated to a daily, meditative studio practice. Since 1970, Williams has lived and worked from his home in Petaluma, California, alongside his wife Carol Williams, who serves as both collaborator and studio manager. His studio seamlessly extends into their home, where the walls are adorned salon-style with ancestral heirlooms that deeply influence his practice. Williams’ own paintings and drawings are surrounded by handmade quilts, furniture, and artwork created by his mother, father, and paternal uncle. Raised in an environment steeped in art and poetry, Williams’ emergence as a visual artist was profoundly shaped by this backdrop, fueling his autobiographical approach to art-making. His parents, recognizing his talents despite his academic challenges due to undiagnosed color vision deficiency (CVD) and dyslexia, provided him with a studio and encouraged his burgeoning artistic abilities. An autodidact who learned to read in his mid-30s while teaching full-time at the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts, Williams embodies a self-taught ethos that remains skeptical of the international art world, paired with a deeply generous pedagogical career as a beloved teacher in the Bay Area. “I still work as deeply as I possibly can inward to where, now, I hear my own heart, and hear the whistling in my body, and sometimes I need nothing but what I am,” states Franklin Williams.
Although the size, scale, and palette of Williams’ work have varied over the years, his artwork retains a vibrant, even eccentric, use of color influenced by his color vision deficiency, which results in unique color recognition. His canvases are imbued with intense emotion. The joys of fatherhood and his profound love for his wife reveal Williams’ work as diaristic. Carol serves as the inspiration for much of his figuration and nearly all of the femme-reading bodies in paintings such as Twins (Part 1 & 2) (1976) and Standing Figure (circa 1990s). These erotically charged objects are devotional, intertwining love and sexuality into vividly hued human forms and bodily organs, becoming portraits of intimacy and marriage as well as moments of mourning. Several works in the exhibition mark intense periods of pain, such as the loss of an infant daughter in Baby Girl #2 (1970) and Baby Girl #4 (1971); the passing of Williams’ father in Last Gate (1982); and the looming death of his mother in Cutting Apron Strings (1982).
There are also joyous family portraits, exemplified in Pink Tea (1972), as well as celebrations of the international travel that punctuated their life in Petaluma, as seen in Secret Sweet Slovakia (2020) and Portrait 5 (2015). Williams’ playful engagement with materials, subject matter, and color has persisted from his earliest soft sculptures, included in the exhibition, to his most recent paintings and drawings, such as Fez Feeds Lovable Beauty (2020) and Sensuous Submission (2021). For Williams, art-making is an incredible gift—a nearly mystical process that channels what he refers to as “beauty, mystery, and myth” into visual form, capturing the highs and lows of a life immersed in love.
