In 1982 Williams was included in Recent Acquisitions of the Schomburg Collection at the Schomburg Center in New York. In 1977, Williams participated in the second World Festival of Black Arts and African Culture in Lagos, Nigeria (FESTAC). He was a Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, City University of New York from 1971 to 2008. Collectors such as AT&T and General Mills purchased his art and his work was featured in both Life and Time magazines. The same year, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited his work twice. Williams' first one-man show at New York's Reese Palley Gallery in 1971 resulted in the sale of every painting. In 1970 Williams was commissioned by the Jewish Museum (New York), and the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. He also took part in numerous exhibitions including the Studio Museum in Harlem's Inaugural Show, X to the Fourth Power, and New Acquisitions held at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1969 he participated in The Black Artist in America: A Symposium, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The Museum of Modern Art acquired his composition 'Elbert Jackson L.A.M.F., Part II' in 1969, and by 1970 his work was being exhibited at the Fondation Maeght in the south of France.Īfter his formal education at Pratt Institute and Yale University in the 1960s in the visual arts curriculum, he investigated the physical boundaries one finds uncommon to explorations in the science of color, setting for himself the standard of achieving in his work an inherent completeness out of the reach of other painters. Williams quickly gained attention from the mainstream art world. In 1968 he received a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Yale University School of Art and Architecture. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute i(1966) and studied at The Skowhegan School of Art. He attended the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan (now the High School of Art and Design), which held many of its classes at the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After the family's move to the North, his art talent was recognized by the head of a local community center, who gave him a room there to use as a studio. Williams (born July 17, 1942, in Cross Creek, North Carolina) is an American painter known for his process-based approach to painting that engages motifs drawn from personal memory and cultural narrative to create non-referential, abstract compositions.

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