Walter Williams

American, 1920–1998

Walter Henry Williams, painter, printmaker, and ceramicist, was an African American artist who was born in Brooklyn, New York on 11 August 1920. As a child he became very withdrawn due the death of his mother when he was five years-old and the domineering, authoritarian nature of his father. As a young man, Williams explored Harlem where he met artists who inspired him to dream of becoming one. His dream was put on hold when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. His assignment of burying the dead soldiers, sometimes burying them alive, would haunt his life.

He studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School with Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino on the G.I. Bill between 1951 and 1955. Williams was included in the 1953 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of America Art. He also spent the summer of 1953 studying art on scholarship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, Maine. Upon graduating from the Brooklyn Museum Art School, Williams won a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and used it to travel to Denmark. In 1957, Williams returned from Denmark and was included in the Whitney’s 1957 Annual Exhibition: Sculpture, Paintings, Watercolors. He resided in Mexico between 1959 and 1963 and, during that time, Williams won the National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1960 and the Silvermine Award in 1963.

Courtesy Annex Galleries