Gerald Williams (born 1941 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American visual artist whose work has been influential within the Black Arts Movement,[1][2] a transnational aesthetic phenomenon that first manifested in the 1960s and continues to evolve today.
[8] After high school, he enrolled as an accounting major at the downtown Chicago campus of Roosevelt University, located at 430 South Michigan Avenue.
He grew up on South Evans Street, a block from Oak Woods Cemetery, in the Woodlawn neighborhood, with 10 siblings in a house his mother and father owned.
While working full-time as a facilities manager for the art department at Northeastern Illinois University, which was Chicago Teachers College North back then, he met an artist named Jeff Donaldson, who was on the faculty there.
After attending the first meeting with Donaldson and the others, Williams realized that, unbeknownst to him, another member of the group, Wadsworth Jarrell, was the artist who was renting the other side of the coach house.
After finishing his MFA, he participated along with other members of AfriCOBRA as a United States delegate to FESTAC 77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, which was held in Lagos, Nigeria.
Williams concluded his two-year assignment in the Peace Corps in 1979, ending it with a solo exhibition of his paintings titled "Can You Feel the Brand New Day," which was held at the French Cultural Center in Nairobi.
After leaving Kenya, he went on a two-month journey on his own to Cairo, Egypt, to Liberia, to Sierra Leone, to Nigeria, and to Senegal.
In 1984, he accepted a job directing the arts and crafts center on an American Air Force base in South Korea.
After five years in South Korea, he was transferred to Japan to direct the arts and crafts center at Yokota Air Base, about 25 minutes outside of Tokyo.
In 2001, he accepted his final transfer, to direct the arts and crafts center at Lajes Field, in the Azores, a group of islands off the coast of Portugal.