William T. Williams

[3] A Guggenheim Fellow, Williams he received the Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2024.

[9][11] 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.

[9] After Art and Design, Williams enrolled in New York Community College City Tech, where he earned an associate’s degree in 1962.

[17][18] From 1968 until 1970, Williams helped organize the Smokehouse Associates, a group of artists, including Guy Ciarcia, Melvin Edwards, and Billy Rose, who painted murals in Harlem in traditional and non-traditional spaces.

The Museum of Modern Art acquired his composition "Elbert Jackson L.A.M.F., Part II" in 1969,[16][1] and by 1970 his work was exhibited at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.

Williams returned home to the dusty unpaved roads of North Carolina for the inspiration of a new palette, one born of the luster and glow of mica, false gold, and fox fire from earth's pulsating cover.

In 1977, Williams participated in the second World Festival of Black Arts and African Culture in Lagos, Nigeria (FESTAC).

[20] In 1985, he was featured in a solo exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, North Carolina.

William also took part in Contemporary Visual Expressions, a show at the Anacostia Museum and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.. William's traveled to Venezuela with painter Jack Whitten and sculptors Melvin Edwards and Tyrone Mitchell for the opening of their exhibition Espiritu & Materia at the Museum of Visual Arts, Alejandro Otero.

In 2000 Williams took part in an extensive traveling show entitled To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

In 2005, Williams was invited to create a print at the Brandywine Workshop in conjunction with receiving the James Van Der Zee Award for Lifetime Achievement.

The Artic Workshop located in Philadelphia was founded in 1972 to promote interest and talent in printmaking while cultivating cultural diversity in the arts.

During this year, Williams' work was also shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem in Energy and Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964–1980.

[4] In 2017, his work was included in the landmark exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which was organized by Tate Modern, London, and traveled to six major institutions across the United States through 2020.