Awards
1992 Art Matters Fellowship [19]
1997 California Community Foundation's Fellowships for Visual Artists [10] [20]
Megan Williams | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1956 (age 67–68) Cleveland, Ohio |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | California Institute of the Arts, B.F.A., 1978 |
| Known for | Contemporary art |
| Notable work | Helter Skelter |
| Movement | Expressionism Surrealism |
Megan Williams (born 1956) is a contemporary artist who creates wall drawings, three-dimensional drawings, and traditional sculpture.
Born in 1956 in Cleveland, Ohio, in the U.S., [1] Williams earned a B.F.A. in 1978 from the California Institute of the Arts. [2] As of 1990, Megan Williams was married, and had a son. [2]
Williams' earliest exhibits were collaborative. Mark Rosenthal of University of California's Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive commented in 1978 that in Williams' collaboration with Jon Borofsky, "the artists worked on each other's images in the manner of participants in a jazz rhythm section who respond to one another's musical thoughts, alternately leading or following." [3]
As early as 1983, art critics explicitly reviewed Williams' work favorably. John Russell of The New York Times called her an "artist of true quality". [4] By 1993, Roberta Smith of The New York Times characterized her work as "figurative political art", comparing the "animated autonomy of her lines" with that of Betsy Friedman Murunashi-Lederman and Nicole Eiseman. [5]
The Santa Monica Museum of Art 1990 description of Williams' wall drawing, Totem, pointed out she "took advantage of the freedom of working on a large scale and in an ephemeral situation". [6] Williams herself explained her wall art: "I see an entire room as a blank sheet of paper, allowing the viewer to exist in it, rather than outside of it. It places the work in closer proximity to the psychological space with which we surround ourselves." [6]
Christopher Miles of ArtForum in 2003 called Williams a "master of laugh-till-you-hurt images that invite our projections like Rorschach blots". [7] In 2008 he observed that Williams' practice was "turning the inner outward", a defining characteristic of her work, noting she "substitutes the goofy for the surreal, effecting what is indeed a kind of expressionism, but one that is as self-effacing and comic as it is assertive and heroic." [8] Miles identified two modes that Williams uses: the first, lighthearted, optimistic contemplation; and the second, humor in a cartoon format to suggest "violence and angst". [8] He wrote, "Williams' images, while fantastic and fairy-taleish in their specifics, are quite the opposite in their tenor and implications." [8]
In 2008, critic Holly Myers of the Los Angeles Times described Williams' style as "unmistakable": using cartoonish forms such as human figures and anthropomorphized buildings; suggesting "rubbery agility, giddy pictorial buoyancy and an often furious sense of internally generated motion". [9] A gallery's 2008 description of her work said it was "populated by careening forces and dyspeptic explosions," noting one work was "sci-fi and apocalyptic", an "outburst of atomic proportions". [10]
ArtsBlock at the University of California, Riverside, characterized Williams in 2014 as "a painter who uses cartoon imagery in her paintings that depict characters with riotous, bad mannered attitudes". [11]
Williams has exhibited at multiple venues:
1992 Art Matters Fellowship [19]
1997 California Community Foundation's Fellowships for Visual Artists [10] [20]
Richard Diebenkorn was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began his extensive series of geometric, lyrical abstract paintings. Known as the Ocean Park paintings, these paintings were instrumental to his achievement of worldwide acclaim.
Donald Jess Bachardy is an American portrait artist. He resides in Santa Monica, California. Bachardy was the partner of Christopher Isherwood for over 30 years.
Angela Bulloch, is an artist who often works with sound and installation; she is recognised as one of the Young British Artists. Bulloch lives and works in Berlin.
Jonathan Borofsky is an American sculptor and printmaker who lives and works in Ogunquit, Maine.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, formerly known as the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA), is a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, California, United States. As an independent and non-collecting art museum, it exhibits the work of local, national, and international contemporary artists. Until May 2015, the museum was based at the Bergamot Station Arts Center in Santa Monica, California. In May 2016, the museum announced an official name change to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and its relocation to Los Angeles's Downtown Arts District. The museum reopened to the public in September 2017.
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from 2008, succeeded by Julie Rodrigues Widholm in August, 2020. The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums program.
John Altoon was an American artist. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Armenian parents, from 1947 to 1949 he attended the Otis Art Institute, from 1947 to 1950 he also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in 1950 the Chouinard Art Institute. Altoon was a prominent figure in the LA art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Baxter Museum, Pasadena, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Carolyn Mary Kleefeld is an English-American author, poet, and visual artist. She is the author of twenty-five books, has a line of fine art cards, and has had numerous gallery and museum awards and exhibitions between 1981 and the present, in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other major cities.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Alexandra Grant is an American visual artist who examines language and written texts through painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and other media. She uses language and exchanges with writers as a source for much of that work. Grant examines the process of writing and ideas based in linguistic theory as it connects to art and creates visual images inspired by text and collaborative group installations based on that process. She is based in Los Angeles.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.
Elsa Longhauser is the founding executive director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, United States, formerly the Santa Monica Museum of Art (SMMoA), where Longhauser served as director from 2000 until the museum ended operations in Bergamot Station in 2015. From 1983 until 2000, Longhauser served as director of the gallery at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Travis Collinson is a visual artist whose paintings take elements from photographs and sketches and reinterpret them at larger scale.
Anthony Hernandez is an American photographer who divides his time between Los Angeles, his birthplace, and Idaho. His photography has ranged from street photography to images of the built environment and other remains of civilization, particularly those discarded or abandoned elements that serve as evidence of human presence. He has spent most of his career photographing in Los Angeles and environs. "It is L.A.'s combination of beauty and brutality that has always intrigued Hernandez." La Biennale di Venezia said of Hernandez, "For the past three decades a prevalent question has troubled the photographer: how to picture the contemporary ruins of the city and the harsh impact of urban life on its less advantaged citizens?" His wife is the novelist Judith Freeman.
Jack Hooper was an American painter, muralist, sculptor, printmaker and art educator. Hooper was a major figure on the Southern California art scene, belonging to that generation of Los Angeles painters who matured during the late 1950s and the 1960s, painters such as John Altoon, Sam Amato, Robert Irwin, Lee Mullican, William Brice and Billy Al Bengston. He was an innovator in the use of new materials, most importantly plastic in art. He is known for abstract expressionist, mural and figurative painting. Hooper has exhibited in art museums and galleries nationally and internationally including solo shows in Europe, Mexico and the United States. Modeling renown UCLA art professor and figurative artist, Jan Stussy, the last 20 years of his life were spent in rural Mexico, where he drew and painted every single day until his death.
Julia Couzens is a California-based, American artist known for a diverse body of work that embraces unconventional materials and methods and includes drawing, sculpture, installation art, and writing. Critic David Roth identifies as a connecting thread in her evolving work, her "decidedly surrealist-symbolist sensibility, in which eroticism, the grotesque and the gothic mix in equal parts." Her work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Christopher Grimes Gallery and California State University, Stanislaus (2009), in surveys at the University of California, Davis and Sonoma Museum of Visual Art (1999), and group shows at the Crocker Art Museum, P•P•O•W, Orange County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, and BAMPFA, among others. Her art has been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Flash Art, New Art Examiner, and Art Practical, among other publications, and collected by institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California and Butler Institute of American Art, among many. In addition to working as an artist, Couzens has taught at several Southern California universities and writes about contemporary art for The Sacramento Bee and Squarecylinder. She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta community of Clarksburg and maintains a studio in downtown Los Angeles.
Bettina Hubby is a multi-media conceptual artist currently residing in Los Angeles.
Brian Wall is a British-born American sculptor now living in California. His work consists mainly of abstract welded steel constructions, and his career stretches over six decades. He has had numerous solo shows, and his sculptures reside in many private and museum collections. He was a faculty member at the Central School of Art in London, and a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley.
Pearl C. Hsiung is a Taiwan-born American multi-media artist based in Los Angeles.
