Art Fact Friday #24 Philemona Williamson

William Mandela Matthews
Jan 5, 2024
2 min read

A nationally renowned contemporary artist recognized by vibrantly colored, dynamic paintings. The artist contemporaries included Neo-Expressionists Eric Fischl, David Salle, and Julian Schnabel all prominent in the 1980s. The metaphors of the artist work speak to interpersonal relationships. The artists use of figures of different complexions signals multi-racial ethnicities. The artist has served the faculty of Parsons School of Design, The Getty Institute for Education in the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Bard College, Rhode Island School of Design and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Philemona Williamson was born in New York City in 1951. She earned a bachelor's degree from Bennington College, 1973, and a master's degree from NYU in 1979. Bennington exposed Williamson to post-modernism. Williamson came of age as an artist during the 1980s, when a renewed interest in figurative painting was on the rise.

She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1990. Since the 1990s Williamson has had multiple solo exhibition; exhibiting her work at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC. She also has features in group exhibitions including contemporaries like Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker. Their work was featured in a recent show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s." Williamson, metaphorical narratives separate her work by thoroughly examining her work, her life and her art world experience.

She has resided and worked in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, since 1997. She received her first invitation to the Montclair Art Museum in 2003 as part of an exhibition, “Growing Up: Childhood in American and Native American Art.” In 2009 Williamson received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Painting 2018 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in 2020. Williamson’s most recent show opened April 8, 2022 at the June Kelly Gallery in NYC.

Williamson has shown in multiple institutions including The Queens Museum of Art, The Bass, Miami, and Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Williamson’s work is in museums including the Montclair Art Museum, NJ, Kalamazoo Institutes of Arts, MI, Mint Museum, NC, Smith College Museum of Art, MA, Hampton University Museum, VA and Sheldon Art Museum, NE. Her public works include murals for the MTA Arts in Transit Program located at the Livonia Ave Station. Art & Object named her “10 Contemporary Black Artists You Should Know More About”. She also created a mosaic mural in the Glenwood Campus School for the NYC School Authority. She currently teaches painting at Pratt Institute and Hunter College in New York.

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