Sue Williams
Born: 1954
Hometown: Chicago Heights, IL
Lives and Works: Brooklyn, NY
Website: http://suewilliams.net/
Education:
BFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, 1976
Cooper Union, New York, NY, 1973
About The Artist
Sue Willliams' work is populated by patterns in motion executed in bright colors with energy and a cartoonish sense of humor (she cites Mad Magazine as a source of inspiration). Her sarcastic vocabulary addresses women’s issues such as pornography, loss, pride, and misogyny. The familiar doodles and scrawls, erasures and texts that inhabit the canvases refer to surrealist vocabulary; they emerge from colorful shapes that take the form of spontaneous and at first, unedited scribbles and verbal puns. Williams is preoccupied with the deprecation of the female body and the psychological traumas they encompass. The repetition of organic forms that seem to float in the colorful backgrounds of her canvases look like abandoned human limbs or intestinal shapes that form a complex system of references and memories that somehow live repulsively and congenially with each other.
More recently, Williams’ strewn figuration has been subsumed into abstract shapes and lines that are no less representative of Williams’ concern with feminism and gender politics. One of the strongest women artists to emerge from the 1980s, Williams’ mark on feminist art history is equal to that of her peers including Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger.
Galleries
303 Gallery, New York, NY
Select Permanent Collections
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Whitney Museum of American Art. New York, NY
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Works by the Artist
