From The Principal’s Office To The Art Museum, Robin F. Williams Returns To Columbus

As a student at Thomas Worthington High School in Columbus, OH, Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) remembers going to the principal's office with her art teacher to defend a painting the school wanted remove from senior art exhibit. He had copied a painting of a nude woman from “Art in America” ​​magazine, hiding the figure's face with pixelation.

“That was my proto-feminist art practice,” Williams told Forbes.com, laughing. “I actually received a scholarship for this painting in a competition and it was meant to be honored in the senior art show, but the administration thought it would be too controversial. My teacher and I had to explain -censored them, gave them a crash course in the history of feminist painting and allowed me to be in the show as long as I wrote an artist statement about why it wasn't porn.”

Williams didn't need to defend his paintings with Ms. Maurer when the Columbus Museum of Art opened “Robin F. Williams: We've Been Expecting You,” the first institutional solo show for the artist who depicts evocative figures set between the reality. and surreal.

As for the title, it's not the museum you'd expect the once-precocious local artist now living in Brooklyn to fill its walls, it's the paintings you've been waiting for.

“I like to think of the figures in my work as having a certain self-awareness or awareness and it's a way of playing with the power dynamic between the viewer and the figure in the painting,” explains Williams. “Framing the show as a group of paintings that are actually anticipating the viewer, or waiting for the viewer, I hope it changes the context in which you experience them.”

The Art Museum of Columbus

Williams began taking art classes in Columbus when he was five years old. His grandmother accompanied him. No finger paint or Play-Doh. Oil painting.

“(Painting) has been a lifelong companion and I feel so loved, it's still there for me,” she says.

The future artist was not a frequent visitor to the CMA during childhood. One memory of the place he carries was a visit to his father when he bought him a book of postcards from the gift shop featuring the work of well-known American painters. George Taker among them.

“I hadn't learned to look at paintings in a museum, but it definitely sparked something,” Williams said. “I carried (those postcards) for the rest of my childhood and young adulthood because there were paintings that really inspired me and were very formative.”

Now he hopes to similarly influence another generation of Columbus children who visit the museum with his paintings.

“This really excites me and I've thought about it,” Williams said. “I hope to be making art that is expansive. I hope that (visitors) see my paintings and make you believe that there are other possibilities, other ways of being, other ways of experiencing the world that are not so narrow, not so scary nor prescribed. To the extent that I was able to see these performances as a young person, they really helped me.”

Williams identifies as queer and non-binary. In her work, she challenges the stereotypical representations of women and sexuality seen through art and popular culture.

“As a child, I was quite nervous about puberty because I understood that this would be the time where I felt I would have to take on very prescribed gender roles,” she recalls. “There was always a certain awareness that what was being reflected back to me didn't match my felt experience and making art was always a way to resolve that disconnect and make sense of something I felt in the world.”

Williams' work also has gender expectations. He paints men at rest and women reveling in guiltless joy. He does it, unapologetically, as a storyteller, relying on the figure, which was not always as fashionable as it is today.

“I emerged at a time when the narrative in painting was really despised. It's really interesting to see that explode now because we're dealing with the fact that different identities have been left out of the fine arts discourse and some identities can't be represented without context, without narrative,” Williams said. “I was working with representation and the narrative at a time when it was thought to be something separate or not allowed within the discourse of painting. There was always the danger that it would tell something to the viewer instead of making a work that is an experience.”

Robin F. Williams x Marie Laurencin

Williams' exhibit has been combined in Columbus with “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris.” Both shows opened together and close on August 18, 2024. Although born a century apart on opposite sides of the Atlantic, they share an innovative figurative art practice that challenges conventions of femininity and gender subjectivity.

“It's amazing to be paired with (Laurencin) in this exhibition space and to be in this context,” Williams said. “She was also a queer artist, a bisexual artist, she had a lot of powerful male contemporaries, she lived through the war and she had many different romances in her life with men and women and she continued to make art about what her internal experience was like. which was not necessarily well received.”

Laurencin (1883–1956) was a French painter. The word “Sapphic” refers to attraction or sexual activity between women.

The show was acclaimed when it premiered last year at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The News from New York said, “Laurencin had no interest in sticking to simple similes. She was only interested in creating a whole new world.”

As Laurencin's first major U.S. exhibition in more than 30 years, “Sapphic Paris” illuminates the artist's radically challenging vision, his signature depictions of women in pastel hues and curvilinear forms.

“Sapphic Paris” demonstrates how Laurencin infused a feminine and queer aesthetic into the artistic currents of his time. From establishing his initial practice in pre-war Paris, fleeing to Spain during World War I, and subsequently returning to Paris in 1921, Laurencin came to play a defining role within the Paris cultural milieu of the twenties In the following decades, Laurencin created works intimately in conversation with contemporary Sapphic literature, which included a transformative lens towards “Saphic modernity”.

Both exhibitions advance the Museum's stated goal of conveying queer voices in modern art, and hosting Williams continues its deep engagement with the greatest artists with a background in Columbus, a list that includes George Bellows, Roy Lichtenstein, Elijah Pierce and Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.