Sue Williams

Overview

I want to draw attention to issues. I want people to be informed. It’s a scary time. Everything gets integrated into the art, not always consciously. The paintings become a refuge. If I have visibility, I have the responsibility to try and change things.

Sue Williams addresses issues of politics, gender equality, the female body, and sexuality through the use of concealed messages in abstract, vibrantly colored paintings.

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Biography

Some works look almost like Pop Art; one of them looks a lot like a brain from Zap! comics. I try not to make them specific, but sometimes they look cool, so I leave them. Others have almost no image, but it’s probably there if you look hard enough.

Sue Williams was born in 1954 in New York, NY. She studied at Cooper Union before transferring to California Institute of the Arts where she received her BFA in 1976.

Through concealed messages in abstract painting, Williams' vibrantly colored and highly specific work serves as a foil to the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement. She came to prominence in the early 1980s, with works that echoed and argued with the dominant postmodern feminist aesthetic of the time. In the years since, Williams' focus has never waned yet her aesthetic interests have moved toward abstraction along with her subject matter and...