Michael Williamson
Merion Station, PA
Educational Background
Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson,New York, M.F.A. in Painting
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, B.A., cum laude
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fall term abroad in Rome, Italy
Exhibitions
The Cosmopolitan Club, Philadelphia, January-March 2023
Main Street Arts Small Works Show, Clifton Springs, NY, November-December 2022
Main Street Arts Small Works Show, Clifton Springs, NY, November-December 2021
Hamilton Street Gallery, Bound Brook, NJ, Group Show, Fall 2019
Imperfect Gallery, Group Show, Fall 2019
High Point Café, One-Person Shows, 2009, 2011, Winter 2017, Winter 2018
Cathedral Village, November- December 2016
Imperfect Gallery, Faculty Show, 2015
Foulkeways, Faculty Show, 2014
The Baldwin School, Faculty Show, 2014
JMS Gallery, Chestnut Hill, PA, December 2007, Group Show
JMS Gallery, Chestnut Hill, PA, March 2006, Two-Person Show
Rosenfeld Gallery, Small Works Show, December 2005
Grants & Awards
Fallingwater Teacher Residency
Art Fellow Residency, Skidmore College
Milton and Sally Avery Scholarship, Bard College
Yale Summer School of Music and Art, Norfolk, Connecticut
Employment
Senior Instructor in Adult Education, The Barnes Foundation, 2020 - present
Artist's Statement
Speak Memory is the title of an evocative memoir by Vladimir Nabokov. It is a sensualist's recollection of his early childhood through the distilled, self-aware perspective of the adult novelist.
It is through the lens of memory and feeling that these landscapes emerge. These paintings, their light, color, and tactile surfaces are more about feeling, memory, dream, remembrance, and forgetting.
Most recently I’ve been reading The 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah-Jones, The Brutish Museums, Dan Hicks, and Caste, Isabel Wilkerson and this has informed my subconscious about the forced journey my ancestors made to the Americas. In my mind, these currently constructed paintings trace a journey to freedom from West Africa, South Carolina, and Virginia. The land of my ancestors is the land of savage beauty.
“I am the dream and the hope of the slave.” Maya Angelou
Michael Williamson
