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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

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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

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