LG Williams

LG Williams is a Los Angeles artist and an Endowed University Instructor at The Academy of Art University, and recently The Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-In-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, CA. Williams’s practice spans many artistic disciplines, including art criticism and art history.

Williams received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. He has exhibited at various national and international venues, among them The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia 2011, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa Art Preserve, Laguna Art Museum, Klaipėdos Kultūrų Komunikacijų Centras, Cologne Art Fair, Artissima, LISTE, Art-O-Rama, ARCO, Super Window Project, Gloria Maria Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, Steven Wirtz Gallery, and Gallery Subversive to name a few venues.

Williams’s artworks are featured in museums and private collections in Europe, U.S., and Japan. According to Kenneth Baker, an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, “Williams wants to hold open a space in which painting might resume in earnest.” His exhibition, In Abstentia, held at Super Window Project in Kyoto, was reviewed in Artforum magazine in May 2011. In 2014 Donald Preziosi (Emeritus Professor of Art History, UCLA) included Williams in his Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity (Routledge). In 2012 Baron Osuna (Super Window Project) for Gloria Maria Gallery co-curated LG Williams / The Estate of LG Williams, Anthology: 1985-2012, a mid-career retrospective exhibition in Milan. Thomas Frangenberg, University of Leicester, wrote the catalog essay for the accompanying publication.

Williams’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Huffington Post, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Juxtapoz Magazine, LA Weekly, and O.C. Weekly, among others.

An heir to West Coast and Beat Generation art, LG Williams is one of the youngest members of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, whose membership includes Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman.

Williams has taught studio art, art history, art appreciation, and graphic design courses at the University of California-Davis, University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, Arizona State University, and The University of Hawaii, to name a few institutions.

In 2008, when arts reporter Steven Heller selected the Top 10 Art Books of the Year for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, he singled out Williams’ opening sentence from his clandestine introductory essay, written under pseudonym for E Pluribus Venom: The Art of Shepard Fairey.

In 2009 Cengage Learning / Wadsworth published Williams’s Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (edited by Julia Friedman) — an innovative pedagogical tool designed to facilitate learning art history through drawing. In 2011-12 Williams was the art critic for The Tokyo Weekender, the oldest free English publication in Japan.

In 2016 Williams (PCP Press) conceived and produced Wasted Words and Dust Bunnies by Dave Hickey (the latter volume edited by Julia Friedman). Both publications were reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement — while The UCLA Hammer Museum, SITE Santa Fe, The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA), and The Las Vegas Contemporary Art Center (C.A.C.) featured events and appearances with Hickey and Friedman. Additionally, Wasted Words appeared in Netflix’s Velvet Buzzsaw, the art-horror film set in Los Angeles starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

In 2018, Williams published Wayne Thiebaud Lectures on Art and Drawing, Williams compilation of student lectures of the legendary painter who taught Art at the University of California Davis until retiring — with an introductory essay by Dr. Gene Cooper, Professor Emeritus, California State University Long Beach. Recently, Williams published three compilations of ‘tweets’ and ‘Twitter poems’ by the legendary Los Angeles artist-iconoclast Raymond Pettibon: SCKONTHIS!!, Tuff Luyv, and my fists r free.