Enacting world-building through his practice, London Williams (b. 1998; Milwaukee, WI) constructs dreamlike interiors that serve as refuge for a cohort of spectral figures, reconfiguring the past and present to envision a Black queer utopia. Williams takes charge of fabulating a realm constantly in flux, drawing elements from his upbringing in the Midwest and a liberated life in the present. By treading an emotional line between reverence and nostalgia, the artist references both the grandeur of religious art with the empathetic qualities of historic photography in devising a realm outside of linear time.
Williams pursues the theatrical through monumental paintings, and his practice branches into drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, performance, and installation to immerse his audience in the imagined spaces he creates for his subjects. Through these parallel strategies, the artist thins the veil between worlds, drawing viewers into his domain of characters who dress, dance, and express acts of care.
Williams’ subjects are drawn from life, their likenesses referential of people in his community: fellow artists, relative strangers, and members of Pittsburgh’s lively ballroom scene. These subjects pose on set-like arrangements in his studio; homelike spaces transfigured from furniture, light, and drapery that hover somewhere between a living room and a green room.
The artist conjures a dimension that encompasses a range of semantics — studio, house, closet, club — and each, though drawn up from subconscious memory, resist any monolithic or singular interpretation. This practice builds a home in multiple senses: a space of safety, a fostered sisterhood, a kiki house. In these concentric reads, multiple spotlights, and vanishing points, Williams deconstructs clear perspective, literal and figurative, to clear paths towards authorship.
London Williams’ work has been exhibited at Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT; Platform Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Haw Contemporary, Kansas City, MO; San Dao Gallery, Wuhan, China, and DooSung Paper Gallery, Seoul, Korea. The artist is a 2024-25 artivist with 1Hood Media Academy, Pittsburgh, PA; and a 2024-25 artist-in-residence with the Brewhouse Arts Distillery Emerging Artists Program, Pittsburgh, PA. Williams has received recognition through grants by the Pittsburgh Foundation, PA, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Montreal, Canada. In 2019, Williams was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Williams earned a Bachelors in Fine Arts in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute, MO, and a Masters in Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University, and lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.