SARAH WILLIAMS
WORKS
BIOGRAPHY
Sarah Williams’s paintings show a view of America that is so ubiquitous most people never even notice it: the car wash, a snow-covered shed, an ice cream cone-shaped ice cream store, all cloaked in darkness and bathed in the incandescent light of street lamps. Williams has been praised for her “uncanny mastery of light” and “insinuations of quiet desperation” infused in her nocturnes of everyday middle-America.
One critic explained, “Williams’ intimate familiarity with the imagery in addition to its ambiguity allow her paintings to have both an immediacy of communication to American audiences and a narrative depth.” While she has been compared to the great American Regionalist painter Edward Hopper and photographer Gregory Crewdson, whose spooky and quietly jarring elaborately staged photographs are practically films unto themselves, it is Williams’ deliberate use of brush strokes that reintroduce the human hand to scenes devoid of actual people. Art historian Ben Lima argues that Williams’ “…paintings feel more humane than do their possible points of reference.”
Sarah Williams received an MFA in 2009 from University of North Texas and has been exhibiting widely across Texas and the U.S., and is the recipient of numerous awards, including Purchase Award from UNT's Art in Public Places in 2009 and a Hunting Art Prize Finalist in 2010. She has exhibited and participated in a panel for the Dallas Contemporary’s Here, There & Beyond, and recently completed an artist-in-residence program in Vermont. Williams recently exhibited at the Galveston Arts Center, and had a solo exhibition at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in 2010.
EXHIBITIONS
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D Magazine, Front Row, Lima, Ben, "Reveiw: Sarah Williams' Nightfall: Anonymous Nowheres Rendered in Rich Oils," January 2012
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Our Visual Culture, "Sarah Williams: Painting the New American Landscape," May 2011
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29-95 Art, Britt, Douglas, "Sarah Wiliams' Nocturnal Vision at McMurtrey Gallery," February 2011
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Houston Chronicle, Britt, Douglas, "Artist captures a lonely beauty," Houston Chronicle, February 2010
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29-95 Art, Boyd, Robert, "Spooky night scenes at McMurtrey Gallery," January 2010
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Modern Luxury Dallas, Review, "Sarah Williams", December 2009
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Renegade Bus, Goode, Joshua, excerpt on Sarah Williams 'Night Vision', September 2009
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