Gerald Williams (artist)

Gerald Williams (born 1941, Chicago, Illinois) is an American visual artist whose work has been influential within the Black Arts Movement, a transnational aesthetic phenomenon that first manifested in the 1960s and continues to evolve today. Williams was a founding member of AfriCOBRA. His work has been featured in exhibitions at some of the most important museums in the world, including the Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In addition to his influence as a contemporary artist, he has served in the Peace Corps, taught in the public schools systems of Chicago and Washington, D.C., and served as an Arts and Crafts Center Director for the United States Air Force. In 2015, he moved back to his childhood neighborhood of Woodlawn, Chicago, where he currently lives and works.

Williams graduated from Englewood High School in 1959, which was then located at 6201 S. Stewart. The school was torn down in 1979, reopened in another location, and then that location was closed in 2008.. After high school, he enrolled as an accounting major at the downtown Chicago campus of Roosevelt University, located at 430 South Michigan Avenue. After leaving Roosevelt, he studied from January 1961 to December 1962 at Woodrow Wilson Junior College on South Halsted Street, known today as Kennedy-King College, where he received his Associates Degree in art. After serving for two years in the Air Force, he returned to Chicago in 1966 and enrolled in night classes at Loop College, now known as Harold Washington College, while also taking drawing and design classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1967, he enrolled full time in art classes at Chicago Teachers College, now known as Chicago State University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Chicago Teachers College in 1969. In 1973, Williams moved to Washington, D.C., and enrolled in the graduate program at Howard University. He earned his Masters of Fine Arts degree in painting from Howard in 1976.

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