Considered an “artist’s artist” Neil Williams’ relatively short career was punctuated by his influential involvement in Minimalism and is most known for his pioneering of the shaped canvas alongside the abstract giant, Frank Stella. Both would go on to share studio space in Sagaponack, NY alongside sculptor John Chamberlain.
Williams was born in Bluff Utah in 1934, and at the age of 15 he ran away, lied about his age, and joined the US Marine Corps. Following his stint in the military, Williams attended the San Francisco Art Institute where he first showed his works at the City Lights Book Store. After receiving his BA in 1959, William’s quickly moved to New York City.
Williams played an enigmatic roll in the New York art scene, as Frank Stella put it, “Neil was a free spirit in those days. There was a big contrast in his personality, however. He would be quite patient and be with the work whereas when he got out of the studio, he was a wild man.” The infamous Max’s Kansas City was Williams’ watering hole of choice, as frequent and one-time customers included Andy Warhol, Lou Reed & the Velvet Underground. Artists like John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Richard Serra, and Donald Judd. Musicians like Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and John Lennon, and even early and important performances by Aerosmith, Bob Marley and The Wailers, and Bruce Springsteen. Though William’s helped his close friend, Mickey Ruskin, incorporate the establishment and even convince various artists to donate works for free bar tabs, Williams would begin to remove himself from the then chaotic American artist’s social scene in the mid to late 1960s.
Williams strung together showings at the Green Gallery (1964) and the Andre Emmerich Gallery (1966 and 1968) both in New York City, and the Dwan Gallery (1966) in Los Angeles. Even further, he was a part of the now defining “Systemic Painting” (1966) group show at the Guggenheim curated by Lawrence Alloway, featuring artists like Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Kenneth Nolan, and Robert Ryman. Championing his shaped canvases, Neil William’s was also an archetypal example of what it meant to experiment with what was then known as hardline abstraction. Alloway defines Systemic Painting, or Minimalism, in relation to the preceding movement, Abstract Expressionism in the following statement:
“The end-state of the painting is known prior to its completion. This does not exclude empirical modifications of a work in progress, but it does focus them within a system. A system is a unified whole, the parts of which demonstrate some regularities.”
Williams also participated in the 1967 and 1973 Whitney Art Annuals and received the Guggenheim fellowship in 1968. He held a solo exhibition in 1982 in Brazil where he would hope to relocate and then a career retrospective at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City in 1986.
Williams’ style would develop drastically throughout the latter half of his career. He wouldn’t hesitate to evolve his work with a greater sense of painterly abstraction, eventually colliding floral elements that he found as inspiration in Brazil with the hard color palate he had utilized in his earliest Minimalist works. Even more, though, Williams would also develop a collaged style, pasting mixed media onto canvas, dripping paints over found objects like paint brushes, and creating reliefs with secondary frames. While he maintained a fluctuating personal, professional, and stylistic involvement in the development of post painterly abstract art, Williams also held teaching posts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Metro State College in Denver, and Syracuse University.
Examples of Williams’s work can be found in public collections throughout the United States, including the Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania; the MIT-List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, Colorado; the Guild Hall Museum of East Hampton, East Hampton, New York; the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. A posthumous exhibition of Williams’s work was held at the Galleria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1989.
Williams died in 1988 at the age of 53 from a heart attack. He would never live to see his desire of living and creating in Brazil permanently.