Artists

Franklin Williams is a pivotal yet underrecognized figure in Bay Area art whose work has defied easy categorization for more than six decades. Though often associated with Funk, Nut, Visionary, and Pattern & Decoration, Williams has consistently resisted movement labels, maintaining an idiosyncratic practice rooted in material invention, personal imagery, and formal experimentation. His intricately constructed sculptures, paintings, and works on paper often incorporate unconventional techniques—such as stitching yarn and crochet thread directly into their surfaces—drawing inspiration from domestic craft traditions, ornament, and the psychological spaces of fantasy and desire. His art persistently grapples with elemental themes of sexuality and mortality, fantasy and reality, abstraction and embodiment.

Williams’s early career gained momentum while he was still an undergraduate at California College of the Arts, where art critic John Coplans famously recognized his “strange, intensely patterned drawings” as his authentic voice—an insight that led Williams to abandon more conventional painting and embrace a more radical, personal path. In 1967, he was included in Peter Selz’s landmark Funk exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum, cementing his role in the Bay Area’s experimental art history.

Since then, Williams has exhibited widely in the U.S. Recent solo presentations include Franklin Williams: New Work at The Bell, Brown University (2024); Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2024); Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2022, 2019, 2017); and the Sonoma County Art Museum, Santa Rosa (2017). Notable group exhibitions include Nuts and Who’s: A Candy Store Sampler (2023, San Jose Museum of Art); To the Max! (2023, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa); Lover Earth: Art and Sexuality (2020, Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College); With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 (2019, MOCA Los Angeles; traveled to CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY); and Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art and Design (2019, ICA Boston).

In addition to his studio practice, Williams shaped generations of Bay Area artists through teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (1966–1999) and his alma mater, California College of the Arts (1969–2018).

His work is held in major public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Oakland Museum of California; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, among others.