Franklin Williams: It’s About Love – Opening Party and Conversation with the Artist

Join artist Franklin Williams in conversation with Kate Kraczon, Chief Curator and Directors of Exhibitions of The Bell / Brown Arts Institute, to celebrate the opening of Williams’ survey exhibition It’s About Love. Bursting with color, texture, and organic form, the intensely personal work of Franklin Williams (b. 1940 in Ogden, UT; lives and works in Petaluma, CA) sustains a tension between figuration and abstraction. In his rigorous yet whimsical artworks, Williams evokes familial and romantic love, death, sorrow, lust, and humor quite tenderly, with motifs and shapes intimately bound by a symbolism that has spanned the many decades of his studio-based practice. A reception in the List Lobby will follow the conversation and, as always, The Bell is free and open to the public.Franklin Williams has exhibited extensively in California, specifically the Bay Area, since the 1960s. He was included in the 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and 1967 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent solo exhibitions include several at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2022, 2019, 2017), Garth Greenan Gallery, New York (2024), and a major exhibition at the Sonoma County Art Museum, Santa Rosa, CA (2017). In 1967, the artist’s work was included in the legendary Funk exhibition organized by Peter Selz at the Berkeley Art Museum. Williams has been included in the recent major group exhibitions With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019) which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019); and Jean Conner, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington and Franklin Williams, Karma, New York (2017). His work is in the collections of institutions including the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Oakland Art Museum; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art; and the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.Kate Kraczon is Director of Exhibitions of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) and Chief Curator of The Bell at Brown University. She oversees the BAI’s exhibition programs, which include The Bell and its collection of over 7,000 works in List Art Center, the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Brown’s robust Public Art collection. As a member of the BAI leadership team, she is involved in many aspects of developing and lecturing within the BAI academic program. Since joining Brown, Kraczon has curated exhibitions with artists Elisabeth Subrin, Savannah Knoop, Jules Gimbrone, Harry Gould Harvey IV, and Faith Wilding. She was previously the Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (2008-2019), where she organized over thirty exhibitions.