Installation view of Brittney Leeanne Williams: Huddle (November 30, 2023-January 10, 2024) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990, Pasadena, CA) transforms Southern California vistas into what she calls “emotional landscapes: representations of psychological states, memories, and emotional ties,” often staging a red, bent figure in tableaux where the natural world and architecture blend and reflect each other. Williams’s female forms become conduits for her exploration of feminine and Black identities.
Williams’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; The Hole, New York, NY; Nicodim, Los Angeles, CA; Monique Meloche, Chicago, IL; Mamoth, London, UK; Carl Kostyál, Milan, IT and Stockholm, SE; Para Site, Hong Kong, CN; Galerie Droste, Paris, FR; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, GE; Newchild, Antwerp, BE; Collaborations, Copenhagen, DK; and at institutions such as MoAD, San Francisco, CA; and Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA; among others. Her work is represented in various public collections, including the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; the Domus Collection, New York, NY and Beijing, CN; HE Art Museum (HEM), CN; Fundacion Medianoche0, Granada, ES; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. She is a 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence. In 2018, she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. Williams’s artist residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; the Fores Project, UK; Arts + Public Life; and McColl Center.
Brittney Leeanne Williams in the studio, Los Angeles, CA, 2023. Photo: Yubo Dong, ofstudio
BRITTNEY LEEANNE WILLIAMS: HUDDLE
November 30, 2023-January 10, 2024
THE NATURAL WORLD: PART II
March 9-April 13, 2022
BRITTNEY LEEANNE WILLIAMS: THE ARCH IS A PORTAL IS A BELLY IS A BACK
March 5-April 14, 2021
QUARTERS: ANNE BUCKWALTER, DUSTIN HODGES, JJ MANFORD, BRITTNEY LEEANNE WILLIAMS
December 11, 2019-January 29, 2020
FOG DESIGN+ART 2022
ELANA BOWSHER, HULDA GUZMÁN, BRITTNEY LEEANNE WILLIAMS
Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA, Booth 206
January 20-23, 2022
The bent posture of a semi-abstracted female silhouette dominates 15 of the 17 artworks by Brittney Leeanne Williams, currently on view at Alexander Berggruen [March 5–April 14, 2021]. This show of paintings and works on paper made 2020–2021 embodies the Chicago-based artist’s investigations into the physical and psychological exhaustion of being a black woman in the United States. Sensuously folded, a recurring figure’s posture has been simplified as a smooth rounded arc to indicate the back. A few simple curves imply the breast and belly, and introduce a void beneath them. Variations come from other formal components that energize and solidify the work. In addition to her frequent use of red on the figures, which the artist discusses in various interviews as referencing the pulsing lights of ambulances in Chicago, Williams also includes subtle line work, elements of the natural environment as setting, and positions of arms and legs that create the positive and negative spaces in the compositions.
In Williams’ work, the negative spaces are just as much a positive form of the bent figures. She implies that all the crevices and surfaces are deserving of her affection, and our attention.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on the work of Brittney Leeanne Williams and her unparalleled explorations of the human figure in relationship with the landscape. By working with a single posture, the contorted or bent over body, the Chicago-based artist speaks of psychological states as well as the misshapen and emotional experiences of being a woman. […] Whether its shape reflects in the mountain range in the background or it carries tree-tops, has the sun setting within or an ocean underneath, gets rained over, or dissolved in the wind, it becomes a powerful symbol of different scenarios in which women bend, especially on a psychological level.
“These works expand on my interest in bringing together expressionistic, almost symbolic landscapes with geometric picture planes, arcs, and borders,” the artist told Juxtapoz about the particular element she was exploring with these pieces. “They bow, bend, and break out of borders while their feet inch into the beyond.”
Brittney Leeanne Williams’ paintings depict figures in transformation and bodies subject to unseen pressures or forces. In Williams’ own words, the figures twist and knot themselves into emotional landscapes. These figurative and pictorial inversions create a body-space continuum. Their postures hold tensions that connect the present moment to centuries past.
The Chicago-based artist’s rich, vivid works see her employ a recurring red figure who plays host to the experiences, emotions and memories of women.
The bent back of Williams’ figures is integral, and for the artist it reveals a woman’s place in society, or at least in the stories Williams remembers being raised on. “I can see women emotionally, psychologically and physically being contorted in that way,” says the artist. “A woman bends to pick up her child, she bends in tiredness, in prayer, in love-making. I just think there’s something about this bent back that is really insightful about the woman’s experience.”
We are pleased to share with you a new essay, “Brittney Leeanne Williams: Black Women at/in the Bend,” written by New York-based curator, producer, and multidisciplinary artist Niama Safia Sandy. Through historical, societal, and spiritual lenses, Sandy explores Williams’s portrayal of the Black female experience and the portals Williams’s paintings open for Black women.
This essay was published on the occasion of Brittney Leeanne Williams: The Arch Is a Portal Is a Belly Is a Back (March 5-April 14, 2021) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.
