LG Williams

LG Williams is an American artist, writer, publisher, critic, art historian, and educator. He formerly served as an Endowed University Instructor at Academy of Art University. He has also served as the Emmy Henning Distinguished Professor of Visual Art and Art History at D(D).DDDD University and as the Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-in-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, California. His practice spans visual art, publishing, criticism, art history, pedagogy, and digital projects.

Williams received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis. He has exhibited at national and international venues, including The Internet Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2011; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; di Rosa; Laguna Art Museum; Klaipėdos Kultūrų Komunikacijų Centras; Cologne Art Fair; Artissima; LISTE; ART-O-RAMA; ARCO; Super Window Project; Gloria Maria Gallery; Lance Fung Gallery; Steven Wirtz Gallery; and Gallery Subversive.

Williams’s artworks are held in museums and private collections in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote that “Williams wants to hold open a space in which painting might resume in earnest.” Williams’s exhibition In Abstentia, presented at Super Window Project in Kyoto, was reviewed in Artforum in May 2011.

In 2014, Donald Preziosi, Emeritus Professor of Art History at UCLA, included Williams in Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity, published by Routledge. In 2012, Baron Osuna of Super Window Project, for Gloria Maria Gallery, co-curated LG Williams / The Estate of LG Williams, Anthology: 1985–2012, a mid-career retrospective in Milan. Thomas Frangenberg of the University of Leicester wrote the accompanying catalog essay.

Williams’s work and writing have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Japan Times, the Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, HuffPost, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, East Bay Express, The Daily Californian, Juxtapoz, Java Magazine, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, Artweek, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and The Sacramento Bee, among other publications.

An heir to West Coast and Beat Generation art, Williams is a member of the Rat Bastard Protective Association and is among its youngest members. The association’s history includes Bruce Conner, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Wallace Berman.

Williams has taught studio art, art history, art appreciation, and graphic design at the University of California, Davis; the University of Southern California; California College of the Arts; Arizona State University; and the University of Hawai‘i, among other institutions.

In 2008, when Steven Heller selected the Top 10 Art Books of the Year for The New York Times Sunday Book Review, he singled out the opening sentence from Williams’s clandestine introductory essay, written under a pseudonym, for E Pluribus Venom: The Art of Shepard Fairey.

In 2009, Cengage Learning, through Wadsworth, published Williams’s Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, edited by Julia Friedman. The book was conceived as an innovative pedagogical tool for learning art history through drawing.

From 2011 to 2012, Williams served as art critic for The Tokyo Weekender, the oldest free English-language publication in Japan.

In 2016, Williams, through PCP Press, conceived and produced Dave Hickey’s Wasted Words and Dust Bunnies, the latter edited by Julia Friedman. Both books were reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hammer Museum at UCLA, SITE Santa Fe, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Las Vegas Contemporary Art Center also presented events featuring Hickey and Friedman. Wasted Words later appeared in Velvet Buzzsaw, the Los Angeles-set art-horror film released by Netflix and starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

In 2018, Williams published Wayne Thiebaud Lectures on Art and Drawing, his compilation of Thiebaud’s student lectures, with an introductory essay by Gene Cooper, Professor Emeritus at California State University, Long Beach. Williams later published three compilations of writings by the Los Angeles artist Raymond Pettibon: SCKONTHIS!!, Tuff Luyv, and my fists r free.

Williams is perhaps best known for Prosperity Aesthetics™, his post-consumer, trans-dimensional aesthetic theory. Also described as the Prosperity Art Principle, the Wealth Art Principle, or the Principle of Artistic Success, Prosperity Aesthetics™ operates a conceptual belief system centered on artistic faith, positive speech, and donations to artistic causes are presented as instruments of aesthetic esteem and material wealth. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams’s live Prosperity Aesthetics™ seminars have reached more than 100,000 Zoom viewers across 20 countries.

In 2005, Williams received an Honorary Doctorate from The Institute for Subversive Art and Analysis in Cedar Rapids.