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Reba and Dave Williams have
built what is thought to be the largest and broadest collection of prints by
American artists in private hands. The collection numbers more than 5,000
objects made by 2,000 artists, and dates from the 19th century to
recently completed works. The Williams began collecting prints in the early
1970s.
The Williams collection
emphasizes American prints of 1900-1960, with special focus on prints made by
artists working on the Federal Government’s relief programs of the 1930s-40s,
notably the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The collection also includes
approximately 500 screenprints, and more than 200 late 19th century
etchings.
As an adjunct to their
collecting, Reba and Dave Williams have studied art history at Hunter College
and CUNY, The Graduate Center. Reba Williams received her Ph.D. in 1996. Her
dissertation was on the history of the Weyhe Gallery, the leading dealer in, and
promoter of, American prints in the first half of the 20th century.
See the Biographies of Reba and Dave Williams.
An important feature of the Williams collection are the
traveling exhibitions created from it. Over the past 18 years, the
Williams have mounted and circulated 16 separate exhibitions, at 100
museum venues in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan. A
scholarly catalogue, typically authored by the Williams, has accompanied each of
these exhibits. See Traveling
Exhibitions History for complete information.
From 1986 to 2001, most of
the Williams collection was installed in the Alliance Capital Building, 1345
Avenue of the Americas, New York City, where Reba and Dave Williams were
employed. In 2003, the Williams collection was moved to The Print Research
Foundation.
The first traveling exhibition drawn on the Williams
collection was “American Screenprints.” In 1985-86, the Williams researched the
beginnings and development of screenprinting, a printmaking technique that
originated in the U.S. as a fine art form in the late-1920s. They authored two
articles on this topic for Print Quarterly, the scholarly magazine of print
study. These articles were the basis for the catalogue they authored
accompanying “American Screenprints,” which toured museums throughout the world
from 1987 to 1993.
Another
group of prints from the Williams collection—an exhibition titled, “Alone in a
Crowd, Prints of the 1930s-40s by African-American Artists” – toured 17 U.S.
museums from 1992 to 1997. “Alone in a Crowd” was composed of 105 prints, many
by artists who had received little or no public attention for 50 years. This
group of prints was donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and formed the
basis of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2003 titled “African
American Artists, 1929-1945.” The Williams have continued to collect the early
work of African American artists.
“The Sight
of Music,” images of music by 20th century artists, is one of the most recent
exhibitions traveled by the Williams. The exhibition toured museums, usually in
tandem with music festivals, in Austria, Italy, Poland and seven U.S. cities.
Other touring exhibitions drawn from the Williams collection have included
prints of New York City images, American sporting prints, and prints by artists
influenced by Picasso.
The most
distinguishing characteristic of the Williams collection is its breadth. All
styles and movements of American art are reflected: Realism, Impressionism,
American Scene – the optimistic Regionalists of the Midwest and the
socially-concerned and generally pessimistic urban artists – Surrealism,
Expressionism, Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism (including Jackson Pollock’s
prints and Lee Krasner’s prints – again, the Williams published their research
on both Krasner and Pollock in Print Quarterly), and the numerous
styles pursued by today’s artist printmakers.
The
collection is also a more than 100 year visual American social history. It
begins with the Civil War, reflects Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, early
urbanization, the First World War, the Jazz Age and 1920s boom, the Depression,
World War II, and the 1940s-50s American art reflecting more of the artist’s own
emotions and less of the outside world. The collection includes work by
recognized American master printmakers—John Sloan, George Bellows, Edward
Hopper, Reginald Marsh, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg.
But the collection is dominated by lesser-known artists, whose work has dropped
from critical and public attention. Through their collecting, publishing
research on, and exhibiting the work of these lost artists, the Williams have
revived interest in, and the reputations of, many 1930s-40s American artists.
A previously shown exhibition at The New-York Historical Society was composed of
19th century American prints. It, too, featured little-known or near forgotten
artists of that period, as well as rare works by well-known artists, including
Thomas Moran’s Mountain of the Holy Cross and Winslow Homer’s The Signal of
Distress, perhaps the only extant copy of this print. Another exhibition of
19th century etchings from the collection, entitled “In the Age of Winslow
Homer—American Prints 1880-1900,” was exhibited at the Dulwich Picture Gallery,
London, from February 22, 2006 to May 21, 2006, in conjunction with a Winslow Homer retrospective.
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