"Embarking on a journey can be both exciting and terrifying. It is going towards something new, something unknown. It is also leaving what we have behind. In this painting the figures are trying to decide whether or not to jump off a boat without a rudder, without a sail, and to risk it all at sea. There seems to be another ship hovering nearby, with a hint of  a sail and netting that could help. But we don’t know and that’s really how we’re all feeling at some point  -- the dilemma to just risk it all to trust. Will this rocking boat, without any way of steering yet full of your history, take you to a safe place? Or should you just jump into the wind?" - Philemona Williamson on Compass Set

With Philemona Williamson's (b. 1951, New York, NY) two recent paintings poetically titled, Compass Set, and Suspicious Touch, she invites the viewer to use their imagination to try to interpret their complex narratives. Continuing her storytelling, she populates the paintings with children and adolescents, beautifully encapsulating themes of time and memory, revealing fleeting moments that are once unknown but relatable. The paintings inspire infinite tales as her subjects intertwine with our own experiences. The lush color palette and dreamlike positioning of the figures ensure that their vulnerability - of age, of race, of sexual identity - is seen as strength and not as weakness.

Philemona Williamson was most recently highlighted in Season 41, Episode 6 of PBS’s “State of the Arts” as well as in an episode of the Smithsonian’s “ArtNation” series. Since the 1990s Williamson has had many solo shows and has been represented in important group exhibitions alongside such contemporaries as Whitfield Lovell, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker. In 2019, her mid-career retrospective was held at the Montclair Art Museum, NJ; she collaborated with author Marilyn Nelson to create a series of paintings for the children’s book “Lubaya’s Quiet Roar” (Penguin Random House). She receives numerous awards and residencies including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock-Krasner, National Endowment for the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson also served on the advisory board of the Getty Center for Education. She has shown in institutions including The Queens Museum of Art, The Bass Museum in Miami, and the Contemporary Art Museum, in St. Louis. Williamson’s work is in museum collections including the Montclair Art Museum, NJ, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI, Mint Museum, NC, Smith College Museum of Art, MA, Hampton University Museum, VA and Sheldon Art Museum, NE. Her public works include murals for the MTA Arts in Transit Program. Art & Object named her in the “10 Contemporary Black Artists You Should Know More About”. From 2016 to 2022 she taught painting at Pratt Institute and Hunter College in New York.