NEW YORK, NY.- William T. Williams: Word of Eye is the debut presentation of the newest body of paintings by William T. Williams (b.1942). The gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of the artist’s work, the presentation includes eleven paintings created between 2024 and 2025 whose luminous surfaces shift according to the positioning of the viewer, demanding sustained looking and insisting on a phenomenological viewing experience. Simultaneously a continuation of the artist’s decades-long engagement with surface and a deliberate broadening of his palette, these new works show Williams pushing the boundaries of abstraction, furthering a dialogue with the entirety of his oeuvre, and enacting an endless exploration of the possibilities of his medium. The latest development in the artist’s lifelong commitment to finding a mode of mark-making that is undeniably his own, these new paintings are imbued with a sense of monumentality that is expressed through their beauty, compositional complexity, and perceptual impact.

Titled after one of the paintings on view, Word of Eye speaks to viewers through visual rhythm, form, texture, and tone. To accompany the installation, Williams has compiled a playlist of songs(Opens in a new window) he has listened to on repeat while painting these works.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has been the exclusive representative of Williams since 2016. In 2017, the gallery mounted William T. Williams: Things Unknown, Paintings 1968–2017 and published a fully illustrated catalogue with interviews between the artist and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and Courtney J. Martin, then the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at Dia Art Foundation. In 2019, the artist unveiled his 465 Series in a second solo show at the gallery, William T. Williams: Recent Paintings, for which a catalogue that included an essay by art historian Jonathan P. Binstock and an interview with Williams conducted by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist was produced. The third gallery exhibition to feature the artist’s work, William T. Williams: Tension to the Edge (2022), focused on several never-before-seen large-scale geometric paintings created between 1968 and 1970. The exhibition coincided with the publication of Smokehouse Associates, a major study of the public art collective that Williams founded in 1968, published by the Studio Museum in Harlem and Yale University Press with contributions from Eric Booker, Charles Davis II, Ashley James, and James Trainor.

"The work is complete with the viewer because it’s about me trying to communicate with another human about being human… It’s not the physical object. It’s the experience you have in front of that object or with that object. When I’m sitting, listening to music, it’s not the horn, it’s not the person on the stage, it’s what their efforts are doing to me."

— William T. Williams [1]



[1]William T. Williams, in conversation with the gallery, 2026