Art + Artists

Antoine Williams is an artist and educator whose works explore power, perception, and fear as they relate to institutional inequities. He finds inspiration in science fiction, hip-hop, and his working-class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina. Working in painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, and printmaking, Williams continues to develop his own mythological story around the complexities of contemporary black life. Williams earned his BFA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While in Charlotte, he helped form the God City Art Collective, where he participated in a number of socially engaged, community-based art projects, including pop-up exhibitions, afterschool art programs, underground rap shows, and film festivals. Williams has been honored with a 2014-2015 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. He was an artist-in-residence at the Indie Grits Film Festival in Columbia, South Carolina; Elsewhere, Greensboro, North Carolina; and at Golden Belt Galleries, Durham, North Carolina. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina; Look Out! Gallery, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; Greenhill, Greensboro, North Carolina, and at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York. He is currently an assistant professor of art at Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina.