“There’s something to learn every time I go in the studio,” William T. Williams told me this past spring. “Anything that I did yesterday I have to forget, and I have to enter the studio and enter the paintings as if it’s the first time that I’ve had engagement.” He likes to keep the process “as open as possible,” but still, he is always “thinking about two or three steps ahead.” He keeps at it until he has followed “where the paintings are taking me, [then I] just go with that until I’ve exhausted it.”

We were standing in his sun-drenched studio behind his home in Connecticut, where sets of windows on three walls illuminate the interior for several hours each day. Williams and his wife, Pat, have split their time between here and New York for the past 15 years, and it’s a sharp contrast to the New York studio he’s had since 1968, which he intentionally kept free of natural light. “I boarded the windows up in the back, because I wanted to have a certain set light,” he said. “When we came up here, it was just the opposite. We decided to open the studio up, and that has influenced the paintings because of the angle of light and the geometry that the light brings in the afternoon.” The paintings, he said, have become more vertical. He might turn a canvas around and place it against a window to see the light pass through it. “That begins to inform me,” he said.

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Works in progress stood on two walls, and one lay on the floor: bands and rectangles of cracked paint butting against each other in a sense of organized chaos. A decade and a half’s worth of paint drips cover the floor. An equally paint-stained table holds the various mixtures of Golden paint that he’s currently using. In one corner are shelves holding smaller variations of his abstractions, which he described as “the key to everything.” Some might be the details of a section he’s trying to work out; others are miniatures of a larger canvas. Depending on where he is in the process, in-progress canvases will likely feature sections covered in blue painter’s tape, or cut-up Post-its in different shades, which he uses “to indicate where something’s going to be, but not necessarily the color,” he said. His latest abstract paintings feature two-inch vertical bands made up of different rectangles of color, roughly the size of the Post-its he uses to mark them out.

After laying down a clear layer for the underpainting, Williams begins to build up thin layers on different sections of the canvas, adjusting the thickness for the application as he goes. “Each new layer brings another element that I have to orchestrate,” he said. He leaves gaps between layers to create their signature cracked appearance, which is his way of exposing “the building up of the layers.” Most of these paintings take at least six months, though some he’s worked on for years, making subtle adjustments, for example, to one color, “changing the blue ever so slightly, tonally, and coming back into it.”

Each layer of paint is slightly different, depending on which solution of paint he’s using. Some are thinned with different amounts of alcohol, which speeds up the drying; others are thinned with water, which reduces the sheen of the surface. Getting the consistency just how he wanted it took years of experimentation. “The drying time is important,” he noted. Instead of using a palette, Williams works from plastic cups that contain each of these mixtures, allowing him to easily go back and make touch-ups if need be, or to re-up a solution when he runs out.

At the core of the work is a dedication to formalism—and to breaking down its conventions. “I want art that doesn’t just sit on the wall,” he said. “I want it to be as irritable as possible. It’s finding a hidden way or system that does that.” He is interested in what abstraction can channel. “There’s a twist that happens in terms of: If I’m not going to paint protest paintings, if I’m not going to paint a narrative painting where there’s a story, how do I talk about those kinds of feelings that led me to want to do dissonance, or something that’s off-kilter?”

Color, he says, is “the most difficult element in painting. If you’re doing something representational, the color will do what you want it to do because you’re simulating something. If you’re in abstraction, it’s the most difficult element to control. To get it outside of a prescribed thing, to get there to be some poetry or some magic in it, requires something else. There has to be something that’s offbeat, something that’s off-key in it to make it work.”

With his recent canvases, he wanted to play with the idea of figure versus ground. Jonquil (2021) features a cracked yellow background with a single band of yellow going down it; a third of the way down the band is a single red square, which whether it was “sitting in front of the plane, or sliding in back of that plane, or being a hole in that plane, that’s what began to interest me,” Williams explained. Though these newer works might look drastically different from his “Diamond in a Box” series from the late 1960s, in which planes of various colors and geometric forms collide and overlap in a harmonious dissonance, Williams sees them as being in dialogue with each other, though the earlier pieces don’t have nearly as many layers of paint. As he began to multiply these squares in later canvases, he started to see a relationship with his paintings from years ago. “That’s very much part of the paintings from the late ’60s: things passing in back and in front. That was just isolating one of those gestures.”

“There is a constant sense where you see him asking and answering questions in the space of the work, and he has done that for decades,” Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, told me. “What we then have is the legacy of not only this incredible practice but also the legacy of this incredible person who has been so committed to creating art, creating space, creating meaning.”

WILLIAMS WAS BORN in Cross Creek, North Carolina, in 1942. The family moved to New York when he was 4 years old, settling in Queens. Until he was about 14, his parents would send him back to North Carolina every summer, almost as soon as school let out. Williams had a penchant for drawing as a kid, and early on, two people nurtured his interest in the arts. Tommy Hemans, who ran a community center in the housing project where Williams lived, gave him materials, and Mrs. Ross, who taught his junior high school art class, suggested to his parents that he would benefit from attending the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design). There, he found himself surrounded by artists, both as professors and classmates, for the first time. “It was an immersion in the idea of what art is and what it can be—the power of what it can be. That early training was helpful,” he said. He first went to New York Community College, studying advertising production for two years. He got a job at Billboard Music Week, but estimates he lasted from May to July, when he saw an ad seeking applications to the Pratt Institute.

When Williams enrolled in Pratt in 1962, he started out in the graphic design department, but switched to painting in his sophomore year. His initial assignments, from academically trained painters who had students make figurative paintings, weren’t especially inspiring. His grades, he said, “were dismal, and I was really unhappy.” What marked a turning point was taking a class with painter Richard Bové. Without him, Williams said, “I would not be painting.” Bové told Williams to go see an exhibition of Hans Hofmann at the Kootz Gallery. “What struck me was the exuberance of paint and the physicality of paint, and just the sheer amount that Hofmann was using,” Williams said. “That sense that it’s a material that has a life of its own. For me, painting became about material.”

In 1965, during his junior year at Pratt, the faculty selected Williams to spend the summer studying at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, where, as he recalls it, he was the only student working in abstraction. “I arrived there struggling with trying to get away from the Abstract Expressionists,” he said. In Alfred Leslie, a second-generation Ab-Exer who had recently started making realistic figurative paintings, however, he found an instructor with whom he could have freewheeling conversations about scale and technique.

At Skowhegan, Williams won the Leonard Bocour Award, whose namesake had founded Bocour Artist Colors, the legendary paint manufacturer. Upon his return to New York, he met Bocour and visited the factory on West 52nd Street; for the next 15 years or so, Bocour would be one of Williams’s main patrons. “He was the person who invested in me, in terms of believing in me as an artist.” Bocour, who himself was an artist, shared painterly knowledge, too. If Williams was struggling to get the paint to lay how he wanted it to, Bocour would visit Williams’s studio, or Williams would head to the factory to meet up with a technician. “I’d show him the problem, and he’d show me how to fix it,” he said. Though, in one instance, the advice from a fellow artist using a home remedy, adding Ivory Soap to the paint, allowed the paint “to sink into the canvas miraculously.”

His time at Pratt, Williams said, “gave me confidence that this thing called ‘art’ was important, and that it was something that I could do the rest of my life.” Coming from a blue-collar background, “there was a disconnect,” he said, between “the idea of art and making a living.” Bové and the other faculty, like Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz, encouraged him to go to grad school at Yale, where, he recalled, painter Al Held “greeted me with his way of saying, ‘I like your work, and I like you, but you’re going to have to work.’”

After graduate school, Williams began his “Diamond in a Box” series, drawing on a shape he had known in childhood from the quilts of his grandmother and aunts and the design on the front of his mother’s phonograph. “It worked for me because it forces the eye to go to the top, then the two sides, then the bottom,” he said. “Any geometry had to play in relationship to that diamond.” Then he embarked on his “Shimmer Series,” inspired by how the light would flicker over the lake at Skowhegan, and how it would shimmer over Jamaica Bay during his early morning subway rides from Far Rockaway to Manhattan during high school. These canvases use just one color, Dioxazine Purple, which gives the impression of small waves rippling. By the late ’70s, he’d moved on to his “Roller” series (1978–82), using paint rollers and a wet-on-wet technique to apply some 15 layers of paint to the canvas. It was the most anti-art gesture he could think of; during the five or so years he worked in that way, he said, “the surfaces were getting more texture. I was getting marks out of them that I couldn’t make,” he said. By the early ’80s, he’d developed a palette that was “much richer and much wider,” which led to “overloading paintings with color. It’s just a lot of devilish things that interest me in terms of making a work of art. Painting is play to me—it’s work, but it’s play.”

That sense of play has made Williams something of an iconoclast. “He has existed outside of any one movement,” said Eric Booker, a curator who has worked with him, “and he hasn’t really been swayed by that. He’s stayed a very steady course that is true to him and what inspires him.” While his work is most certainly in dialogue with the history of 20th-century abstraction, Booker said, “there is always something in Bill’s paintings that remains entirely his own.”

FOR ALMOST AS LONG as he has been making art, Williams has been teaching it. Through an introduction from art historian Dore Ashton, he got a job at the School of Visual Arts in 1970, and was soon teaching at both SVA and Pratt; the following year, he moved to join the faculty of Brooklyn College via an invitation from Pearlstein, who was one of several Pratt professors now teaching at the public university. He shared an office with Pearlstein, Harry Holtzman, Allan D’Arcangelo, and Jimmy Ernst, all of whom he described as helping him navigate teaching by being able to talk with artists who “had lived a generation of art prior to me, as opposed to reading about it.” Williams stayed for nearly 40 years, retiring in 2008.

Among the artists he influenced at Brooklyn College was Nari Ward, who took Williams’s undergrad course New Materials, where students made a work from a New York telephone directory. “He was the right person at the right time,” Ward said, noting that when he began to move away from 2D art into sculpture, Williams suggested artists to look at—like David Hammons and Martin Puryear—then told him to “think about how they’re working, and how different is your engagement with this material.” Ward also took instruction from Williams’s own practice and his handling of paint. “I saw him negotiating both this sense of control over [the medium] and at the same time allowing a way to let go of that control to make the material teach him what needs to happen.”

Teaching wasn’t the only way in which Williams changed artists’ fates. In 1968, as he was finishing up his MFA at Yale, he wrote a proposal for an artist residency program. “It was the idea of, how do you go from being a student into making art your life’s work?” he explained. “One of the things that I saw missing was an infrastructure that was supportive of specifically minority artists. So many of them I met were self-taught. Others I met who had formal education always talked about what happens after school.” His proposal included a multipronged approach that would provide artists with a place to make their work (the residency component); supporters to buy their work (patrons) and to write about it (scholars and critics); and the venue to tie it all together (the museum). “Those are the components that come together in terms of an artist,” he said.

He shared the proposal with Ashton, who connected him with someone on the Junior Council (now the Contemporary Arts Council) of the Museum of Modern Art, who told him about a new institution Uptown that was being founded to support Black artists. Serendipitously, it was to be called the Studio Museum in Harlem, with the idea of it having a studio already baked in. He met with the founding trustees, who included Eleanor Holmes Norton and Betty Blayton-Taylor, and supporter Charles Cowles, and they were enthusiastic. Formally implemented in 1969 with Valerie Maynard as the first resident, the program still exists to this day; alumni include some of the most prominent artists in the world, like Kerry James Marshall, David Hammons, Simone Leigh, Lauren Halsey, Kehinde Wiley, Julie Mehretu, and Titus Kaphar, some of whom have gone on to establish similar programs elsewhere. “It lives at the center of the life of this institution,” said Studio Museum director Thelma Golden. Williams “connected the possibility of what it meant to create opportunity for artists, to mentor artists, to create a space for artists to fully engage with their creativity.”

Williams was also working outside the museum. Alongside artists Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose, he started the Smokehouse Associates, which produced nine murals around Harlem between 1968 and 1970. (A fragment of only one of them still exists, though Williams’s archives contain photo documentation of the others.) The artists engaged community members—a block association, a church, elders—to help them figure out what was needed for the space and even to help paint. Eric Booker, who curated an exhibition on Smokehouse at the Studio Museum in 2017, said he sees the project as “decentralizing the arts, which lives at the heart of [Williams’s] ethos as an artist and as an educator.” Mona Hadler, an art historian who conducted an oral history with Williams, believes that the works proved “abstraction can uplift” and that an artwork “need not be figurative to have a message.”

A given mural’s design and coloration were responsive to the site and the surrounding environs of that particular section of Harlem. “The community’s reaction is evident in the documentation,” Booker said. “You see children and elderly people inhabiting and participating in these spaces. There’s always this sense of a joyful possibility in the way that they’re interacting with these spaces. That means of social empowerment was important to the collective’s mission. It was less about the works themselves and more about the process of making the works, and what that did for the surrounding community.”

Williams compared the relationship between a mural and its site to the very nature of painting, especially his most recent work with multiple layers of paint. “By its nature, you’re layering material. You can go at it in terms of layering the material so that it’s seamless, or you can layer the material where there’s a dialogue between what’s underneath and what’s on top.”

WILLIAMS WORKED IN AN UNOFFICIAL CAPACITY for the Studio Museum for about a year. During that time, he organized one exhibition, 1969’s “X to the Fourth Power,” a four-person group show featuring only abstract art—a challenge, as he saw it, to the institution and its audience. Williams showed a “Diamond in the Box” painting, alongside a 100-foot chain sculpture by Melvin Edwards, whom he had met through Al Held; a large-scale beveled painting by Sam Gilliam, whom he had cold-called; and an 8-by-16-foot painting by Steven Kelsey, a white artist who had been his classmate at Yale. The reaction to it, Williams told me, was “bewilderment.” As art historian Kellie Jones explained in a 2019 essay, abstract art “did not match up with what some thought of as representative of Harlem, particularly in the heady days of the Black Arts Movement.”

That wasn’t the only response, however. Williams recalled one line from the show’s review in The New York Times: “To a large extent, the exhibition succeeds in making its point that art is art whether the artist is black or white, whether the work is exhibited in Harlem or in a posh downtown establishment.” “It was just blatant racism in terms of the first premise being that [Black artists are] not capable of doing [abstraction], and I think that was implicit in a lot of things,” he said. “I think that exhibition ended that discussion.”

Pushing that discussion further in a 1971 essay in ARTnews called “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful,’” the artist Frank Bowling wrote, “Much of the discussion surrounding painting and sculpture by blacks seems completely concerned with notions about Black Art, not with the works themselves or their delivery.” According to Williams, he and his friends Edwards, Gilliam, and Jack Whitten spent a lot of time discussing “what art could be instead of what it had been” and debating “the idea of what is an aesthetic,” a formal approach to abstraction that was unique to each artist. Because of the era’s “blatant racism,” particularly within art criticism, it wasn’t a conversation that much of the art world was ready to have.

In terms of his own paintings, Williams told me, “the early writing about the work made an assumption that the dissonance that was in the work was by default rather than by decision. The spatial cancellation in the paintings was by decision, not by default.” He deliberately gave his paintings titles that had “absolutely nothing” to do with their content, in order to “force the viewer to just look at the paintings and have a relationship with what they were looking at, rather than me giving them a prompt or a narrative.” Sister of Neckbone (1970), for instance, is an abstract painting with planes of color at oblique angles stacked on each other, broken up by lines and arcs. Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, included Sister of Neckbone in her 2021 exhibition “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” in a section that was “a meditation on the Black body itself.” The work’s title, she said, refers to “how people within the Black community give honorifics to each other,” some of which might be based on their bodies. The titular “Sister of Neckbone” acknowledges this woman and her role in that specific community, or as Cassel Oliver put it, it “is another way of honoring Black bodies, which is a very Southern thing to do.”

“The titles are events that a group of people have experienced,” Williams explained. Rather than provide a narrative, his naming mechanism comes from “wanting someone who has had that experience to walk in, see that painting, and laugh, because that experience is so important…. They and the painting are having an experience. There’s no looking. It’s of the present. Looking is, ‘That thing is there, and I’m here, and I’m looking at it.’ Experiencing it is, ‘It and I are one in the same.’ … Looking excludes people; experiencing doesn’t exclude anyone.” In the New York art world of the late 1960s, he recalled, people would often say, “That’s a good reading of that painting,” which he felt implied that there is “a prescribed literature or a prerequisite to experiencing the painting. What I’m suggesting is there are no prescribed things for my paintings. All you have to do is stand in front of it and experience it. You don’t need a narrative. You don’t need a PhD. You don’t need previous art experiences. It’s just you and that object. That’s it.”

AHEAD OF THE “X TO THE FOURTH POWER” show, Williams and Edwards spent a day clearing out the space and getting it ready for the exhibition. “The human energy that was put into that show bonded Mel, Sam, and me together for 50 years,” Williams recalled. “What came through that is a bond in terms of this idea of making art and what it was about. Meeting two other artists who were as demanding and as committed as I was—it was divine.” Their friendship lasted until both his friends’ deaths, Gilliam in 2022 and Edwards this past March.

It’s difficult to overstate just how important these friendships were to Williams. “Every time I come into the studio and work, they’re present—they’re there saying, ‘You keep going,’” Williams said. “It’s knowing that there were two other human beings with the same kind of absolute commitment to what they were doing. The dialogue continues even after they’ve passed away.” He recalled visiting Edwards’s studio in New Jersey and Gilliam’s studio in Washington, D.C., over the years, and being amazed “at just the sheer body of ideas and sheer body of engagement,” he said. “There’s a whole history back there that people are not aware of [in terms of] the amount of interaction, the amount of discussion, and the amount of thinking.”

Toward the end of my visit, I noticed what at first seemed to me to be a sculpture. Behind one wooden column were dozens upon dozens of dried-out paintbrushes dipped in various colors. I asked Williams about it. He paused and took a deep breath. “It’s a memorial,” he told me. Each time a friend he’s known for a long time—artists, musicians, poets, and more—dies, he will take the “brush that I’m working [with] that day, stop, leave the paint on it, let it dry, and put it on the memorial.” Brushes for Gilliam and Whitten are among them, as well as one for Edwards, which joined the ranks in March. “It has gotten very full,” Williams added, “but it didn’t start out that way. [They’re] always there.”