J.K. Williams
Daughter of a Midwestern sharecropper, J.K. Williams moved to Brooklyn, New York in the 1970′s to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with Honors in Sculpture from Pratt Institute. Ms. Williams designed sterling silver and gold jewelry sold in department stores around the country before apprenticing as a fine jeweler at Tiffany and Company. Within a few years she specialized in the execution of highly realistic jewelry pieces in gold, platinum and diamonds for Tiffany’s Special Order department.
The artist also studied sculpture, watercolor, drawing, anatomy, and oil painting at the Art Students League of New York with a variety of instructors in regular classes as well as in workshops. She has also attended classes and workshops at the Salmagundi Club in New York. Ms. Williams’s most intensive study has been at the Art Students League with Boston School realist Hilary H. Holmes and with Costa Vaviagiakis. She has been mentored for over ten years by Robert Douglas Hunter, New England artist and former President of the Guild of Boston Artists, and studied privately with Costa Vavagiakis. The artist’s historic precedents are strongly Boston School, going back in a direct line to the Academic tradition through Hilary H. Holmes and mentor Robert Douglas Hunter to R.H. Ives Gammell, William MacGregor Paxton, Jean-Leon Gerome, and Paul Delaroche to Antoine-Jean, Baron Gros.
Today Ms. Williams concentrates mostly on oil painting that encompasses a variety of subjects done in a highly realistic style. Her subjects primarily include the human figure and portraiture, animal and avian subjects, still lifes and landscapes.
Ms. Williams has received a number of awards and special recognition, including “Honorable Mention” in Salon International 2012, “Top Sixty” in Salon International 2010, and the Gail von der Lippe Merit Scholarship at the Art Students League. Additional cash prizes include the Academic Artist’s Association Award and a cash award from the Masur Museum of Art, and non-cash awards from the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, The Artists Magazine and consistently in Vavagiakis Class Exhibitions at the Art Students League. In each of three years of attendance in Salmagundi Club classes, she won cash prizes in each year’s student exhibition, receiving two “Best in Show”.
Ms. Williams has exhibited in juried exhibitions at museums and cultural arts centers around the United States, including the Masur Museum of Art, Twin City Art Foundation, Monroe, LA; Coos Art Musuem, Coos Bay, OR; Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, TN; Hoyt Institute of Fine Arts, New Castle, PA; Roseville Art Center, Roseville, CA: Woodmere Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS; Brea Civil and Cultural Center, Brea, CA; Walton Art Center, Lafayette, AR; Visual Arts Center of Northwest Florida, Panama City, FL; Hillcrest Art Center, Cambria, CA; Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, WI; Art Center of the Ozarks, Springdale, AR; Karen Sprague Cultural Arts Center, Springfield, MA and The Arts Center in Old Forge, NY. Her work has also been exhibited in New York City at the Salmagundi Club and National Arts Club on numerous occasions, and in solo and group exhbitions at The Hudson Guild Galleries, New York, NY.
The artist is a Life Member of The American Society of Classical Realism and of the Art Students League of New York and a signature member of the Academic Artists Association, where she shows regularly in their annual juried exhibition.