Museum of Art

Please join us for a lecture with Randy Williams, visual artist and Professor Emeritus of Studio Art and Art Education at Manhattanville College in Harrison, NY. His talk, “Everything is Connected: The Art of Resisting Definition,” will focus on Williams’s career as an artist, teacher, and museum educator. Describing his talk, the artist states that he will “show how an artist, college professor, and museum educator with fifty years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art advanced a multi-dimensional paradigm style of teaching into a single-teaching philosophy.” Williams will discuss three motivating factors in his development as a teaching artist: art is a metaphor for life, specialization leads to extinction, and art of value is often created in tandem with lived experiences. The lecture aligns with the October 7 closing of Bates Museum’s exhibition, Selections from the Diversify the Collection Program, which features a recently-acquired artwork by Williams, My Vanishing Country Also. 

Williams was born in New York City in 1947. He maintains two careers, one as an active visual artist and another as an educator developing new methods of presenting the visual arts in Colleges, Universities, Schools and Museums. A Professor of Studio and Art Education at Manhattanville College, Randy Willliams is also an instructor and educational consultant to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is Artistic Director of the New York State Summer School of the Visual Arts in which he has been a master teacher for thirty–two years.

Williams holds a Bachelor of Science in Art Education from New York University and a Masters Degree in Art Education from Sir George Williams University in Montreal. He has won numerous prizes and awards, including a 1982 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to the American Academy in Rome. He also has been recognized by the New York State Council on the Arts, Visual Arts Division, and the New York Foundation of the Arts with a Fellowship in sculpture. He received the Manhattanville College Excellence Award in 1995 and 2007.

Randy Williams’ work has been the subject of more than thirty-five national and international solo exhibitions. He has had scores of special projects, and has exhibited in over 100 group exhibitions. His artwork is in a number of private art collections.