Tuesday Night Lecture Series: Rachel Eulena Williams

As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS), Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture by artist Rachel Eulena Williams, organized by the MFA Painting program.

Rachel Eulena Williams is an artist whose work displays an unusual level of candor, invention and lightness. Exuding confidence and pleasure, her painted constructions employ the language of abstract painting, but are transformed through her own approach to material. Finding a balance between painting and sculpture, Williams applies larger swaths of color made from painted canvases that she subsequently cuts up and reconfigures. The collage-like works are tied together with sewing which acts both pictorially and creates marks inside her compositions. Williams also adds ropes of differing sizes and thickness that become stand-ins for gestural marks. The overall feeling is of solidity and lightness, structure and wild chances, jostling to create waves of energy.

Rachel Williams (b. 1991, Miami, FL) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. In 2023 she exhibited Hair and Body at Dundee Contemporary Arts, her first major solo exhibition in a UK institution. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Ceysson & Benetiere, New York, Saint Etienne & Luxembourg; The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Journal Gallery, and Turn Gallery, all in New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Loyal Gallery, Sweden. Her work is included in the collections such as the Pérez Art Museum, Miami and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Portrait: Courtesy of the artist