This article is part of our special section on museums on how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.
Artist Robin F. Williams once thought he would be a children’s book illustrator.
Her career and personal evolution have taken her in a very different direction, but she retains some of the stylistic aspects of her first artistic endeavor.
“I think I learned a lot about my identity through making art,” said Williams, 40, who lives in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. She identifies as queer, bisexual, pansexual, and nonbinary and uses both “she” and “they” pronouns.
Williams has impressed other artists with her slyly funny, graphically complex scenes that often depict female subjects with a view to reversing the traditional power dynamics of the “male gaze.”
Working in both oil and acrylic, she has experimented with different ways of applying and adjusting the paint, sometimes using a silicone plate sponge, other times creatively wielding an airbrush.
“Robin is a materials scientist,” said Jenna Gribbon, her friend and fellow artist. “It’s not often I stand in front of a painting and have no idea how the artist constructed the image.”
Artist Brian Donnelly, better known by his stage name KAWS, said: “The humor in her work really gets me, and her execution is impeccable.”
Donnelly has borrowed three works from his personal collection for Williams’ first solo museum show, which opened this month in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, at the Columbus Museum of Art. “Robin F. Williams: We’ve Been Expecting You” runs through August 18.
One of the photographs in the show, “Siri Defends Her Honor” (2019), imagines the life of Apple’s digital assistant. “She’s a disembodied woman trapped in our phone and meant to do our bidding,” Williams said.
Williams talks about his approach to art in his Brooklyn studio. The conversation has been edited and shortened.
How old were you when art entered your life?
My grandmother got me into drawing lessons when I was about 5 years old. They were in the basement of a gift shop on Wednesday night.
Now you have a show in your hometown museum.
I’ve lived in Columbus for 18 years and I’ve lived in New York for 18 years. So in a way it feels like a nice homecoming.
Did you go there as a kid?
My dad did take me to the Columbus Museum a few times, but at the time I didn’t have much of a context for painting. But when I was 8, he bought me a little book of postcards from the gift shop, with American pictures. I remember loving this. As a kid, I needed book-scale art. I carried it with me.
Any memorable images?
There was a painting by George Tooker, The Subway (1950). He was a very early influence of mine. He was very good at creating a strange subtext in painting.
There is a lot of humor in your paintings. Was that in your work from the beginning?
There is a major memory of art school at RISD [Rhode Island School of Design]. I was presenting a painting that I had worked very hard on, and it was a woman. She was sort of a Victoria’s Secret model. But she was positioned as a tiger protecting a birthday cake. It was an absurd picture. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t think it was funny at the time. I thought it reduced the social commentary.
As a Midwesterner at a prestigious East Coast art school, I was very concerned about not being taken seriously. And someone complimented me: “That’s really funny, in a good way.” So I pretended that I wanted it to be.
Did that hurt your feelings?
It actually gave me so much permission. I was like, “Oh, well, me in the morning funny.” But it took me a while to get back to humor in my work.
Your subjects are now mostly women. How did this develop?
I drew children and then I started drawing men. At the time I gave myself permission to paint women, I also gave myself permission to let the humor into the work, and I think it just got a lot stronger.
They’re female, but they’re also kind of cartoony, on purpose, right?
I draw figures that can be clocks like women. But I also enjoy the conversation about gender being a construct. These are paintings: Do paintings have gender? They are a collection of signs and signals that we have collectively decided to add to a woman. But I like to leave a little ambiguity there. For non-binary people, there will never be a perfectly designed way of representing their inner experience.
How does this relate to your own story?
My identities do not fall into a clean category. So I think about the pressure to be legible. Whether it’s as a woman, or as a non-binary person, or as a queer person—to be legible, to be understood, is such a real desire. I definitely want to talk to other queer people, but I really want to talk to anyone who has ever felt the oppression of playing a role or needing to watch how you’re perceived. I think it’s a feeling most of us have experienced at one point or another.
There is something self-possessed about these figures, too.
I think it all stems from a larger idea of a very rich inner life of the figures – it’s a consequence of their own consciousness. It’s like these are paintings that know they’re paintings.
But they also have life when they are not seen, which is disappointing for someone who has been socialized as a woman. All the time you are looked at as if you are something kept on a shelf that comes to life when you are perceived.
Besides Tooker, what other artists have influenced you?
Mane. He’s my man. I always feel so shy because he is an obvious choice. I like his way of leveling things and the way he positions the viewer, engages the viewer – the way it’s leveled almost suggests that the light source is the viewer.
Is there a particular Manet that moves you?
“Olympia” forever! I have only seen this painting in person twice. [Manet’s famous 1863 scene depicts a nude prostitute, attended by a Black maid.] I cried both times. Manet had a commitment to breaking open secrets and hierarchies, exposing them and saying, “Let’s just look at this for what it is.” Oh, God, if I could that for the rest of my life.
It feels related to your idea of these figures having consciousness.
She’s a prostitute who never gets a day off. She travels around the world, visits various museums [if the painting is lent]. It made me want to be an artist. More precisely, an artist. I owe her a lot. And I feel like I owe her a lot. I don’t want to throw Mane under the bus, but Mane is not alive. Now my relationship is with her.
Any other artists?
George de La Tour [1593-1692] is a huge influence on me. The drama! His sculpting with light interests me. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies over the past few years. And this genre is simply filled with light shadows, figures emerging from the darkness. de La Tour’s picture and the slasher film achieve the same thing: we watch women get excited in a very powerful way, about something indescribable.
This ties directly into a piece in the show Final Girl Exodus (2021) about the last woman standing in slasher films.
I wanted to imagine a future for them where they got out of the sequel loop. They go to heaven with each other.
One of them looks over her shoulder, greeting the viewer and saying, “We know we’re being watched. But it’s a new option, it’s a way to see us too.”
