Meet Kelly S. Williams

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly S. Williams.

Hi Kelly, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I was born and raised in Nashville and went to undergraduate and graduate schools out of state and then came back to Nashville after a few years in Chicago. I returned to teach classes at Watkins College of Art, which at the time was a free-standing institution in the North Nashville area of town. I tried to find a full-time teaching job at the college level, but adjunct teaching was really the only teaching gig I could find.

So, I left teaching to take a personal assistant job for a family in town and that led to a wild ride as an assistant tour manager and personal assistant for a few different musicians. I also worked in production for commercials, music videos, and TV when those industries really started to take off in Nashville. When I realized I would never be able to sustain making art the way I wanted to while working these kinds of jobs, I went back to work in academe, but on the administrative (not teaching) side of things.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Ha. Absolutely not. It’s still not a “smooth” road. Trying to be a visual artist in a city like Nashville is always going to be a struggle, but the good news is that a victory or a “win” for one of us is a victory for all of us.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My studio work bounces between representational and non-representational work pretty frequently. I was trained as a still-life genre painter and that is always going to be the language I start any work with. I have shown my work in Nashville pretty regularly since about 1999 and the bulk of those shows included still-life paintings made from the observation of domestic, middle-class life.

In graduate school, I began looking closely at textiles and began making more non-representational, pattern-based paintings. In more recent years, I’ve been focusing on combining the two languages in a way that creates a fuller picture of who I am as an artist.

So maybe we end by discussing what matters most to you and why?
Well, no one will be surprised to hear me say my dog matters to me most. Those people who know that fact will also know that I love them in equal measure, even if they don’t appear in my paintings as frequently as she does. My friends in Nashville are the most creative and inspiring people I know and they are primarily folks I went to elementary, high school, and college with. Or I met them in high school. It’s a remarkable gift to have so many long-term friends in your life, but I’m a Taurus and I tend to hang on to people pretty tightly.

In terms of Nashville, what matters to me most are Bell’s Bend Park, Germantown (my current neighborhood where I’ve lived for almost 13 years), and the visual art community– all the artists and gallery owners, and museum staff who keep me going.