Vera B. Williams / STORIES: Eight Decades of Politics and Picture Making

Vera B. Williams attended BMC from 1945-1950 when she became one of the few to formally graduate. She was a student of Josef Albers and had sculptor Richard Lippold as her outside examiner prior to graduation. She married architect Paul Williams at the college and, with him, co-founded the artists’ co-op community called The Land in Stony Point, New York. Williams was an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books that often centered on diverse, working-class families, perhaps informed by her own childhood growing up during the Depression as the daughter of immigrants from Eastern Europe.

The Land at Stony Point, also known as Gate Hill Cooperative, became an outcropping of Black Mountain College’s experimental ethos. It was inspired by a BMC faculty member Paul Goodman’s Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, which he lectured on at the Summer Institute of 1950. BMC luminaries John Cage, David Tudor, M.C. Richards, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Stan VanDerBeek, and Patsy Lynch Wood shaped Gate Hill as founding members of the community alongside Vera Baker and Paul Williams.

The exhibition will highlight three aspects of Vera B. Williams’ life and work: her time at Black Mountain College, her political activism, and her work as a children’s book author.

Williams attended Black Mountain College in the 1940s and early 1950s, where she embraced all aspects of living, working, and learning in the intensely creative college community. She eventually graduated with Josef Albers as her advisor and sculptor Richard Lippold as her outside examiner. This section of the exhibition will include historic photographs, artwork, and ephemera made by Williams and other members of the BMC community.

Willians’ political activism began very early under the influence of her progressive parents and continued throughout her life. She designed seventy-six covers for Liberation Magazine, protested against the war in Vietnam and nuclear proliferation, participated as an activist and leader of the War Resisters League, supported women’s causes and racial equality, was arrested in 1981, and spent a month in federal prison. The exhibition will put a spotlight on Williams’ tireless efforts towards these causes through her artwork and political action.

In the 1970s, Williams began a new life as an author and illustrator of children’s books. She found a way to combine her human-centered politics of inclusion and her celebration of diversity in books that also made use of her artistic training at BMC under the color master Josef Albers. Vera’s books won Caldecott Honors and many other awards as they explored aspects of society rarely found in children’s books of the time. This section of the exhibition will include original illustrations for her books.