Carl Joe Williams

Carl Joe Williams’s paintings—colorful, musical, improvisational—reflect the character of New Orleans, where the artist was born and continues to live. Williams grabs everyday objects from the streets of his neighborhood: unhinged doors, rolls of oldwallpaper, abandoned televisions. He then paints directly on the surfaces of these found forms, creating images that hover between realistic depiction and vibrant abstraction. Likening his process to that of a jazz musician, Williams painted American Shotgun by starting with a found set of slatted doors and improvisationally building up the surface. He then added paired saint-like figures. Looming large in the background, the shotgun house—that ubiquitous symbol of New Orleans architecture—unites the two figures, intersecting with the halos that emanate from their heads. Responding to iconic American painters like Grant Wood and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Williams proposes in his found-object paintings a deep connection to history, narrative, and place.