William Scott "Good Person"
White Columns
This event has ended.
William Scott (b. 1964) works at the celebrated Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, USA. Established in the early 1970s Creative Growth is a visionary art workshop and studio program that serves a community of adult artists with mental, physical, and developmental disabilities.
William Scott’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures relate directly to his personal circumstances: exploring the social topography of his native San Francisco, and aspects of his emotional and spiritual life. For many years William Scott has been working on an ongoing urban planning project that would see San Francisco – in Scott’s terminology – “cancelled”, only to be re-imagined, rebuilt, and rechristened as a new city named ‘Praise Frisco.’ Scott’s urban project, which was the subject of his 2006 White Room exhibition at White Columns, is rooted in a desire to see his own socially marginalized neighborhood of Bay View / Hunter’s Point “torn down” and then subsequently renewed according to his carefully detailed plans. Scott’s ambitious, optimistic, and deeply humane project engages explicitly with San Francisco’s recent past, present realities, and potential future.
The current exhibition - ‘William Scott – Good Person’ - focuses on Scott’s ongoing series of portrait works which depict himself, members of his immediate family, and members of his local community, alongside characters drawn from his imagination (though often based on real subjects, including identifiable celebrities such as Diana Ross.) Scott juxtaposes these individuals and characters in complex and recurring narrative scenarios that operate somewhere between autobiography and fantasy (e.g. in one series of works Scott imagines how his life might have unfolded in different circumstances.) Whilst rooted in personal experience, William Scott’s work ultimately addresses universal questions of identity, community, faith, and the daily challenges we all face navigating reality.
Media
Schedule
from March 10, 2009 to April 18, 2009
Opening Reception on 2009-03-10 from 18:00 to 20:00