Looking-Glass Art

“I don’t make ‘black art,’ ” says New Yorker Philemona Williamson, whose work is on view at Wenger Gallery through Aug. 1. “It bridges racial gaps because I’m sharing my private self and I happen to be a black female.”

Part autobiography, part child’s diary, part zany hallucination, Williamson’s paintings are an “Alice Through the Looking Glass” adventure where the protagonist is awkwardly wedged between childhood and womanhood, thwarting all sorts of attacks on her innocence. There’s a willful tenacity to the brightly colored work which Williamson acknowledges: “Isn’t that what growing up means for everyone? You hurt, but you survive.”

That anxiety tinges Williamson’s blend of sophisticated folk imagery where figures have believeable volume but act out their dramas in flat, tipsy scenes of jarring colors and exaggerated, scary shadows. “I like that tension. It makes place and time unspecific and fantastic and lets the feelings come through,” she says.

Williamson was a young art student interested in the figure at the height of Abstract Expressionism. “I was busy exploring my identity through images of black Madonnas and the department was busy teaching Color Field abstraction. By the end of college, I was struggling to find my own artistic voice. Right at that time a very brilliant female friend had a complete mental breakdown. The experience made me dig deep into the pain and peculiarity of my own childhood and this work began to pour out,” she says.

Williamson just landed a Krasner/Pollock Foundation Grant, but over the years she has juggled art making with jobs as an art educator, teaching art appreciation at veterans’ hospitals and museums, and in Harlem schools to kids, teachers and parents. “When a child runs in displaying a precious scribble and an adult says, ‘But what is it?,’ a little magic dies,” she says. “There aren’t rules for making or looking at art. It should be fun and always magical.”