at home: Artists in Conversation
Join us for lively and inspiring conversations with some of today’s most notable artists. at home: Artists in Conversation brings together curators and artists to discuss various artistic practices and insights into their work.
About Sue Williamson
Born in Lichfield, England, in 1941, Williamson immigrated with her family to South Africa when she was seven. Between 1963 and 1965 she studied at the Art Students League of New York. In 1983, she earned her advanced diploma in fine art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Her work engages with themes of memory, trauma, and identity formation. Trained as a printmaker, Williamson works across media including photography, video, mixed-media installation, and constructed objects.
Williamson is a member of the generation of South African artists whose work challenged the apartheid government in the 1970s and 1980s. After the first democratic election in 1994, Williamson turned her attention to the stories of atrocities being revealed during the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a court-like restorative justice body assembled in South Africa in 1996 after the end of apartheid. Her work includes Truth Games and No More Fairy Tales, a series of five two-channel video conversations highlighting the reality of daily life in South Africa twenty years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In 2007, Williamson received a Visual Artist Research Award from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and in 2011 she received a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2013, she was guest curator of the summer academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee, a vibrant arts and cultural center in Bern, Switzerland.
Williamson’s work is held in many public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; Tate Modern, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has participated in numerous international group exhibitions including the Johannesburg Art Biennale (in 1997 and 1995), the Havana Biennale (2009 and 1994), and the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2013 and 1993). Williamson is also known for her writings about art. In 1997, she established ArtThrob, a prominent online publication that features the work of contemporary South African artists. ArtThrob has been nominated three times as a finalist for the Arts and Culture Trust Award, and in 1999 was nominated for the United Nations prize for best cultural website. Williamson lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.
This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.
