South Willard | Billy White

Billy White | Figures

September 2 through September 16, 2015

Organized by Celia Lesh

In Partnership with NIAD Art Center

One morning recently at NIAD, one of the artists arrived in tears. Billy, who rode the same bus with her to the art center that morning, spent the first part of the day making a clay sculpture of Mr. T, “to protect her,” he said. Once, while showing me a work in progress he told me, “This is the guy who will help you when you’re lost.” Sometimes, before Billy leaves the ceramics studio he arranges the damp clay figures into a circle, with one character in the center. Billy’s sculptures are often safeguards of a certain person or endowed with specific powers, existing like the small protective statues of Fatima, Bastet, or a patron saint.

Billy recurrently creates clay busts that begin as Vincent Van Gogh and morph into several different characters while retaining qualities of each previous personality – a hat, a mouth closed around a cigar, a mustache, a particularly muscular bicep. Vincent Van Gogh becomes Peter Sellers who becomes Redd Foxx who becomes Billy himself. Little Richard and Richard Pryor are married into a single body whose portrait is titled “Little Richard Pryor”. Sculptures of his father wear a hat that is WC Field’s, Yosemite Sam’s, and/or Jed Clampett’s. Identities are both specific and fluid, and exist in a sort of pantheon where the historic, celebrated, anonymous, and personal share a landscape.

Human bodies and facial expressions are sculpted and drawn through abbreviated and impulsive gestures that yield something honest and potent. Limbs are long and gesticulating or stretched beyond the length of the paper, noses are engorged or severely pointed, breasts and pecs protrude, and postures are exaggerated. Formal shifts in anatomy for the sake of narration share a relationship with the mutable identities of Billy’s characters, named and formed for specific uses in his lived experience. The tragicomedy of being in a human body is at the center of Billy’s works.

Arstanda “Billy” White was born in 1962 and has been making art at NIAD Art Center for twenty years. I’ve heard Billy say he makes art because he is lonely. I’ve heard Billy say he makes art to make the people happy.

-Celia Lesh

Richard Pryor, no date
glazed earthenware
10 inches X 10 inches X 3 inches