For Garth Greenan Gallery’s third Spotlight exhibition—the latest in a series of by-appointment-only presentations in the leadup to the gallery’s move to SoHo this fall—the gallery displays a selection of recent work by Bay Area artist Franklin Williams. Arriving on the heels of Williams’s appearance in the landmark exhibitions Sixties Surreal at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2025 and With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972–1985 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2020, the display at Garth Greenan Gallery gives a window into the Utah-born artist’s recent production. The six pieces—all deriving from Williams’s 2021 series Bursting Blossoms—emphasize his skilled draftsmanship, virtuosic mastery of vernacular craft, and singular artistic vision.

Executed in felt-tip pen and acrylic, the drawings each feature a bouquet-like figure, and are additionally adorned with carpet tacks and cotton crochet threads that protrude from the surface like fur. Painstaking stippling provides a sense of texture and depth, while the ornate, centralized figures evoke botanical illustrations, phalluses, or Greco-Roman statuary. At the crux of these strange and exacting works—and present in Williams’s oeuvre going back to the 1960s—are subtle acts of transgression: an overturning of the categories of reality and illusion, masculinity and femininity, fine art and craft.

About Franklin Williams

Franklin Williams is an artist based in Petaluma, California and a longtime and beloved teacher at the California College of Arts and San Francisco Art Institute. Though sometimes affiliated with the movements “Nut Art” or Pattern & Decoration, Williams has assiduously resisted categorization. For more than six decades, he has worked quietly and independently—largely in isolation from the art world—limning an expansive personal cosmos via the masterful execution of vernacular handicraft and a meticulous, delicate line.