Drawing Upon Art: A Participatory Workbook For Art, Art Appreciation And Art History

Drawing Upon Art is a supplemental drawing workbook, whose roughly 400 assignments’ address the fundamental, historic questions in Visual Art This workbook challenges students, with simple and direct exercises, to experience for themselves history’s most advanced and creative visual art problems and developments.

As a supplemental workbook, Drawing Upon Art uniquely addresses the most pressing paradox that currently exists in every college’ and university Art Appreciation and Introductory Art History classroom in the United States. Namely, the seminal visual principals, theories, and concepts in Art’s history are still delivered solely through .the same old, textual approach. This antiquated methodology remains to this very day, as distant, passive, and ineffectual as it was since its conception, After all, one cannot and should not’ expect the major achievements of the visual arts to be fully understood, grasped or appreciated by any means other than a direct, hands-on approach.

LG Williams is a Los Angeles-based artist and recently the Endowed University Instructor at The Academy of Art University; Robert Hughes Distinguished Visual Artist-In-Residence at The Lodge in Hollywood, CA; and the Emmy Hennings Distinguished Professor at D(D).DDDD University. LG has exhibited in various national and international venues, including The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia, and has appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Japan Times, Los Angeles Times, La Stampa, Bookforum, Purple Diary, Mousse Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail among others.

PCP Press is an independent publisher of avant-garde books and insurgent authors. Founded in 1990 in San Francisco at a time when transgressive and sometimes esoteric international art books had a difficult time making their way into the wider American marketplace, over the past three decades PCP has grown into a consistent publisher of books, special editions and rare publications from an array of the world’s most respected authors and cultural institutions - including Raymond Pettibon, Dave Hickey, Wayne Thiebaud, Bryan Reynolds, David Hawkes, Shepard Fairey, LG Williams, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, and Luscerne Kunstpanorama.

# # # # #

An heir to the West Coast and Beat generation art, LG Williams is the youngest member of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, whose membership included Bruce Connor, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Manuel Neri. Williams received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis - nearly twenty years after the school’s most famous graduate Bruce Nauman. He has showed at many national and international venues, among them The Internet Pavilion of La Biennale Di Venezia 2011, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, di Rosa Art Preserve, Klaipedos Kultury Komunikacijy Centras, Ludwig Forum Aachen, Super Window Project, Gloria Maria Gallery, Lance Fung Gallery, and Steven Wirtz Gallery.

Reviews featuring Williams have appeared in Artforum, Art Issues, Art Week, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, La Stampa, Japan Times, Huffington Post, Purple.fr, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Maui Weekly, Java Magazine, and Glass Magazine. Art historian Thomas Frangenberg (University of Leicester), wrote the catalogue essay for Anthology: 1985-2012, Williams’ mid-career retrospective in Milan; and Donald Preziosi (University of California Los Angeles), featured Williams’ artwork in his 2014 monograph Art, Religion, Amnesia: The Enchantments of Credulity (Routledge).

Williams curated Wally Hedrick’s War Room for The 2003 San Francisco International Art Fair, the first time this ＂significant item of Bay Area art history＂ had been exhibited since 1967. In 2009 Cengage Learning / Wadsworth published Williams’s Drawing Upon Art: A Workbook for Gardner’s Art Through the Ages - an innovative pedagogical tool designed to facilitate learning art history through drawing. During 2010-11 Williams was the art critic for The Tokyo Weekender, the oldest free English publication in Japan. In 2016, Williams’ publishing house PCP Press released Dave Hickey’s Wasted Words and Dust Bunnies compiled and edited by art historian Julia Friedman.

Williams has taught studio art, art history, art appreciation, and graphic design courses since 1990 with programs such as The University of California, Davis, University of Southern California, California College of the Arts, Arizona State University, and The University of Hawaii.

# # # # #