Artworks

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William Hawkins (1895-1990)

Born in rural Kentucky, William Hawkins moved north to Columbus Ohio in 1916, where he lived for the rest of his life. He held an assortment of unskilled jobs and only began painting in the style for which he is best known until the mid to late 1970s. He worked almost without letup thereafter, in spite of illness and advancing age.
To accompany the artist on his walks through the streets of Columbus was like following an experienced prospector in search of gold. Hawkins’s selective eye seized images from newspapers, magazines, and advertisements, which he habitually salvaged from dumpsters and kept in a suitcase for reference and use in his works. He combined these images with his own recollections and impressions to create a vivid picture gallery of animals, American icons (such as the Statue of Liberty and the Chrysler building), and historic events. Although the artist could barely read and write, he transformed words themselves—usually his signature and birthplace and date—into powerful graphic elements.

Hawkins’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Newark Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. In 2018, “William L. Hawkins: An Imaginative Geography,” a comprehensive exhibition including 60 of the artist’s most important works and an accompanying catalog, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art—later travelling to the Mingei International Museum (San Diego, California), the Figge Art Museum (Davenport, Iowa), and the Columbus Museum in Georgia.