Manning Williams: Inventing Narrative Abstraction is a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, and drafts of Manning Williams; spanning landscape, abstraction and the emergence of narrative abstraction.

Through the 1970s and 80s Williams painted a body of work that concentrated on Charleston city scenes, suburban landscape, roadways, friends and family. Taken individually these works seemed fragmentary and unrelated, but read as a larger body of work, they may be understood as narratives of a larger community in the context of place and time. Williams turned against the tide of the Charleston Renaissance, taking to common, overlooked corners of the city; instead of the idyllic locations that favor nostalgia over reality.

In the early 1980s Williams started making highly abstract drawings, both black and white and boldly colorful, on small note cards. Returning to his early interest in Pop Art, he began painting and drawing on top of comic books and newspapers. As his interest in abstraction grew, so did his interest in the comic book format; which was accelerated after seeing Art Spiegelman’s exhibition MAUS at MOMA in 1992.

Williams started making his own narrative drawings and comics with a series of cockroach characters and used comic book bulbs with words on increasingly large abstract painting. Over time, the words left the bubbles and he embraced Kandinsky’s pre-World War I abstract expressionist works to create a new body of abstract paintings of great energy and vitality.

While these works left the tactile scale of comic books, their reliance on narrative devices, action and color of comics remained within the cacophony of modernist painting techniques. Works of art that seem highly abstract, spring to life with titles such as “Soldier’ Kiss”, “Dr. Seuss’ Pyramid,” and “The Dutch Girl’s Hat”. Starting out with representational painting that abstracts narratives, it is all too appropriate that his final works start with abstraction and push beyond tropes of abstraction into narrative painting.

Manning Williams was born in Charleston in 1939. He received his BS from the College of Charleston before doing graduate work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.  Williams’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with solo shows in Charleston, New Orleans, Washington, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Art and the Greenville Museum of Art. Group shows including his work were “Second Story Show” at Piccolo Spoleto in 2002, “100 Years/100 Artists, Views From the 20th Century,” at the South Carolina State Museum in 1999-2000, and “Old South, New South” at Winthrop College in 1995.  In 2004, Williams and Linda Fantuzzo had a duo show at the Gibbes Museum of Art.  In 2008, Williams had a solo show at the Florence Museum. Museum retrospects were held in 2021 at the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Morris Museum