Casey Williams
(1947 - 2013)
Casey Williams was a Houston native known for taking beautiful photographs of mundane objects. Though he started with black and white, he transitioned to color, and in many cases, carefully and subtly hand-tinted the photographs. His imagery consisted of things that most people don’t ever notice - microwave towers, graffiti, discarded trash and ship hulls. He cropped the images in a manner that makes the viewer look twice to understand what is being presented. In some cases, the images are flat, while in others, they have an illusion of depth. He was able to turn the ordinary into something special through composition and color. The large-scale format he preferred made the work powerful and transfixing.
Williams received his BFA from the University of Texas in 1970 and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute 1976. He taught photography at the University of North Texas for several years before returning to Houston in the late 1970s to start a photography program at the MFAH’s Glassell school. He had numerous gallery and museum exhibitions throughout his career including a three-person show at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in 2002 entitled Industrial Ingenuity.
Williams’s art may be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi, the Witte Museum in San Antonio, the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and The Museum of Modern Art in NY.
Art on Campus
Untitled
Year: 1999
Medium: Pigment Print
Location: John Gray Center, Rudy Williams Building, University Advancement
Gift of Betty Moody in Memory of Clint Willour and Reid Mitchell
This seemingly abstract photograph is actually a closely cropped image of the side of a cargo ship. Williams most popular work was his series of photographs from the Houston Ship Channel. He spent nearly 10 years photographing in the Channel until the Department of Homeland Security refused him access with a camera in 2008. Williams was attracted to the colorful layers of paint on the hulls of ships. As cargo was unloaded, the ship would float up exposing areas that had previously been below water and now appeared faded and striped with areas of peeling paint. The rippling brown water of the channel provides a contrast in texture and also reflects the colors of the ship above resulting in an unexpectedly stunning image. Williams was consciously invoking paintings by Abstract artists such as Mark Rothko in the way he manipulated these photographs.
Williams’ photographs were typically printed in large-scale format up to six feet square and mounted on stretched fabric or aluminum. This small contact sheet was mounted on board and given to Clint Willour as a gift. It is inscribed “for Clint” at the bottom left. Clint Willour was a long-time curator for the Galveston Art Center. Over his lifetime, he gave the Museum of Fine Arts over 1,000 works of art, including photographs that helped to build the photography collection into one of national importance. Clint’s remaining collection was inherited by Betty Moody, a celebrated Houston Gallerist. Moody gifted this photo to Lamar University along with many other museum-worthy pieces of art in 2023.