Philemona Williamson
Disproportionate Upheavals
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco
November 1 - December 20, 2025
Uneven Terrain, 2025
Oil on canvas, 48 x 56 in (121.9 x 142.2 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, presents Disproportionate Upheavals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with narrative painter Philemona Williamson. The presentation includes eight paintings created between 2024 and 2025, along with a significant piece from 2016.
Philemona Williamson, based in New Jersey, is known for her figurative paintings. Williamson’s narratives of childhood and adolescence create a space of fable and memory investigating the dissonance, possibility, and liminal state of transition. With a career spanning over forty years, she creates an iconography both personal and universal.
Figures are dynamic, passionate, volatile, familiar, and strange—moving through moments of uncertainty and landscapes beyond control. Toys and objects act as repositories of emotion and memory. Poetic and open-ended, the paintings invite viewers to tap into their own stories of change, chaos, and possibility.
Dwelling in Discord, 2025
Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in (91.4 x 101.6 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery
Dwelling in Discord (2025) interweaves two very different places from her childhood: the upscale Upper East Side NYC apartment where her parents worked and lived, and a small room in a Harlem hotel with a communal kitchen. From a young age, she had to navigate these contrasting worlds. Philemona Williamson affirms that the longing for home, safety, and a sense of belonging in the world never diminishes.
The paintings are visually and technically fluid, with brushstrokes moving through saturated fields of color. The underlying hues in each piece emerge strongly through the figures; ambiguous gestures blur the boundaries between figures and their surroundings. Every plant, animal, object, and landscape feels resonant—as if recalling a half-remembered dream or a return to childhood memories.
A Crooked Line, 2016
Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in (139.7 x 203.2 cm)
© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery
A Crooked Line (2016) was inspired by Williamson’s 2015 artist-in-residence experience at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She explains, “I would often witness the Second Line parades held for important occasions, both joyful and somber. Here, I conjured that heightened revelry, both public and private, that seems to burst forth when one is free to be their authentic self.”
Philemona Williamson’s (b.1951, New York, NY) work is in institutional collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Kalamazoo Art Institute, MI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, NE; CNAP: The French National Contemporary Art Collection; and Fondation Francès, Clichy, France. Museum exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, NY; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; and Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO. In 2019, a mid-career survey was held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.
Upcoming in 2026: a group exhibition at the Newark Museum and an exhibition curated by Camilo Alvarez, opening in March 2026 at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT. Her work is currently on view at Fondation Villa Datris, Vaucluse, France. In 2024, Philemona Williamson exhibited in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.
Philemona Williamson is the recipient of numerous awards including Anonymous Was A Woman; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson has taught painting at numerous colleges, including Pratt Institute and Hunter College, New York City, and served on the Advisory Board of the Getty Center for Education in California.
JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY
1275 Minnesota Street #200, San Francisco, CA 94107
