African-American Walter Henry Williams Print "Fighting Cock #3"

African-American Walter Henry Williams Print "Fighting Cock #3"

Offered for sale is a color woodblock print titled "Fighting Cock #3" by the African-American artist Walter Henry Williams (1920-1988). The print is pencil signed in the lower right and dated 1964. The print is #20 from an edition of 200. This piece is nicely framed under glass, is wired and ready to hang.

Walter Henry Williams was born in Brooklyn, New York, August 11, 1920. He studied art at the Brooklyn Museum Art School under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino under the G.I. Bill. He also spent a summer studying art at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. After graduating Williams won a Whitney fellowship to study in Mexico.

According to the "History of African-American Artists" by Bearden and Henderson, after Williams' four years of living in racially liberal Mexico he "felt the freedom from racial prejudice was essential for his further development." He then returned to the U.S. and began to travel to Denmark in 1959.
Williams moved to Copenhagen, Denmark and became a citizen in 1979. He returned briefly to the United States, where he completed a body of work informed by the experiences of being an African American living in the South. It was while he was in Copenhagen, however, that he created a series of colorful woodcuts of black children playing in fields of flowers. Walter Williams died in Copenhagen in June of 1998.