Williams Emmet Biography
Williams Emmett, born in Greenville in 1925, spent his adolescence in Virginia before moving to Europe from 1949 to 1966. He attended Kenyon College, where he studied poetry with John Crowe Ransom, and the University of Paris, where he deepened his studies in anthropology. In Switzerland, he worked as an assistant to the ethnologist Paul Radin.
Emmett Williams was both an artist and a poet and was involved in the Darmstadt concrete poetry movement from 1957 to 1959. During that time he collaborated with Daniel Spoerri and the German poet Claus Bremer. Material, a work published in 1958, was described by Spoerri as "a system of words, letters or signs that begin to make sense when the reader contributes". Williams' works often used dies to create empty spaces that pushed the reader to actively participate in the creation of meaning.
Throughout his career, Williams continued to explore the use of the alphabet in art. His concrete sound poem, Alphabet Poem (1963), was created based on his Alphabet Symphony (1962), which consisted of 26 objects, one for each letter of the alphabet, accompanied by instructions for the performer. The latter was a Fluxus performance, an artistic movement of the 1960s. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Williams devoted himself particularly to producing suites of prints. In 1978 he created his Graphic Portraits, a series of 13 screenprints in homage to 12 artists with whom he worked.
Williams has also taught at several institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His importance lies above all in his commitment to combining different disciplines in his work, exploring the intersection between poetry, music, visual art and performance.
