Franklin Williams, also known in this body of work as Professor Emeritus (the title recently bestowed upon him after fifty-one years teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts), has increasingly turned his attention inward, reflecting on his life and the influences that have remained close at hand. Each work in the exhibition could be described as a self-portrait, featuring a centrally placed head partially deconstructed and overflowing with ornamentation and intricate patterning. From an early age, Williams quietly absorbed the household craft traditions around him. Inspired by his mother’s elaborate handmade quilts, Williams learned to sew before he could ride a bicycle, a skill he continues to employ in his work today. In this recent body of work, the artist includes heirlooms from his childhood environment. The portraits evolved from looking closely at the hot pads that were crocheted by the women in his family. Several paintings incorporate embroidered handkerchiefs sewn by his mother Ruth and his Aunt Gladys. Two works depict a Raggedy Ann doll and teddy bear that were given to Williams before he was born and to this day, sit proudly (if a bit worse for wear) atop a bookcase in the artist’s studio. The artist has also mined material from stockpiles diligently maintained since the 1960s. Burying snippets of drawings and etchings several decades old within the new paintings, Williams effectively breathes new life into archival ephemera and souvenir-like objects dear to the artist. Strewn throughout the works are talismans and amulets representing personal histories: tiny fabric rosettes, even tinier sea shells and an exuberantly decorated Welsh love spoon. The painted portraits can also suggest masks, evoking the dichotomy of our internal and external selves. Of particular influence to Williams is the poetry of W.B. Yeats and more specifically, the poet’s use of the mask as a device to reveal and obscure true identity. In reflecting upon decades of artmaking, Williams has come to embrace the archetypal symbol as a cyclical apparatus for self-determination. Franklin Williams’s work is also on view in With Pleasure: Pattern & Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, a major group exhibition curated by Anna Katz at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The exhibition will travel to the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in 2020. ------- Trained as a dancer, Pottinger uses movement as a guiding principle to make her energetic compositions, often cutting up and rearranging sheets of paper until achieving the right balance. Characterized by surfaces that are built-up and worked over long stretches of time, the artist’s meditative drawings illustrate a range of techniques and processes that constantly chart the traces of her hand. Pottinger begins her drawings by applying alternately dense and loose layers of pastels in a variety of hues. Pipe cleaners, googly eyes, and fragments of paper–including intimate black-and-white ink drawings–are integrated into the larger composition, creating a sense of dynamism and awe at the sheer plethora of marks and surfaces achieved here. One gets the sense of encountering multiple worlds where time and space has collapsed, or of witnessing new forms of language being created (suggestions of hieroglyphic and tribal symbols abound). Like a map, the works have their own topography, where elements combine to create pathways that lead us in any number of directions. In Little theatre (all works 2019), curved and straight lines, dots, animals, and repeated symbols populate every inch of the paper’s surface, playing out a multitude of possible scenarios. In Two Feet, rows of letters that don’t form words butt up against and sit on top of one another; elsewhere a blood red sun sets against a muddy brown horizon. Pottinger’s intuitive mark-making and selective negation– she sometimes scrapes into the pastel surface to reveal layers of color beneath–is balanced with a deliberate sense of space; where a mark sits is just as significant as the mark itself.