Through the years, the major underlying themes in my work have derived from my personal experience and the practice of making pictures. I have been inspired by themes from the Old Testament, moved by the course of events in the life of the streets and the world at large, and stimulated by nature both seen and unseen. My vocabulary of forms has been based largely on the biomorphic.
Throughout his short but vital career, William Majors (1930–1982) produced an innovative, varied body of work spanning paintings, prints, collages, and drawings. Self-taught as an anatomical draftsman while hospitalized as a teenager, Majors carried an early intimacy with the human body into an aesthetic language of biomorphic forms. This vocabulary was used across paintings and prints to explore the Old Testament, the natural world, and the fragility of life itself. Making a Mark reintroduces an artist whose accomplishments have long outpaced his public recognition.
This exhibition pays particular attention to Majors’s printmaking practice and the context that shaped it. On display in its entirety is Etchings from Ecclesiastes, a 1965 portfolio of eighteen etchings commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Council—a rare honor for any printmaker, particularly one then working night shifts as a MoMA security guard. While developing this pivotal work, Majors was involved in Spiral, a collective of Black artists founded in 1963 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. Loans of prints by fellow Spiral members—along with works by Majors’s other peers, including Melvin Edwards and Jacob Lawrence—situate his practice amidst the group’s shared concerns and the broader political and cultural climate of the period.
Making a Mark further considers this moment alongside the wider printmaking renaissance unfolding in New York at the time, including the emergence of community spaces such as the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Lower East Side Printshop. Notably, Majors worked apart from these collectives, acquiring his own etching press and opening his studio to friends and colleagues in turn. This accessible, hands-on spirit extended into his decades-long career as an educator—a role he saw as inherent to his practice as an artist.
Shirley Fiterman Art Center