Chester Williams

Chester Williams, Black Artist, Abstract Bronze, Wood African American Sculpture

Chester L. Williams Label on bottom, signed. Title: Promethium Medium: Bronze, Aluminum and wood. Approx. dimensions: 12 X 11 X 4 inches. Chester Lee Williams (1944-1919) was born in 1944, in Durham, North Carolina. Chester cultivated a creative mind that eventually led him to pursue an education in fine arts and sculpture at North Carolina Central University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA). In 1974, he made his way to Tallahassee and started instructing at FAMU. Students at the university have a deep appreciation for the jazz lover’s insight and skill. A lifelong artist, Chester's work has been featured in galleries and publications across the country. The body of his work produced over 45 years has evolved from smooth and supple sculptures into the more angular and defiant shapes seen in his later works. Chester has said: "All of the works are me. I still embrace every one of them." Chester enjoyed traveling and exploring different cultures. His art was influenced by his travel and knowledge of African culture. He was an educator for 37 years, teaching at Voorhees College, North Carolina Central University and Florida A&M University before retiring in 2011. He sold his first piece of art in the ninth grade to his homeroom teacher. (That early sale paid off — years later, that teacher’s husband, the president of a bank, commissioned Williams to create a sculpture for the bank’s lobby...

Roberto Estopinan, Cuban, 1920 - 2015 Dimensions: 24.5" wide x 13" high plus 6" high base. Roberto Estopiñán (1921–2015) was a Cuban American sculptor known for his sculptures of the human form, including political prisoners. Born in Camaguey, Cuba, he lived in the United States for over fifty years. His works are held by major institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. Roberto Gabriel Estopinan, a sculptor, draftsman, and printmaker, was born in Havana, Cuba on March 18, 1921. Estopiñán enrolled at the San Alejandro Academy when he was just 14 years old and became the protegé and studio assistant of the sculptor Juan José Sicre. After graduation he traveled first to Mexico, where he met and befriended Francisco Zuniga, and studied Pre-Columbian sculpture. In 1949 he traveled to Europe, visiting England, France and Italy. In these trips he encountered the sculpture of Henry Moore and Marino Marini, and their humanistic yet formal visions would be influential on Estopinan's work. Estopiñán was a pioneer of direct carvings using wood and of welding techniques in Latin America. Throughout the 1950s, Estopiñán received important prizes at various national exhibitions in Havana. In 1953 he was the only semi-finalist from Latin America at the Tate Gallery's international sculpture competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner. In 1961, the artist moved to New York, where he resided until 2002. Roberto Gabriel Estopiñán a Cuban emigre sculptor who emigrated to exile in the United States not long after Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959, is considered one of Latin America’s most important 20th-century artists. His work, which includes drawings and prints as well as sculptures in wood and bronze, is in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Art, among many locations. He is best known for his stark, disturbing renderings of political prisoners, the fruit of his own experiences as a dissident under both Castro and his predecessor, the dictator Fulgencio Batista, and for his representations of the female torso that can remind viewers of both classical statuary and the high-modern, abstractly elongated work of Henry Moore.mHe was born in Havana to a father from Asturias in northwest Spain and a mother of African descent. Estopiñán was something of a prodigy. At the age of fourteen, he won the first prize in drawing at the Centro Asturiano, a regional association for Cubans of Asturian descent. Shortly afterward he received special permission to enter the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana. At the school he was mentored first by its director, the painter Armando Menocal (1863-1941), then by the landscape artist Antonio Rodríguez Morey (1872-1967), and finally by Juan José Sicre (1898-1974), regarded as one of Cuba’s greatest sculptors. Sicre, a professor of sculpture at the Academy, had helped introduce European modernist art to Cuba, and from the 1930s through the 1950s had sculpted monumental figures in Havana of José Martí and other Cuban national heroes that stand to this day. Estopiñán was first Sicre’s student, then his assistant, and, finally, his colleague for the next fifty years. After graduating from San Alejandro in 1942, Estopiñán began simultaneously teaching art at the Ceiba del Agua School for young men, assisting Sicre in public art projects and developing his own artistic vision. He also traveled widely, to Mexico, New York, France, and Italy. From the late 1940s through the 1950s his sculpture evolved from an early neoclassical phase under the influence of Maillol to what he defined as “formalist humanism”: emphasizing the abstract beauty of the shapes he sculpted while not abandoning the human figure as the basis of his work. As the 1950s progressed he chose to carve in native Cuban woods...

I have made this sculpture in several materials including the baltic birch shown here. The 60 pieces comprising the sculpture are 1/4 thick and pinned and glued to create the comple...

**ATTENTION** This piece can not be shipped. It need to be sold in California where the showroom is located in Los Angeles. California residents will receive free w...