Breakfast with Professionals: William Downs

Join Jaime Bull and Brittainy Lauback as they invite art industry professionals into their Professional Practices class with Breakfast with Professionals. Lectures are open to students across the School of Art. 

These zoom based lectures are hosted by ARST4990: Professional Practices. Lectures will give students an opportunity to interact with professionals from various creative backgrounds as a way of exposing students to the variety of career possibilities relevant to their course of study.

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William Downs, born in Greenville, South Carolina, creates and resides in Atlanta, GA. He earned his multidisciplinary MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Atlanta College of Art and Design. 

Downs has shown in a sundry of group and solo exhibitions at venues across the United States and abroad including: E.C. Lina Gallery, LA, Contemporary Art Museum, MS, and the Century Gallery in London. In 2018, he received the Artadia Award and a Nellie Mae Rowe Fellowship at the Hambidge Creative Residency Center Program. Downs’ work featured in the Art AIDS America exhibition which toured nationally for a year headed by Rock Hushka and Johnathan Katz. Following, his work was chosen for the prolific Black Pulp! exhibition piloted by the International Print Center New York. This exhibit also showed at The Contemporary Art Museum at the University of South Florida and the African American Museum in Philadelphia.

Downs work is included in numerous permanent collections including the Peggy Cooper Cafritz Collection, Portman Collection, Schrager Collection and both the Birmingham Museum of Art & the High Museum of Art. He’s featured in various publications such as Black Pulp, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, and Grizzly Grizzly’s 10 Years – 10 Essays – 10 Exhibits.