Art Museum of theUniversity of Memphis

On Saturday, August. 29, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis (AMUM) opens a new exhibition reprising Paul R Williams, American Architect, the first major museum exhibition devoted to the achievements of the Black architect Paul R. Williams (1894-1980), which was launched by AMUM in 2010. A newly designed website will launch in tandem with the opening.

The upcoming exhibition presents over 200 photographs arranged by decade, from the 1920s through the 1960s, depicting interiors and exteriors of buildings. The images are by the photographer David Horan who, accompanied by Leslie Luebbers, AMUM director and exhibition curator, traveled over the course of two years to photograph as many homes and buildings in the LA area as possible. Together, his photographs convey Williams’s mastery of detail and choreography of space and natural light.

There was a paucity of research on Willliams after his death, even up to the years when the museum embarked on American Architect. The dominance of a narrative that valorized California architecture for its international “modernism” rendered Williams’s stylistic versatility unfashionable. As well, after his death his office communications, contracts, and schedules were destroyed by a fire and its design plans lay in private hands. 

“In the years after the exhibition, the foundational research on the project website became a key resource for scholars interested in Williams,” said Luebbers. In 2020, Paul R. Williams’s plans were acquired by the Getty Research Institute in partnership with the University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture. 

AMUM’s early interest in Williams stems in part from the fact that his family came from Memphis, his father having worked at as a waiter at the Peabody Hotel before taking his family west. And, perhaps most significantly, it was Willliams who designed the original St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a five-pointed star-shaped building that has been lost as the complex has grown.

Paul R Williams, American Architect draws upon the holdings of the Paul Revere Williams Project (University of Memphis). The Paul R. Williams Project began in early 2006 in partnership with the Memphis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) as part of an initiative launched by the national AIA in honor of the organizations' 150th anniversary.  AIA Memphis, the Memphis chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architecture (NOMA), and the University of Memphis’ Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change were active parters in the project.