Clapham’s Studio Voltaire reopens with a bang this month featuring artist William Scott

Clapham’s Studio Voltaire is back with a bang, reopening this month with a major exhibition of San Francisco–based artist William Scott.

The expansive exhibition of more than 80 paintings, drawings and sculptures, from the early 1990s to present, includes a number of previously unexhibited works.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of works presented in the public realm in the area around Studio Voltaire.

While deeply rooted in personal history, Scott’s paintings address wider questions of citizenship, community, and cultural memory.

His portraits of predominantly black figures encompass actors, musicians, politicians, and civil rights leaders – from Prince, Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou to Barack Obama and Kamala Harris – as well as self-portraits, family members, his neighbours and women from the Baptist church he has attended since childhood.

Scott’s works can be seen as a form of activism, eloquently describing his desire for social change.

Frequently describing himself as an architect, his works reimagine the social topography of his native San Francisco, which re–emerges as the utopian ‘Praise Frisco’: a safe and gleaming neighbourhood.

Scott’s alternative proposals for urban development replace penthouses with community centres and revisit the Bayview housing complexes he grew up in, reckoning with the rapid gentrification of the city.

While Scott’s works are hopeful and sincere, they equally confront loss, as well as ideas of renewal and rebirth.

His longstanding series of invented Skyline Friendly Organisation ‘citizen ships’ take the form of B–movie flying saucers, designed to bring back those who have died to start a new life.

His Another Life series of self portraits explore the intersections of faith, disability and desire – often depicting a younger version of himself as athletic Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Billy the Kid or a young man happily attending prom.

For Scott, painting is a transformative as well as a documentary tool; a way to recraft his personal narrative and even undertake extraordinary acts.

A presentation of large–scale public realm works has been selected by Scott to complement this survey.

Working with landmark sites in the area local to Studio Voltaire, including Clapham Methodist Church, the presentation will animate Studio Voltaire’s neighbourhood and provide unique moments for residents and visitors to encounter Scott’s practice in the everyday.

The exhibition run from October 15 to December 30.

www.studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/william-scott/