According to Rene Hanks in The Other Side of Color, Walter Williams did not start creating art until he was thirty years old, when he used his veteran’s benefits to enroll in art classes at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. There, he studied under Ben Shahn, Reuben Tam and Gregorio Prestopino. In 1962, he moved to Coppenhagen, Denmark where he lived until his death in 1998. But in 1968 he briefly returned to the U.S. to serve as an artist-in-residence at Fisk University. It was there that he started a series of paintings based on black life in the South. Characterized by warm colors, flowers and children, these works reflect his optimism about the future of race relations. William’s work is in the collections of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City; Metropolitan Museum, New York City; Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.