Jessica Abbott Williams was born in Washington D.C. and because her father worked in international affairs and her mother is Dutch, she and her sisters grew up traveling extensively and living around the world including years spent in Bangkok, Thailand and Vienna, Austria. As an undergraduate she studied English Literature and Poetry at Westmont College in Montecito. After college she worked for many years in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, Chanel and the Council on Foreign Relations. At the age of 29, she returned to California to study ceramics at the California College of the Arts and received a BFA in 1997.
Since 1997 she has owned and operated Brushstrokes, a community art space and ceramics studio in Berkeley. She has maintained her own studio practice in both ceramics and painting. Jessica has sold her line of ceramics at the SFMOMA Museum Store, the Palo Alto Art Center Gallery Shop, The Gardener in Berkeley and most recently at FarmHouseUrban in Mill Valley.
This year, she participated in an artist collaboration with the fashion designer Erica Tanov on a line of clothing and showed her paintings at Erica Tanov boutiques in Berkeley, Marin and Los Angeles. She has exhibited her paintings nationally including at the Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Manhattan, FarmHouseUrban in Mill Valley and St. Supery Winery in Napa Valley for Art in April curated by the artist/curator/landscape architect Topher Delaney. Jessica has worked with Topher Delaney for over 20 years on public art commissions for garden projects including a ceramic fountain for San Diego Children’s Hospital and ceramic and mosaic vessels for Highland Hospital in Oakland.
Jessica is currently working on a collaborative community art project on the public pathways of Berkeley. In her pop-up “Biophilia Art Lab,” members of the public are invited to contribute their drawings and reflections on the term biophilia, a belief that all humans have an innate love and connection with nature and other forms of life. Selections from these submissions as well as her own drawings and writings will be made into a book to be given away in her “Little Free ART Library” at the Berkeley Art Center in April 2020.
Jessica lives in Berkeley with her husband Otto, two sons and a dog.
Artist Statement:
To observe a subject—concrete, specific, singled out—is to be in the moment. The perspective is deep, not wide. Life is overwhelming when scanned too quickly or from too long a view. Art-making is a meditation, the result is an abstraction, a remnant, a souvenir of a journey taken, a token. There may be some reflected beauty in a line or a composition which has a secondary life in the imagination of the viewer. And in so doing, the very act of creation passes a spark between two people, a shared experience of what life is like on this earth together.