Willie Binnie

Willie Binnie’s work confronts the American mythos—the imagery enshrouding a land with a complex, often dark and troubling, past and present, cloaked in a smoke screen of stoic heroism—as well as larger concerns surrounding notions of power, nationalism, bigotry, war, land, death, and the visual markers connected to each. His art prods the complicated and often paradoxical nature of these issues to examine the social constructs that underpin them.

Scottish American artist Willie Binnie (born 1985 in Dallas, Texas; lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts) has been a visiting lecturer at Williams College since 2019. He received his BA from Pitzer College, in 2008, and his MFA from Southern Methodist University, in 2014. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with notable exhibitions including Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at MASS MoCA (2018), North Adams, Massachusetts; the deCordova Museum 2019 Biennial, Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the inaugural exhibition at the Bunker, the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, West Palm Beach, Florida (2019). He has completed residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida (2014), and at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska (2020). Binnie co-founded Beefhaus, an artist-run project space and community center in the Expo Park neighborhood of Dallas, which supported exhibitions, screenings, and performances from 2013 to 2018. In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017, he co-founded the Puerto Rican artist residency program at MASS MoCA—an ongoing, fully funded fellowship for visual artists and writers from Puerto Rico.