William Keith (January 20, 1929 – September 1, 2004) was an American artist who began his artistic life as a painter, but moved into photography and visual poetry. His visual poetry ran a full gamut from calligrams inspired by

Apollinaire Guillaume Apollinaire) of the Wąż coat of arms. (; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic of Polish descent. Apollinaire is considered one of the foremost poets of the ...

and other early 20th Century French poets to

Lettrisme Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture ...

to the

Minimalism In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...

and

Op Art Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions. Op artworks are abstract, with many better-known pieces created in black and white. Typically, they give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images ...

of the 1960s. As his work developed, Keith concentrated increasingly on African and African-American themes and sources. This development toward African roots and branches led away from the

Roman alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

and more toward the store of

iconography Iconography, as a branch of art history, studies the identification, description and interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct fro ...

and symbolism from Egypt to South Africa to the American

diaspora A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. Historically, the word was used first in reference to the dispersion of Greeks in the Hellenic world, and later Jews after ...

. Consequently, Keith developed graphic techniques suggested by textiles, wood carvings, bronze casts, ceramics, and other indigenous arts. An example of Keith's recreation of the substance of his visual style and the very nature of his own particular artistic interventions would now be traced in his use of rhythmic patterns through repetitions of graphic elements from sources as diverse as road signs and zebra stripes. Keith's work as a whole became a celebration of the adventures of African sources as they moved and interacted with the rest of the world. Individual works may initially seem merely decorative, but familiarity reveals a call to the

kinetics Kinetics ( grc, κίνησις, , kinesis, ''movement'' or ''to move'') may refer to: Science and medicine * Kinetics (physics), the study of motion and its causes ** Rigid body kinetics, the study of the motion of rigid bodies * Chemical ki ...

and dynamics of celebration. Upon his death, Keith was survived by his sons, Antar and Tarik, to whom he dedicated his book, "Pictographs."

Bibliography

*Sphinx (Xerolage, 1992) *Wisdom (Runaway Spoon, 1993) *Pictographs (Left Hand Books, 1996) *Stalking the Minotaur (Koja Press, 2003)

External links

Selected Openings of Pictographs

* ttp://kojapress.com/keith.htm Stalking the Minotaur (Koja Press) {{DEFAULTSORT:Keith, Bill American male poets African-American artists American artists 1929 births 2004 deaths 20th-century American poets 20th-century American male writers 20th-century African-American writers 21st-century African-American people African-American male writers Visual poets