Willy Bo Richardson


Willy Bo Richardson is an American artist from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Richardson is regarded as one of many contemporary painters revisiting late Modernism. Describing his paintings as “philosophy in motion,” Richardson works solely within the framework of vertical strokes. He exhibits his paintings internationally.

Early life and education

His father is a master wood-worker and artist/painter, and his mother founded the first mediatation center in the Southwest. He studied at UW Madison and received a BA from University of Texas at Austin. While at UT Austin, he counted Peter Saul among his teachers.
Living in Philadelphia in 1997, he was writing and painting. Richardson jokes, "I wrote a really bad coming of age novel, and the next year I checked myself in to graduate school for painting at Pratt Institute" in Brooklyn. He received an MFA there in 2000. He and his wife lived in New York City for a decade. He worked as a painting technician at Cooper Union from 2001-2007.

Career

Richardson taught painting at Santa Fe University of Art and Design from 2009-2016. In 2011 his work was included in the exhibition curated by Stephanie Buhmann at Jason McCoy Gallery in New York titled, "70 Years of Abstract Painting – Excerpts". The show assembled works by a selection of modern and contemporary painters, including Josef Albers, Hans Hofmann and Jackson Pollock. In 2012 he showed a body of work in the exhibition "Watercolors”" at the Phillips de Pury headquarters in Chelsea New York. In 2014 Richardson was selected to be one of the SITE Santa Fe SPREAD finalists. His work and vision was featured on the KNME-TV PBS weekly arts series ¡COLORES!. Richardson's painting titled "Number 1," 1999 was acquired by the Albuquerque Museum in 2018. He was a guest artist at the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico in 2019. Richardson is represented by Richard Levy Gallery in Albuquerque.