"Cornus Florida; flowering dogwood" Painting

Laura Cleary Williams is a visual artist living and working in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art from Tufts University in affiliation with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Boston, Laura began studying natural sciences and printmaking. These interests took her to the Southwest, where she participated in a workshop with internationally recognized artist and printmaker Catherine Kernan. This experience led her to pursue her work professionally and later to pursue print publishing. Laura then received a full scholarship from SCAD-Atlanta, where she completed her Masters in Printmaking in 2012. While at SCAD-Atlanta, Laura worked under master printer Robert Brown at Southeastern Center for Printmaking on a project with artists Kiki Smith and Valerie Hammond as a printer, assistant project manager, and later took on her first collaboration as a master printer with Valerie Hammond. Along with two colleges, she then founded Straw Hat Press, a fine arts publishing and contract printshop in Atlanta, Georgia. At Straw Hat, Laura worked with nationally recognized artists and art institutions such as Jason Kofke, Nikita Gale, Paul Light, Brian Dettmer, the High Museum, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and Burnaway Magazine. In 2014, Laura left Atlanta to focus on her solo art career in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she continues to work in a range of mediums, including; printmaking, painting, drawing, and photography. In 2016, Laura featured in an article in Rue Magazine along with four other SCAD graduates to showcase professional artists and designers. In 2019 Laura was accepted in the group exhibition Visual Thinking, an exhibition celebrating the connection between thinking through drawing at the Ronald Barr Gallery at Indiana University Southeast. Laura has shown nationally and internationally. Her work is in several private and public collections.