Sylvia Hill Williams
“If there is an opposite point of view, you are going to hear it at Oberlin.”
Sylvia Hill Williams (1936-1996, OC 1957) was a Smithsonian museum director, curator, and scholar of African art. She was born in Lincoln University, PA. in 1936. After attending Lincoln University for one year, she transferred to Oberlin College, where she majored in art history. Upon graduating from Oberlin, Williams went on to receive a master’s degree from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She also completed coursework at the Columbia University School of Library Science and École Pratique de l’Alliance Française in Paris.
Throughout her early life, Williams held several jobs, including library assistant and cataloguer for the Museum of Modern Art, secretary to the director at the Lagos Office of the African-American Institute in Nigeria, and program officer for the International Exchange Program of the National Social Welfare Assembly. In 1971, Williams joined the Brooklyn Museum as a Mellon research fellow in the department of African, Oceanic and New World cultures. She became curator of the department in 1978.
In February 1983, Williams was hired as the director of the National Museum of African Art, becoming the first black woman to direct a Smithsonian museum. Throughout her tenure at the museum, Williams helped acquire 845 works of traditional and modern art and oversaw five inaugural exhibitions and over twenty other exhibitions. She designed the composition of the permanent exhibits in the new location on the National Mall, where the museum moved in 1987. Williams is still remembered for building the National Museum of African Art "into a first-class center for the study and appreciation of African art and culture” (Smithsonian Institution Secretary I. Michael Heyman).
Sources:
Sylvia H. Williams Papers, 1952-1997, n.d., Oberlin College Archives