Senon Williams: Pleased Beasts

Senon Williams is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist and musician whose experimental practice spans painting, sculpture, and assemblage, exploring memory, identity, and the enduring complexities of the human condition. Pleased Beasts is an intimate exhibition featuring Williams’ response to the Freud Artist Residency (F.A.R) which was established by the Jane McAdam Freud Estate in 2023 to celebrate the acclaimed artist and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud working “at the edges where art and psychoanalysis meet.” A biennial partnership between the Jane McAdam Freud Estate, the Freud Museum London, and the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, the residency explores the continuing relevance of Freudian psychoanalysis to contemporary art through dialogue with the museums’ collections and Jane’s artistic practice. It represents the first partnership between the Freud institutions in his place of birth, life and death. Created in Jane’s honour following her death in 2022, the programme reflects her longstanding relationship with the Freud Museum London, where she was artist-in-residence in 2006 and presented a major exhibition in 2012. An example of Jane’s work can be seen on permanent display in the museum garden. For F.A.R. , Senon Williams returned to sites connected to his family history, tracing ancestral journeys across Eastern Europe. Brought up by a mother born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during the Second World War and a father raised as a sharecropper in the American South, a few generations from slavery, Williams used time spent in Příbor – Sigmund Freud’s birthplace – to reflect on migration, displacement, cultural inheritance, and the lasting impact of historical trauma. Drawing on family histories shaped by war, poverty, and survival, the work explores memory, belonging, and resilience. The project resonates with Freud’s own experience of exile and draws inspiration from the Freud Museum’s collection of antiquities, realised as a series of haunting painted portraits. Pleased Beasts combines painting, sculpture, sound and film. Found objects, left after her death in McAdam Freud’s studio, serve as carriers of memory, bearing traces of the lives, histories, and environments that have passed through them. Through their transformation and recontextualization by Williams, hidden histories are brought into the present. Like Freud’s treasured objects, Williams’ found materials act as witnesses to displacement and survival, embodying the persistence of memory across generations. Senon Williams is a lifelong visual artist and musician, and a Los Angeles native. Through diverse media from paintings on paper and canvas, to wood sculpture and assemblage, Senon’s work explores poignant visualizations of the inherent human struggle both ancient and contemporary. He finds space in the natural world, exposing stages of human evolution. His love of language play, sounds, textures, and associations of word and object often explore the triumphs and conflicts inherent in identity, history, and community. Senon’s search for truth leaves him amazed and baffled. Creating art is his meditation on meaning, or no meaning in the face of our turbulent existence. We are invited to support or defy multiple conclusions; how do we help and how do we hurt? The written word and poetry are a consistent part of his practice. He has published four books: Hunted & Gathered (2017, Hamilton Press), Words Don’t Mean Much (Hat & Beard Press, 2021), Rituals (Lauren Powell Projects/Keep or Gift After Purchase, 2023) and Scrapyard (Hat & Beard Press, 2025), as well as multiple zines. Senon’s work has been shown at Five Car Garage (LA), The Hole NYC (LA), Rusha & Co. (LA), PRJCTLA (LA), The Lodge (LA), Auxiliary Projects (NYC), Beyond The Streets, Southampton Arts Center (NY), FT Gallery (Phnom Penh), amongst many others. Pleased Beasts has been made possible with the generous support of the Jane McAdam Freud Estate, patrons of Senon Williams, and in collaboration with the Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna. Read more Toggle Painting