Ex-UK basketball player LaVon Williams gets a major recognition in Louisville
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Speed Art Museum opens LaVon Williams exhibition, runs through March 8, 2026.
- Exhibit presents about 30 works, centers on Williams’ wood sculpture.
- Williams links art to Kentucky roots and basketball, seeks New York gallery.
LaVon Williams, the Lexington folk artist and Joe B. Hall-era Kentucky Wildcats men’s basketball forward, is getting major recognition in our state’s largest city.
On Nov. 6, an exhibition entitled “Everything Must Change” that shows the evolution of Williams’ work as an artist, opened at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum. The exhibition is scheduled to run through March 8, 2026.
For a Kentucky artist, being displayed at the Speed is akin to an in-state basketball player getting to play at Rupp Arena.
It is our state’s biggest stage.
“A lot of people (have) called to congratulate me,” Williams said. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you know that’s my goal, is to get in the Speed.’ So, yeah, I’ve got a lot of compliments.”
As an artist, Williams is best known for his wood sculpture, although he also creates polychromed figures and panels and paintings on canvas.
His wood carvings are often distinctive for the elongated arms and legs of the people he portrays. A Herald-Leader art reviewer once wrote that Williams‘ work “declares its African ancestry” while also being “distinctly American, filled with movement, angular lines and alternately vivid and subtle colors.”
Williams says it was private collectors of his art in Louisville who brought him to the attention of the Speed Art Museum.
“Susan Zapeda, who’s a big collector of mine, has been collecting my work since, probably, I started,” Williams said. “She was on the board at the Speed, and they were looking for something different, really wanted to express the artists we have here in Kentucky.
“So they came down (to Lexington) last year, they saw my body of work, saw, like, the generations of work, then saw my beginning up until now. So it came about this year, a year to prepare for the exhibit.”
As a basketball player, Williams was a contributing reserve on Kentucky’s 1977-78 NCAA championship team.
A 6-foot-7, 210-pound forward in his playing days, Williams started for UK as a junior and senior, and finished his Wildcats career in 1980 with 726 points, 501 rebounds and a 50.2% shooting percentage.
“I’m not ‘LaVon Williams, a basketball player,’ because I’ve always been an artist, never a basketball player,” Williams said. “I just played basketball.”
Even so, there has occasionally been some overlap between Williams’ basketball past and his art. One patron of Williams’ work was Hall, the artist’s college coach.
Hall, who passed away in 2022 at 93, relished a sculpture Williams did of him depicting the coach as he used to be on the bench in the UK days.
“It’s got my rolled-up program with a big scowl on my face,” Hall said in 2018. “It’s hilarious. I love his work. LaVon is very, very talented and deserving of any honor that he gets.”
Williams, 67, spent the first 10 years of his life in Lakeland, Florida. An older brother introduced Williams into a family tradition of wood carving. “When I was growing up, you sort of had to make your own toys,” Williams said. “Cowboys, super-heroes, those were the first things I carved (on) my own.”
The exhibition “Everything Must Change” includes about 30 different works, Williams says, and incorporates the artistic tradition he inherited in his family. It includes work by his late older brother and mentor, Dave Henry Wright.
Among the LaVon Williams pieces on display are “My Apologies to Isaac Murphy,” a work inspired by the famed Black jockey who was an iconic figure in Thoroughbred horse racing in the late 19th Century.
“It’s men on horseback, and they’re racing,” Williams said of the work. “They’re going back and forth, like, around the track. So it’s kind of like a chaotic kind of representation of, kind of the way I was feeling about quite a few things.”
The work on display at the Speed that contains the most personal meaning to Williams is called “The Colored Reading Room.”
“When I was a kid, I couldn’t go to the library (because of racial segregation) so my mother would sit us around and she would read stories,” Williams said. “So in that depiction you’ll see all these kids around this woman — big, woman, big, tall woman — and she’s reading a book to all these children that (are) all around her. And that is my favorite of all the pieces.”
Now that he has an exhibition at the Speed Art Museum, Williams has an even bigger goal still in mind.
“The one thing I haven’t done is, I haven’t got to (exhibit in) New York (City),” Williams said. “That’s my next goal, is to get into New York, (do a) show in one of the big galleries in New York.”
LaVon Williams drew on his basketball background in explaining how he hoped to “make the Big Apple happen.”
“(In basketball) you just have to keep going from (recruiting) camp to camp until somebody picks you up,” he said. “Basically, that’s how it goes (in art). You go from the collectors to the galleries and, so far, I’ve been doing pretty good.”
To see LaVon Williams’ exhibit at the Speed Art Museum
What: “Everything Must Change,” an exhibition of the art of LaVon Williams
Where: The Speed Art Museum, 2035 South 3rd Street, Louisville
When: Now through March 8, 2026
Hours: The Speed Art Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. It is closed on Monday and Tuesday.
Cost: Museum admission is $25 for adults, $23 for seniors (age 60-plus) and $21 for children (ages 4 through 17).
