William Lamson

William Lamson (b. 1977, Arlington, Virginia) is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, working across video, photography, performance, sculpture, and installation. His practice engages elemental forces in durational, performative actions, often staged in the landscape and captured on video. In A Line Describing the Sun (2010), he used a large Fresnel lens to melt the desert floor into a line of black glass, tracing the sun's path across the sky; Solarium (2012), a site-specific greenhouse at Storm King Art Center built of steel and panels of caramelized sugar, housed three species of citrus trees; and Untitled (Walden) floated a white scale model of Thoreau's cabin on a lake inside a cabin-shaped camera obscura. His exhibition Badwater (Make Room, Los Angeles, 2018) brought together sculptural works in copper-plated foam alongside unique silver gelatin photograms from the Flow Genesis series.

Lamson received his BA from Dartmouth College (2000) and his MFA from Bard College (2006). His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, the Moscow Biennale, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, and he has produced site-specific installations for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2014, is a MacDowell Fellow, and received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship in 2023. His work has been covered in Artforum, frieze, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and The Village Voice.