Artists in Focus: Robert Williams & Coulter Jacobs
More about Artists in Focus: Robert Williams & Coulter Jacobs
Event Overview
Join the Long Beach Museum of Art for an evening of film and conversation with artists Robert Williams and Coulter Jacobs at the Art Theatre of Long Beach. Two documentary screenings introduce their creative journeys, setting the stage for an engaging dialogue between the artists. Together, Jacobs and Williams reflect on their practices, personal histories, and the ideas that shape their work—offering a rare glimpse into the intersections of art, storytelling, and identity.
About the Films
Mr. Bitchin’, directed and produced by Nancye Ferguson, Mary C Reese, and Michael LaFetra, offers a lively and insightful portrait of Robert Williams, tracing his journey as one of the most influential and original figures in contemporary American art. Through archival footage, studio visits, and candid interviews, the film explores Williams’s fearless imagination, technical mastery, and enduring impact on generations of artists.
The documentary celebrates Williams’s bold visual language, irreverent humor, and uncompromising creative independence. Viewers are invited into his studio and personal history, gaining a deeper understanding of how his work bridges fine art, popular culture, and underground comics. Rather than focusing solely on finished works, the film highlights the passion, discipline, and curiosity that continue to drive his practice.
The film reflects the thoughtful and deeply engaged approach to storytelling synonymous with director Nancye Ferguson. As the director, Ferguson is known for her ability to build trust with her subjects and to craft nuanced, character-driven documentaries that honor artistic integrity. Her work emphasizes close collaboration, careful observation, and emotional authenticity, resulting in films that resonate with both dedicated art audiences and the general public.
Both informative and uplifting, Mr. Bitchin’ presents an intimate and joyful look at an artist who has consistently challenged conventions while remaining deeply committed to his vision. The screening offers audiences a meaningful opportunity to connect with Williams’s creative legacy and ongoing influence within the contemporary art landscape.
COULTER JACOBS, a documentary by Josh Roossin, offers an engaging and inspiring portrait of the creative life and artistic vision of Coulter Jacobs. Through intimate studio footage, thoughtful interviews, and carefully selected archival material, the film invites viewers into Jacobs’s working process and highlights the curiosity, dedication, and imagination that shape his practice.
The documentary's patient and observant approach allows audiences to follow the evolution of individual works from early ideas to completed paintings. The approach celebrates Jacobs’s layered techniques and his ability to connect personal experience, cultural references, and visual storytelling. Rather than focusing solely on finished works, the film emphasizes the joy of experimentation, revision, and discovery, revealing how creativity unfolds over time. In doing so, it presents art-making as both a deeply reflective and genuinely joyful pursuit.
Josh Roossin is a documentary filmmaker known for his sensitive, artist-centered storytelling and commitment to long-form, immersive observation. His work often focuses on creative communities and individual makers, highlighting the human stories behind artistic production. Through close collaboration with his subjects, Roossin creates films that balance critical insight with warmth and accessibility, making contemporary art practices engaging for broad audiences.
About the Artist
Robert Williams
In the late 20th and 21st century, diverse forms of commonplace and popular art appeared to be coalescing into a formidable faction of new painted realism. The phenomenon owed its genesis to a number of factors. The new school of imagery was a product of art that didn’t fit comfortably into the accepted definition of fine art. It embraced some of the figurative graphics that formal art academia tended to reject: comic books, movie posters, trading cards, surfer art, and hot rod illustration, to mention a few.
This alternative art movement found its most congealing participant in one of America’s most opprobrious and maligned underground artists, the painter, Robert Williams. It was this artist who brought the term “lowbrow” into the fine arts lexicon, with his groundbreaking 1979 book, The Lowbrow Art of Robt. Williams. It was from this point that the seminal elements of West Coast Outlaw culture slowly started to aggregate.
Williams pursued a career as a fine arts painter years before joining the art studio of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth in the mid-1960s. And in this position as the famous custom car builder’s art director, he moved into the rebellious, anti-war circles of early underground comix.
Coulter Jacobs
Born 1977, Los Angeles, California
Lives and works in San Pedro, Los Angeles
Coulter Jacobs is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges painting, sculpture, writing, and performance. Drawing on the visual language of American traditional tattoo culture and the raw immediacy of abstract expression, Jacobs creates work that explores endurance, memory, and transformation. His pieces often fuse personal mythology with everyday labor—reflecting a life balanced between creative devotion and working-class discipline.
Jacobs earned a degree in Journalism from San Diego State University in 2001. Alongside his art practice, he has long worked as a Water Utility Worker for the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, a dual existence that informs his view of longevity, purpose, and persistence—recurring themes in both his visual and written work.
After losing his studio and archive to a fire in 2017, Jacobs rebuilt his practice from the ground up, focusing on process, honesty, and emotional resilience. His studio in San Pedro serves as both refuge and testing ground for his evolving body of work, which includes two novels, numerous drawings, and mixed-media paintings characterized by symbolic forms, texture, and an intuitive approach to color.
In 2022, Jacobs presented his debut solo exhibition, Longevity, at Simchowitz Gallery in West Hollywood, which affirmed his distinctive voice within the contemporary Los Angeles art scene. His work has since been featured in group exhibitions and profiled in various publications and a short documentary by Josh Roossin.
Jacobs continues to develop his practice as a meditation on time, discipline, and the enduring act of creation.