Franklin Williams (b. 1940) is a painter, sculptor and mixed-media artist whose richly textured, intricately patterned works have contributed to Northern California's experimental art traditions since the 1960s. Born in Ogden, Utah, he earned a B.F.A. in 1964 and an M.F.A. in 1966 from the California College of Arts and Crafts. Drawing on domestic craft traditions, Williams incorporates sewing, crochet, yarn, beads and layered fabrics into paintings and sculptural constructions that explore sexuality, desire, spirituality and mortality. Associated with Bay Area Funk and Nut Art, he developed a distinctive visual language that resists conventional artistic categories. Williams participated in the landmark Funk exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1967, taught at the University of California, Davis, in 1968 and exhibited there in 1970. His work was featured in the Manetti Shrem Museum's Landscape Without Boundaries (2019) and in a major retrospective, It's About Love, at Brown University in 2024. His work is held by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and other major museums.