Bill Hutson was born in San Marcos, Texas in 1936 and lived there through his early teens, when the loss of his parents made the family relocate to San Antonio. After completing high school, he spent two years in the Air Force before moving to San Francisco where he began making abstract paintings. He had little formal training but was briefly (ca.1960-1962) an assistant to Frank N. Ashley, a realist painter who had studied with and assisted Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League in New York. This apprenticeship was Hutson’s introduction to fine art. He noticed and admired art by Sargent Claude Johnson, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington and others.

As Hutson familiarized himself with these artists, he completed and exhibited abstract art at the John Bolles Gallery, Fred Maxwell Gallery and at SFMoMA. He moved to London in 1963, a stint that was soon followed by extended stays in Amsterdam and Paris. The next several years were spent traveling and painting in England, France, Holland, Italy, Senegal and Nigeria. He returned to New York in 1971 when he subleased Joe Overstreet’s studio in the Bowery. At this time he met Alvin Loving, Robert Blackburn, Vivian Browne, Frank Bowling, Peter Bradley, Melvin Edwards, Robert Indiana, James Little, Kenneth Noland, Howardena Pindell, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Haywood (Bill) Rivers, William T. Williams, and Jack Whitten. They were Hutson’s “neighbors” and interlocutors in SoHo and midtown Manhattan and many remained lifelong friends. 

Between 1974 to 1976 Hutson served as a Graphic Arts Officer at The National Museum in Lagos. He also lived and made art in Senegal and Mali before returning to New York in New York. In Europe and West Africa, Hutson had met and associated with artists Iba N’diaye, Souleymane Keita, Ed Clark, Sam Middleton, Joan Mitchell, Beauford Delaney and Barbara Chase-Riboud. Hutson had significant professional contact with Roberto Matta-Echaurren through whom he met Max Ernst and Wifredo Lam when completing an edition of etchings at the Georges Visat Printmaking Workshop in Paris.

 Hutson primarily concentrated on making abstract paintings using a variety of approaches. Early paintings rely on an Africanesque vocabulary; three-dimensional pieces, collages and scrolls recur; his last paintings, made after he had lost his vision, return to the architectural forms of his early work but with a different luminosity. Hutson’s paintings are in numerous public and private collections including the National Museum of Arts, Havana, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The George Visat Collection, Paris, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Newark Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Boysmans-Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Hutson passed away in 2022 as the Jennie Brown Cook and Betsy Hess Cook Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.