Artists in Focus: Robert Williams & Coulter Jacobs

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.

Robert Williams: Mr. Bitchin' is a feature-length documentary that traces the life and art of underground legend Robert Williams, from his early days in California’s hot rod and Kustom Kulture scene to his rise as a pioneering force in Lowbrow and Pop Surrealism. Through rare footage, interviews, and Williams’ own reflections, the film captures his rebellious spirit, technical mastery, and unflinching challenge to the boundaries between high and low art. It’s a vivid portrait of an artist who turned counterculture into a movement.

COULTER JACOBS is an intimate documentary exploring the life and creative evolution of artist Coulter Jacobs. Blending personal archives, studio footage, and interviews, the film follows Jacobs’ journey through the intersections of art, identity, and self-discovery. With candor and visual poetry, it reveals an artist deeply engaged with process, memory, and transformation, offering a compelling look at how personal narrative and experimentation shape a distinct contemporary voice.

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.

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Host or Publisher Long Beach Museum of Art