Rainbow Williams (Sue Parker Williams)

Audio interview November 9, 2013, online at Duke

Rainbow Williams smiling in front of her Saint Augustine house — Rainbow in 2020, sitting outside Riverview, her St. Augustine, Florida, home and gallery, with art projects mounted on the exterior wall.

Rainbow Williams, born in 1934 and died in 2022, grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. She earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of Arkansas (1955), and a master’s degree in crafts from San Miguel de Allende university, in Mexico (1964). In her interview, she describes a long life as an artist, beginning with childhood drawings, and continuing through many media, especially paintings and assemblages. She also made dulcimers.

Rainbow’s interview with SLFA Herstory Project encompasses her life before moving to the Pagoda in Florida, as well as some of her experiences during her residency at the Pagoda. She became a paying member of The Pagoda in 1978. In 1984, she moved on site from Winter Park, Florida, where she lived until 2013. Initially, she lived in the duplex, then later, in a cottage there that she bought. She sold that cottage in 2013.

In the 1990s, Rainbow bought a house near downtown Saint Augustine, Florida, not far from the Pagoda. Riverview was her house in town, serving as her studio. It held a large collection of her artwork, as well as many artifacts from her years at the Pagoda. These included a mural of twenty Pagoda residents as of 1989, and a scale drawing of the entire Pagoda property, annotated to indicate who lived in the various structures over the years.

In 1999, the women who began the lesbian community at the Pagoda sold their cottages to move to another intentional community, Alapine, in Alabama. Rainbow was one of the four who formed a corporation, Fairy Godmothers, to buy the building that had housed the Pagoda-temple of Love (also known as the Center) and the swimming pool next to it.

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