Levester Williams: all matters aside

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture presents the early-career survey Levester Williams: all matters aside, an exhibition curated by Lisa D. Freiman, professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, on view at the CADVC gallery from September 20 through December 14.

Levester Williams: all matters aside presents a selection of the Philadelphia-based conceptual sculptor’s work from the past decade including sculpture, video, sound art, and installation. Williams’s research-based practice, which includes explorations of diverse archives, studies of materials, and explorations of the charged sites of public spaces, is vitally linked to an art practice that sees the world as a nuanced spectrum of human identities and experiences entangled in designations of race, gender, sexuality, and aesthetics.

Levester Williams’s artworks are steeped in the significance of their constitutive materials and their layered connections to specific sites. When he uses specific media, such as Maryland’s Cockeysville marble, or found objects, such as used prison bedsheets from Virginia penitentiaries, he channels their layered associations with Black experience, history, and memory into new contexts and forms.

On display in all matters aside are new works with origins in Williams’s 2015-initiated project of a beyond, where he began to examine the connections among blues singer Billie Holiday, Cockeysville marble, and Baltimore’s built environments. During an artist residency at CADVC, Williams continued his research on the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville marble, a material used in both the Washington Monument and the iconic exterior steps of Baltimore rowhomes. Included in the Center’s gallery and the adjacent Fine Arts Building amphitheater are new single-channel videos commissioned by the Center as part of its Exploratory Research Residency Program launched in 2023, sponsored by the “Big Ideas” initiative of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) Dean’s office.

The new videos result from research and movement workshops that included UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. Artist Nia Hampton, a current UMBC Intermedia + Digital Arts (IMDA) graduate student, and her mother, artist and arts advocate Sheila Gaskins, both Baltimore natives, are featured performers. The filmic work was assisted by IMDA graduate student Bao Nguyen and artist Savannah Knoop, who served as an intimacy coordinator and facilitator. According to Williams, the project underscores the “intertwined history of African-Americans’ plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, with a rather benign stone.”

Opening Reception

The exhibition will open on September 19 from 5 to 7 p.m. with public programming featuring Levester Williams, Michelle D. Wright, and Lisa Freiman. The program is free and open to the public. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first in CADVC’s public art projection series with a new video art gallery on the walls of the Fine Arts Building, set in an exterior amphitheater space. This projection project was seeded by a public art planning grant through the Maryland State Arts Council, with artist Kelley Bell and art historian Kathy O’Dell serving as advisors, and artist Rahne Alexander convening a series of public programs that developed this planning effort. The construction of this public projection space was supported by the CAHSS Dean’s office and the Division of Research and Creative Achievement at UMBC.

About the Artist
Levester Williams (b. 1989) was born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in Columbia, Tennessee. He received his B.F.A. in art and design from University of Michigan (2013) and his M.F.A. in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2016). He recently completed his master’s degree in computer and information technology in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at University of Pennsylvania (2024). Williams currently lives and works in Philadelphia, a city that—like Baltimore—incorporates Cockeysville marble into it its architectural and monumental landscapes.

About the Curator
Lisa Freiman is a curator, arts consultant, and writer with over thirty years of experience in the field of contemporary art. Since 2013, she has been a tenured professor of art history at Virginia Commonwealth University where she also served as the inaugural director of the Institute for Contemporary Art. Freiman was the curator and commissioner for the U.S. Pavilion for the 2011 Venice Biennale and developed a 100-acre sculpture park in Indianapolis that opened in 2010.

Visitor Information

Admission is free. Fall 2024 hours will be announced.

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Image: Video still of Nia Hampton in the vignette “Nia’s Embrace” from “dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore,” filmed at Mount Vernon Park Place in November 2023. (Photo by Levester Williams).