Levester Williams: all matters aside

UMBC’s Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture (CADVC) announces 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 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County from September 20 through December 14.

CADVC is also pleased to announce a new public video screening program in the Fine Arts Building amphitheater, presenting Williams’s new video works Cockeysville and standing ground (on Washington), featuring UMBC and Baltimore-area collaborators. These projected works will be presented alongside rich survey exhibition in the CADVC gallery space.

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 penitentiary bedsheets from a Virginia detention center, 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 this research into the histories and mythologies of Cockeysville marble, a material used in both the Washington Monument in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood and the iconic exterior steps of local rowhomes.

The exhibition will be accompanied by the first in CADVC’s public art projection series with a new video art gallery set into the open amphitheater of the UMBC Fine Arts Building. New single-channel videos commissioned by the Center result from research and movement workshops that included UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. The commissions were part of the Center’s Exploratory Research Residency Program, launched in 2022 and sponsored by the “Big Ideas” initiative of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) Dean’s office. 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 in this series of works. 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.”

The 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.