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 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 presentation in CADVC’s public art projection series with a new video art gallery set into the open amphitheater of the UMBC Fine Arts Building. The amphitheater and gallery will present new single-channel videos resulting from research and movement workshops that included UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. These works were supported in part by 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.

Opening reception
The exhibition will open on September 19 from 5 to 7pm with public programming featuring Levester Williams, Michelle Diane Wright, and Lisa Freiman. Please visit here for additional information.

Publication
The exhibition and public projection program will be accompanied by a special booklet featuring “Scrubbed Clean: The Pursuit of Purity in Baltimore,” an essay by Michelle Diane Wright on histories of racial inequity and the cultural imaginary of Cockeysville marble in Baltimore. The publication is the inaugural project funded by the Maurice Berger CADVC Program Fund, in support of the exploration of, and research into, histories of race, representation and justice in visual culture, with the goal of creating accessible public programming.

About the artist
Levester Williams (b. 1989) was born in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in Columbia, Tennessee. He received his BFA in art and design from University of Michigan (2013) and his MFA 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 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 US Pavilion for the 2011 Venice Biennale and developed a 100-acre sculpture park in Indianapolis that opened in 2010.

Visitor information
Admission is free. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday, 10-5pm, when the university is open.

Parking is free during evening and weekend hours, and metered parking is available other times. Please visit here for directions and parking information.