Conversation w/ CADVC Artist-in-Residence: Levester Williams
Location
Lion Brothers Building
Date & Time
March 5, 2024, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Description
We have a very exciting series of conversations hosted within the context of a course in a course in the department, AMST 430/680 "Seminar in American Signs: Place-Based Artistic Research" This public humanities seminar explores the work of of contemporary artists and other cultural practitioners whose work responds to place-based contexts.
The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture at UMBC (CADVC) hosts an exploratory research residency that allows artists and interdisciplinary collaborators to take advantage of scholarly resources and to build partnerships at UMBC and in the Baltimore region. Artists In Residence (AIRs) are invited to pursue open-ended outcomes, and their engagements may develop into workshops, artworks, or other future projects.
This season, CADVC welcomes three low-residency AIRs who are developing research and creative projects in UMBC and Baltimore. The visiting artists will offer programs open to the general public in the UMBC Lion Brothers building in downtown Baltimore.
March
5, 6pm: Levester Williams will be in conversation with collaborators on
his current work in progress, "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore"(2021-2024). Other discussants will be announced.
Levester Williams is a multimedia artist whose artistic production is rooted in explorations of the relationships between the material and social worlds. His sculptural work and multichannel video projects have been exhibited in museums and art spaces nationally and internationally. In the 2023-2024 academic year, Williams is making a series of visits to UMBC and Baltimore to complete a new filmic work under the project title "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore." Williams is researching the histories of Cockeysville (Maryland) marble, a material used in many salient objects in the local built environment, including the Washington Monument and iconic exterior steps of Baltimore rowhomes. The movement art documented in Williams's film is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding this complex material. In Williams's words, the project underscores the "intertwined history of African-Americans' plight to self-determined agency and full citizenship, and a rather benign stone."
Spaces are limited. RSVP required at this link: https://forms.gle/cV5xEnT572A2e9zNA
