Levester Williams: all matters aside

The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture (CADVC) inaugurates the "demo" of a new public video art projection gallery with work by artist Levester Williams, featuring his work "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore" (2021-2024). The event will include a conversation between Williams and curator Lisa Freiman. Hot refreshments will be served. Showings of the work will continue on select evenings in late February and early March.

The work is the result of the artist's Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC, ongoing since 2023. During this time, Williams has been researching the histories and mythologies 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 film results from this research as well as movement workshops and other activities that included the participation of UMBC students and other Baltimore residents. Artist Nia Hampton, a current IMDA graduate student, and her mother, artist and arts advocate Sheila Gaskins, are featured performers. The filmic work was assisted by IMDA graduate student Bao Nguyen and artist Savannah Knoop, who worked on the project as an intimacy coordinator and facilitator.

dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore is an embodied consideration of the labor histories, and mythologies, surrounding a marble building material that appears throughout Baltimore's built environment. In the movement experiments surrounding the film work, participants negotiated relationships to public space, monumental form, and connections to history. 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."

This public display of an art work-in-process is consistent with CADVC's commitment to showcasing the experimentation of artists and the visual culture of interdisciplinary research. Currently, CADVC's gallery is exhibiting Spectrum of Process, highlighting UMBC faculty approaches to art and culture through rigorous, experimental processes.

Admission is free.

Visitors who need specific accommodations should contact CADVC at cadvc@umbc.edu or 410-455-3188 as soon as possible.

Images - 1. Levester Williams, "dreaming of a beyond: Baltimore" (2021-2024); 4K color video/video installation still (In a park-like setting, a person with dark brown skin tone sits embracing a white marble column from behind. Their hands touch the stone. Their face, obscured. They wear a light pink sweatsuit and brown boots. In the background, a nude fountain sculpture spouts water from the center of a pool of water. White marble also forms the border around the pool.)