Levester Williams (b. Lansing, MI) is a sculptor whose praxis is deeply rooted in aesthetic and critical inquiries into modes of existence and existing. Questions arising from the politics and poetics of identity, space/place, and boundary congeal into forms of sculptures, installations, drawings, sound, code, and the moving image.
Williams received a MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Master of Computer and Information Technology from University of Pennsylvania and BFA in Art and Design from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His works have been included in exhibitions at San José Museum of Art, San José, CA; N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA; and, among others, Museum of African Design, Johannesburg, South Africa. His selected residencies include Skowhegan’s School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; and the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2014
Tar Ball
Collection of Darryl Atwell
Unclean bedsheets from a Virginia penitentiary, tar, flies, and other media
For this four foot sculpture, unwashed bed sheets taken from a Virginia penitentiary are bundled into a ball reminiscent of the iron balls historically used as ankle weights to shackle prisoners. With dead flies caught in its thick layer of tar coating, the sheets evoke the history of so-called “chain gangs,” the teams of prisoners who in the past labored unpaid to lay the roads that crisscross the U.S.
The work also serves as a reminder of the present-day “state road crews” and prison labor that continue to maintain the roads, who are now paid between 25 cents to $1.25 an hour. The history of tarring and feathering in the United States, and its complex relationship to lynching and racial terror, also lays heavily on the surface of Tar Ball, as legacies of forced labor, racial terror, prisons, and jails coalesce in the viscous material.
Levester William’s work is also featured in the following Barring Freedom study guide: From the Inside Out
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Suggested Reading
Barrett, Lindon
Blackness and Value : Seeing Double
Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Dokou, Christina
“Vowel Obstruction: (Not) Screamin’ Joy out of ‘Real Pain.’” (Re)Constructing Pain and Joy: Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Perspectives.
Ed. Chryssoula Lascaratou, Anna Despotopoulou, and Elly Ifantidou. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, 395–413.
Black Skin, White Masks
Are Prisons Obsolete?
Grove Press. 2008
Marriott, David
“On Decadence: Bling Bling” #79
February 2017
