Join us for the closing celebration for Levester Williams: Our Bedrock and Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte: EDELO. Artist performances, curator-led tours, and other activities will take place throughout the afternoon.

This event is free and open to the public.

About the exhibitions:

Levester Williams: Our Bedrock
Our Bedrock is the first West Coast solo show of Philadelphia-based artist Levester Williams. Including sculpture, installation, performance and video, as well as photographs by legendary jazz bassist and photographer Milt Hinton, the exhibition traces the foundational nature of Black struggles in the United States.

The exhibition centers on the histories that emerge through William’s research into Cockeysville Marble, mined in Baltimore County, Maryland. This marble was used to make the columns of the U.S. Capitol Building and the Washington Monument in Washington D.C., as well as the Washington Monument in Baltimore. It also has been used to create the steps and landing (the “stoops”) of many of Baltimore’s residences. In William’s work, this history is poetically woven together with the history of struggles for Black Liberation through reference to Billie Holiday. In the musician’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday references her job cleaning these marble stoops of white families in Baltimore. In William’s practice, the creative assembly of reworked marble, Hinton’s photographs, Holiday’s autobiography, Blues music, and Black performance reveals Black Struggle– and Black creativity– to be the bedrock of the nation. This counters notions of power which imagine it as held only by the state. Instead, in William’s careful masonry, Black art, music, and movements provide the building blocks for a new world.  

Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte: EDELO
The first survey exhibition of artists Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, EDELO brings together new and existing works emerging from their collaborative and individual fifteen-year explorations into the roles art can play in radical modes of community building and social, political, and economic change. 

EDELO features video, sculpture, installation, and performance works, many of which have never before seen in an art institutional context, which together show the trajectory of  the artists’ collaborative practice since 2009. That year, Rollow and Duarte repurposed the abandoned United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico, renaming it EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be). The building had been abandoned by the UN after displaced indigenous community members occupied its offices. Inspired by the 1994 indigenous Zapatista uprising, which used art as a tool to demand immediate and drastic social and economic change, Rollow and Duarte collaborated with members of the community to reimagine the building as an intercultural artist residency, experimental art laboratory, and safe house. 

Artworks in EDELO reflect on that experience and the continued practices by Rollow and Duarte to work in collaboration with diverse communities, creating radical spaces and artworks that confront the failed institutional responses to social and political oppression.