LOCATION
Institute of the Arts and Sciences
100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, CA
P (831) 502-7252
Email ias@ucsc.edu
DATES AND TIMES
January 29, 2025 - April 6, 2025
12- 5 p.m. Tuesdays - Saturdays
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.
The exhibition is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition and with the support of David G. Berger and Holly Maxson.
About Levester Williams (Tab to skip section.)
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 coalesce into 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 Museum of African Design, Johannesburg, South Africa among others. His residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; and the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa.
