Artist: Avery Webster Williamson

Current City: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Item Details: 8" x 10", Acrylic and colored pencil on paper, Framed, 2020, Unique

50% of the proceeds from this piece will be directed to Activation Residency, a Black trans led artist residency experiment aiming to generate safer and more collaborative space, adapt to its residents’ needs, and create portals to futures needed now. Located in New York state’s southern Catskill mountains of Woodridge, the residency seeks to activate the creative practice of each participating resident, redistribute access, resources, and care, and play with the means of production.

Avery Williamson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores historical and contemporary notions of the archive, Black pleasure and spatiotemporal collapse. She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies. There she was awarded the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for extraordinary undergraduate work. Williamson has since shown work in Philadelphia, Cambridge, Nashville and Ann Arbor, and recently completed a six month experimental residency at The Hosting in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Her work has been featured by the Instagram Design team and the American Craft Council. Williamson currently lives and works in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Avery Williamson’s Cartographies of Dissatisfaction (2020) is a series of works on paper that depict abstract narratives of Black pleasure and imagination. Her work captures the inner peace of art-making in isolation. The tension in the outside pandemic world is absent. The work is in response to being confined to the domestic space, to negotiating that space with a partner, to observing new public conversations about Blackness in America, and choosing to visually engage with the parts of Black life that are expansive, alive and generative. Williamson is not interested in the kind of exploration that is dangerous or nefarious. Cartographies of Dissatisfaction may not even be earthly explorations. The pieces depict a fantasy or alternative reality with the familiar palette of planet earth, but where the terrain is free of earthly dangers. Her marks represent an investigation of the paper - the edges, boundaries, positive and negative space. There are pockets of excitement and tension, as well as play and curiosity. The varied marks on the paper map the presence of ancestors and engagement with spirits who live with us every day. While the media Williamson uses across her body of work varies, the themes of archive and dimension-collapse persist. Layers of pencil and paint allow for transparency and let the pieces float. They are emergent and untethered, and represent a certain kind of exploration that is pleasurable, interior, and safe. These works are an effort to archive this moment in the ways that the news cycle and social media won’t and can’t. The drawings render the chaos of 2020 and the process of attempting to make sense and order of the times.

SoMad is proud to present Bathing in Blackness: A Necessary New Order, an exhibition benefiting organizations of the artist’s choosing that support communities and fight for social justice curated by Kamra HakimofActivation Residency.

September 3 – 17, 2020

Bathing in Blackness: A Necessary New Order

Bathing in Blackness: A Necessary New Order

Past Exhibitions