Notes
Artist Statement
Antoine Williams
I grew up the child of factory and retail workers in Robeson County, North Carolina, a predominantly Black, Indigenous (Lumbee and Tuscarora people), Hispanic, and working-class (minority-majority) community in the American South. Whether in movies or TV shows like The Twilight Zone, or told by a family member, as a kid I was fascinated with stories of the supernatural, otherworldly, and monstrous as a means of understanding the world around me. Therefore, my multidisciplinary practice meets at the intersection of cultural mythologies, critical Black study, and monster theory. Through a surrealist lens/language, I am creating working-class contemporary folklore and bestiaries that challenge myths of American economic, technological, and capitalist prosperity. Wheat-paste drawings, collages, public art, sound design, and augmented reality are used to employ abjection and the uncanny as subversive agents that revolve around the notion of society as monstrous to question power and class. I explore mental, emotional, and corporal experiences of “living on” within absurdist structures that manifest as what Dr. Stefanie K. Dunning has coined the “Black Weird.”
I am uninterested in idealized modes of representing the black coded figures that fit like puzzle pieces inside a status quo, but more so in creating a category crisis that transgresses borders and lives within liminal space—similarly to scholar Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman’s idea of the Black Grotesquerie. This allows for a liberating distortion meant to underscore and celebrate the humanity and complexity of Black life—gender, sexuality, ability, place, and socioeconomics—while questioning the monstrosity of the systems we live within. This formal and material distortion, much like the lived realities of those marginalized and colonized, is an act of radical refusal existing somewhere between fantasy and horror with the potential of not just hoping for distant futures, but of transmutation, communal care, survival, and new possibilities for existing in the right here and right now.
Figure 1. Antoine Williams, Goof Ass, ink, printed material, acrylic on canvas, 18.75 × 23.5 in., 2024.
This piece looks at the duality of surveillance of black embodied people in public space and the performance of Blackness in public space as a means of survival. I am thinking about potential Cop Cities around the US and their relationships with working class Black people. Collaged imagery of characters from director Larry Clark’s 1973 film “As Above, So Below” referenced the tension between the aforementioned surveillance and performance. In Skunder Boghossian’s piece “Night Flight of Dread and Delight” he used a boundary line on the canvas to separate the earth from the heavens. I am similarity separating performance from reality as a winged figure, model after the “Flying African” myth, composed from other drawings, freely flies under the radar.
Figure 2. Antoine Williams, Unc, ink, printed material, transfer on wood, 9 × 12 in., 2017.
As told by Zora Neale Hurston in her book “Sanctified Church,” Uncle Monday is a southern African-American folklore figure who lived in Florida and possessed vast knowledge and the ability to shapeshift into an alligator. This allowed him to escape capture from enslavement. Some tales would have him living on the outskirts of a small Black shantytown using his powers to help its residents and not having to work as a sharecropper. I’m interested in where we focus utility and function within exploitative systems. For Uncle Monday his ability to transform renders him useless to the broader capitalist system but beneficial to his community.
Figure 3. Antoine Williams, A Space Between Takis and Henny, ink, printed material and acrylic on canvas, 18 × 20 in., 2024.
This collage explores liminal space—one between joy and pain, desire and disgust, life and death as a means of, as Dr. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman states, “Living On.”
This piece consists of two figures, larger is of Storyboard P’s “ghost dance” in the 2012 short film Until the Quiet Comes directed by Kahlil Joseph. The smaller winged figure, model after the “Flying African” myth, is culled from other drawings with the head of rapper Tierra Whack from her video 27 Club. Both are questioning, exploring and moving through porous boundaries.
Figure 4. Antoine Williams, Untitled, ink, printed material, transfer, acrylic, 23.5 × 28 in., 2022.
This is a contemporary drawing of the Flying Africans myth.
Antoine Williams is a multimedia artist whose practice is at the intersection of cultural mythologies, critical black study, Surrealism, and his working-class upbringing in Red Springs, North Carolina. Antoine received his MFA from UNC Chapel Hill. He has taken part in a number of residencies, including the Joan Mitchell Residency in New Orleans, The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, The McColl Center of Art and Innovation, The Hambidge Center, Loghaven Artist Residency, and Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University. Williams was also part of the 2021 Drawing Center viewing program. He is a recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors, the 2022 National Academy of Design’s Abbey Mural Prize, 2022 South Arts Individual Artist Career Opportunity Grant and the 2018 Harpo Foundation Grant Award. Williams has exhibited in several places, including at Smack Mellon Brooklyn, the Nasher Museum of Art, The Weatherspoon Museum, 21c Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, Prizm Art Fair, the California Museum of Photography as well as many other venues. His work is in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Williams is an assistant professor of Drawing in the Expanded Field at the University of Florida.