Despite its overwhelming contributions to art and culture, the art of the African diaspora is often placed on the backburner when it comes to fine arts spaces. Recently, these artists and their works are being brought to the fore, and multimedia artist Michael Kelly Williams wants to ensure they stay visible. His latest show, Michael Kelly Williams: Crossing consists of a voluminous forty-eight works created over five decades, exhibited at the Kenkeleba Gallery. Curator Debra Vanderburg balances Williams’s techniques, seamlessly integrating his sculptures into the exhibit with his two-dimensional work. Williams digs deep into Black art, and through his work solidifies its place in art history, then builds on its legacy. Williams not only brings African diasporic work in a fine arts space, but through his own work celebrates the development of culture, and speaks up for justice and equality where he sees that development being halted.
I came to understand Williams’s work as he spoke about his process. His use of found objects incorporates chance into every piece, which is almost unthinkable to a meticulous planner such as myself. Instead of seeking out objects to fulfill an existing vision, Williams is “always looking for objects,” collecting trash and treasure alike from friends, family, and supply stores. Williams might be inspired immediately by an object or material, or he might hold onto it for months before finding its purpose. The fluidity of Williams’s process is apparent in his work – the organic nature of the pieces invite the viewer to get closer.
The process seems to stem from a natural draw Williams feels towards the energy of improvisation. Much of Williams’s work is inspired by jazz music and musicians. In his sculpture Things to Come from Those Now Gone, 2018 (titled after a composition by free-jazz musician Muhal Richard Abrams), Williams incorporates musical instruments into the sculpture itself. At the base, a tarnished gramophone horn is turned on its head, creating a wide base and narrow trunk, like that of a tree. Above it, an explosion of branches in the form of wide wire circles with violin bows striking through them like hands on a clock, and bells hung throughout. Other elements of the piece are hard to identify at first – what seem to be delicate and distorted gears turn out to be carefully cut bicycle tires. These familiar elements are at times left unaltered, adding a welcoming element to the piece, while those same elements when transformed create mystery and excitement. Almost the entire work is painted a matte black, and its mix of geometric shapes and organic lines make walking around the piece feel like observing one of his prints in motion. The piece looks almost as though its wheels might spin to life at any moment, that the horns will jump into action just like they do in Abrams’s composition. Williams pays homage to past jazz musicians while commending composers of today who continue to push the boundaries of jazz as Abrams once did, and Williams communicates with these artists through an improvisation of his own, transforming the known into the unexpected.
Not every sculpture of Williams’s is such an uplifting celebration of music, though – Music, 2016, is a sculpture inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyph for beauty, Nefer, which itself is a simplified depiction of a stringed instrument. This symbol is an intersection of language, music, and visual art, yet Williams’s sculpture is cheerless. The long neck of a double bass hangs on the wall, but where the body of the instrument should be, there instead sags a horse collar, worn and cracked after years of labor. From the head of the bass, the warped steel strings protrude at awkward angles without a tailpiece to hold them against the instrument. Here, the familiar elements are not transformed into clever silhouettes – the neck of the bass hangs heavily from the wall, injured and unplayable. I confess that I felt a pang upon seeing this piece, and I stood in front of it for quite a while. It settled in my stomach like a tumor. The symbol Nefer stands for beauty, but also for completeness. The two concepts were so deeply connected that they shared a symbol. And here, a sculpture I found beautiful only moved me because it was incomplete. Painfully apparent, too, was waste. The thought of wasted materials that had not been
saved by an artist such as Williams. Time wasted on passionless labor, conveyed by the flaking horse collar. Or perhaps, time spent on a labor of love, an instrument played into the ground. Though beautiful, the piece speaks to the temporary nature of beauty. Every body deteriorates, and every song must end.
Williams also worked in painting, collage, and printmaking. He credits, in part, the development of these two-dimensional pieces to his time in Asilah, Morocco, where he stayed for an artist residency. The impact on his work is immediately apparent, and comparable to expressionists whose travels to Africa informed their work. Paul Klee traveled to Northern Africa, and had something of an epiphany in Tunisia where he began to paint landscapes abstracted by bright colors and geometry. Williams created abstract landscapes too, but mainly worked in collage. His piece Asilah, 2002, is made of black shapes of cloth over muslin – but stepping back, the piece becomes the city of Asilah in very high contrast. Like Klee, Williams developed his use of color as well. His mix of organic shapes and geometric forms to create landscapes referenced Moroccan fabrics and patterns as well as abstract and expressionist artworks, as can be seen in Intervale Study #5 the El, 1991, which has winding black tracks printed on a blue background, then printed again without refreshing the ink to create an illusion of depth. Skillfully added yellows, greens and rust-colored reds draw the viewer’s eye around the piece. By comparison, Klee’s landscapes are quite flat, with washes of color delineated only by light pencil marks, as in his 1914 piece Red and White Domes.
Expressionists considered themselves to be returning to a simpler and more visceral emotion, and as such did not understand the complexity of African art – to them, it was little more than a building block. Simon Kelly, curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum, said of Matisse, “It is important to realize that [Matisse] never fully recognized or understood the agency of the African artisans who had made these sculptures.”
Alain Locke, the philosopher responsible for much of the thought behind the Harlem Renaissance, was able to see through the work of expressionist artists. He identified the overwhelming influence Black art had on the avant-garde, though Black artists and art history often went recognized. Locke wrote, “Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past. This at least the intelligent presentation of African Art will supply to us.” Williams realizes this too, and in his work, he highlights the cultural past of the African diaspora while ensuring it is granted the space it deserves in fine arts settings. In elevating his own work and that of those who came before him, Williams celebrates and inspires artists who continue to dip into this well of artistic knowledge, drawing up the future of African diasporic arts for years to come.
Winifred Kenney is a second-year student majoring in Fine Arts. Her work is inspired by her medium, which varies from moment to moment. She enjoys reading fiction and looking at art.